I'm Trying To Be Charitable, But It's Hard For Me To Not See Strong Beliefs In Manifestation/The Secret/etc.

The two tupperware genders are spaghetti sauce/tamatar ki salan (reddish) and tumeric/haldi (yellowish).

tfw when I see a post in a group on Zuck's Overgrown Hot-or-Not™ that's comment-locked, and it takes me exactly one (1) second of glancing at the headline to understand wtf happened

sometimes-overlooked bit of queer history

The practice of clinics, centers, bars, universities, organizations, etc. giving out free condoms, while menstrual hygiene products remain expensive, may seem like a patriarchal nod to the needs of cis-het men over those who menstruate.

It absolutely is not.

Handing out free condoms was, is, and always will be (as long as the patriarchy exists, anyway) a radical act. It is a result of the movement to mitigate the spread of HIV/AIDS in the face of deathly inaction on the part of most mainstream institutions at the time.

That any of us ever believe that free condoms are a product of the patriarchy is a victory for the homophobic erasure of the fight against HIV/AIDS. I once fell for it, too, but it's simply untrue.

Yes to free condoms, and yes to free menstrual supplies.

In honor of the ratio we celebrate today, let me tell you about the day I first learnt of its existence. It was the 90's. I was attending a religious elementary school in West Covina at the time. Yes, it's a real city. Rachel Bloom didn't make it up for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

At this very real school in a very real place, I had been absent the day before. I don't know if I had been sick or if it was a family thing, but whatever it was, I had missed a lesson. So when my math teacher kept referring to a term I'd never heard before, I figured I would look it up later, no big deal. There was a glossary in the back of the book that was usually very helpful.

It wasn't helpful that day, though. I spent way too long trying out different spellings for the term my teacher had been using. It couldn't have been more than 10 pages of terms and definitions, and I was an advanced reader, yet I couldn't hunt the term down. I eventually gave up.

The math teacher was warm, lovely woman with a very heavy Jordanian accent. If you know anything about Arabic accents, well, then you'll understand what had happened.

And that's why I can truthfully say that I unsuccessfully tried to look up the word "bi" in a math book while I was a pupil at an Islamic institution called Straight Way School.

π Happy Pi Day, everyone π

A Cellular Longing

Unfocus to see: it is only the inconsistency saying all isn't pulsing in unity

Then, blink into clarity

Solidity is made into illusion Most of what's between, most of what's everything, isn't anything at all What's fundamental is emptiness.

Do you hear the mostly-gaps crying out to be crossed?

Or maybe it's us yearning to traverse

To leave halos in our wake To carve the trails that we take To dust up the little clouds we make

To shed bits of ourselves studded into the vast nothing that they might serve as markers: that there is matter that we are matter that we think we matter that we matter here

Key to Nowhere

You cry out for someone save you from this trap an irresistible call to ears like mine

Oh, what can I do? What shall I do? Anything at all for you

I fumble to find the release There must be a catch somewhere out here that will let me let you out

My groping leads me nowhere but closer to you so I step away to get a better look

As I examine the fuller picture of it all your hand pops out as if by magic (or is it just a door I've never seen before?)

You hold it out to me but I don't take it already preoccupied with taking it all in

Your face appears above your tightly-clenched fingers Your eyes beg me to let you unclasp I let you place it upon my palm You retreat as though you were never out here

Your pleas for me to release you shift from wistful to YOU HAVE THE FUCKING KEY LET ME OUT RIGHT NOW

With one hand and both ears so full of what you've given me I resume my search, somehow more fruitless than before

My vain efforts rise in sync with your cries

You go from expelling your heart's content through your lungs to inhaling every molecule of oxygen left

Before I can drop it right there so that the force of your vacuum sucks it in and lets me let you choke on it-- you expel all you took in back out blasting me far away from you embedding its jagged edges into my skin

Now you can tell the next one a truth that I'd absconded with the only copy

One of the first "oh wow, theory can actually make the world seem less obtuse" moments I ever had was about perfume ads. It seemed to me like everyone had somehow decided TV perfume ads had to be weird but also that TV ads for perfume *must* exist and there was no other way for them to be.

I took a class where this came up and I finally read what's obvious to me in hindsight: The one sense that perfume appeals to is the least conveyable via any other senses. The closest thing to a straightforward pitch you can do with perfume is to list off its scent notes, but those aren't necessarily meaningful to most people, and even to those who know, we can't know how the scents work with each other and on our individual bodies.

So they sell some kind of fantasy of how the smell will make you feel instead. All ads for anything sell a fantasy, but perfume can't pretend like there's anything else there but the fantasy. It's like a distilled, pure kind of cynical consumerism there. Like the Eau de Parfum of capitalism, where other types of ads are Eau de Toilette.

A lot of things that seem like they came out of nowhere are easily explained. This isn't just a classic science/skepticism thing. There are historical, sociological, and cultural explanations that make the world seem a lot less weird to me.

Granted, the explanations can be horrifying rather than comforting. So much of what we consider to be American norms and values are just eugenics, for example. Still, I prefer wrapping my head around it to shrugging and ignoring.

This is all to say, the Gucci ad with Elliot Page, A$AP Rocky, and Julia Garner is more interesting to me than I thought it would be :3

other people love to go on about how WOW I am so organized with my spreadsheets and taping-off of dead outlets and labeling light switches and you wish you were so on top of things and and AND--

it's all very nice, thank you. but! what exactly is the alternative? are y'all really just remembering things??? off-the-cuff???!!!?! *ALL* THE TIME!?!?!?!?!

you know how I know you’re gay?

Went to Costco for my updated booster+flu shot. Pharmacist asks me if I've had any vaccines in the past 4 weeks. Yes, I reply. Which one, she asks? Monkeypox, baby 🏳️‍🌈

maybe I'm just a cynic, but I swear, every progressive I know with a daughter or niece, especially if they are the dad/uncle, will claim that she will take over and run the world someday. and the kid is just a perfectly normal kid?

I'm old enough to where some of those kids are adults or close to it, and while they're certainly cool enough, they're not exactly taking the world by storm or whatever.

it's not that I don't love how loved and supported these kids are. more reflecting on what a weird cliche it is to me to make these grand statements about a child. it feels performative, like they're making up for past misogyny, where they suppressed a girl or woman. or maybe these men really don't know what girls are like before their inner fire is quenched by patriarchal reality. idk