convoluted narrative boner

she’s just minding her own business, bopping along, when maybe a classmate starts mocking her for having visible body hair. or she goes to a sleepover and someone points out that her legs look different from all the other girls’. or she walks in on her mom shaving and asks why, and the answer is “because a woman’s body looks nicer this way.” or maybe her mother or sister actually approaches her and says, “looks like it’s time you learned to shave that jungle.”

the point is, the day before that realization, however it happened, the girl didn’t give a shit about her hair. she put on shorts and tank tops without a second thought. she didn’t feel unclean. she didn’t feel like a monster when she looked in the mirror (at least not because of body hair). her hair didn’t stop her from riding a bike or climbing a tree.

only after someone draws her attention to it does she start feeling self-conscious and wanting to remove it. removal, in this culture, is never a choice made free of coercion. it’s never born of a girl’s own naturally occurring desires. the seed of shame was planted in her by someone else (family, friends, bullies, magazines, razor commercials) and chances are that seed will stay with her forever- a sinking realization that her body can be wrong, that she can look ugly or dirty even when clean, that a thing she never even noticed about herself before should be a source of retroactive humiliation.

please take a moment to really appreciate the argument of why "most cops don't live in the cities they oversee" needs to be addressed

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: what percent of the police live in the city?

mayor: about 5% or so

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: 5%, so 95% don’t live in the city.

mayor: yes.

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: so when you say that the vast majority of the percentage goes towards salaries, et cetera, fringe benefits, that means that they take their money on 81, go to outside the city, pay taxes in those communities that have some of the best schools while we have an underfunded school district--

someone else: $60 million up.

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: so i just want to put into context what we’re talking about, because it’s really easy to say, mayor-- and with all due respect, i like you. but that was a very politician answer.

mayor: sorry, what specifically?

Yusuf Abdul-Qadir: the, “we will consider, and we will look.” what we’re saying is we’re not interested in considering and looking. what we’re saying is, actually, there’s $50 million. commit to $20 million cut, because we’re sending money-- as the mayor of Syracuse, when you don’t have a tax base, you’re sending money out of Syracuse. and not just for 30 years-- for the rest of their life because their pensions, their health insurance, their families. so we are funding for other people’s communities to have the promise of the American dream while we are denying it in our community. that’s the context that you, as the mayor, have to look at this under.

so when we talk about renegotiating union contract, what we’re saying is you can’t play around with, “maybe, um, we will--” no. y’all got to go, because you don’t provide a service that is beneficial to the community, that is meaningful to the community. the services that you provide criminalize our community, impoverish our community, reallocate resources to suburbs. we are actually funding the suburbs, both in our police departments and in our schools.

This not only mirrors so much of what’s happening in America, but feeds right into the complex relationship between Spiderman, the authorities and the media. 

Peter Parker is a brilliant student, awkward, a nerd, but is branded a thug, a gang member, a criminal, because of his appearance. The media latch on to that and misrepresent him totally.

How to Feed Baby Manatees 

But

Wen Qing: what the

fuck

ChengQing is an Untamed thing, but even in the book, it’s like. I feel like Jiang Wanyin and Wen Qing are both About duty and family in the same way that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are both About righteousness rooted in their own judgment. The ships work so well as foils of each other because the characters involved are also foils to each other - jwy to wq and lwj to wwx - in similar ways.

Likewise, and here we lean more on the Untamed, Wen Qing’s fate is informed by the above virtuous values as thwarted by her fatal flaws, un-aided by Jiang Wanyin because the same values, with his different circumstances, put their priorities at cross-purposes– and because both parties refuse to cross a distance created in part by miscommunication. This is not unreasonable or childish of them, necessarily - the emotional and physical stakes are both high - and I should go into more detail about what I think those virtues and flaws and priorities are, but I don’t want to derail this into a character analysis essay. Some other time. I just wanted to lay this out, because: It’s another mirror to wangxian, with Wei Wuxian’s death likewise coming from, like, see above.

Anyway, this is all to say – 

How freaking cool would it be to have a whole B-side to the part two murder mystery? Wen Qing and Wei Wuxian just miss meeting each other. Sure, jwy deeply suspects Mo Xuanyu’s real identity, but like. He’s not gonna talk about it. IMAGINE… they pass within yards of each other in Qinghe… maybe jwy and wq talked to Nie Huaisang a day prior to wwx and lwj? 

Jin Guangyao is Messy, I bet there’s a good sidequest mystery that ties back to him in travelling distance for ChengQing to handle while WangXian are busy in Yi City. Maybe some good dirt on Jin Zixun and Jin Guangshan, while we’re at it… And maybe it’s ChengQing who extract and interact with Sisi and Madam Qin’s maid Bicao! I dunno!

“She’s not even nice to me!”– he protests to his uncle. 

Jiang Cheng, confused and irritated, replies “She’s nicer than you deserve, after your shenanigans??”

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Or