everything i have done wrong in the past few years
i don’t want them erased, i don’t want to forget
but i wish someone could tell me how to move towards the right direction
a light touch on the shoulder, not a carrying-through-the-fire
is that too much to ask, is that grossly entitled of me
i’ve been keeping myself alive because my parents need me, but it’s not working anymore. i should feel sorry, but i don’t.
Bahar Aaamad - Welcoming Spring in Afghanistan
Bahaar aamad o ze Omr’am baz yak Saal’e degar begzasht,
Tamaam’e Zendagi Ahesta az pesh’e Nazar begzasht,
Ba Mesl’e gosht o nakhoon hamesha baa Watan budam,
Agarche nesf’e Omr’e behtareen’am dar Safar begzasht
(via brassmanticore)
Artist: SHINee (샤이니)
Song: Hello (Glen Check Remix)This remix by Glen Check has been making its rounds on the Internet as it is a great mix of Glen Check’s sound and the amazing upbeat love song by SHINee. You may think that the two would not mix, but both fit so perfectly together and it was made into this amazing mix. Glen Check always does a great job mixing songs, so it was no surprise that this was going to be amazing, and surely enough it pretty much is.
haha i think they took a fairly limp song and really spruced it up. also electro indie makes me very happy ;_;
Ten Rules for Writers by Zadie Smith
1. When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2. When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3. Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4. Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.
5. Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.
6. Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.
7. Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.
8. Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
9. Don’t confuse honours with achievement.
10. Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
via The Guardian
Zadie Smith once talked at my school. She is amazing and really nice.
wow, amazing. this is also super applicable to comics, or pretty much any art form.
Trigger warning: Talk of rape
Background: So Kafila published a statement saying that the collective of people who signed the statement opposed the new sexual assault ordinance, that when the Justice Verma committee, gazillion panels on rape and sexual assault said we need gender sensitive laws, gender neutral is NOT what we meant. And most of my facebook feed is littered with “But Menon is so good! How *could* she endorse something that women cannot be perpetrators of violence”. So tumblr, you’re now up to speed. Let’s proceed with the RAGESMASH.
QUICK FACT CHECK:
1. India still has the marital rape exemption (like most Commonwealth countries). The new ordinance on sexual assault does *not* do away with it. Marital rape is still unacknowledged as assault in the eyes of the law.
2. The new ordinance uses gender neutral language, assuming that the perpetrator can be of any gender or orientation. Which in and of itself isn’t a problem.
3. HOWEVER. Keeping in view the marital rape exemption that the ordinance upholds, we now have a scenario, where potentially a man can charge his wife with sexual assault but she *can’t* do the same under any ordinance or legislation in the country.
4. Given the overwhelming data and facts that rape and sexual assault are used as tools of humiliation, punishing and attacking minorities (from gender to cultural to religious), as a way to “teach them a lesson”, rape and sexual assault, more often than not, are not “gender neutral” acts of violence. We have women *participating* in the Gujarat 2002 riots, the Khairlanhjee incident where Priyanka Bhotmange was gangraped in public was done at the *insistence* of the matriarch of the defendants family. We understand that women are not helpless, that many of us are perpetrators of violence. This ordinance doesn’t overturn that with its “gender neutral” language.
5. What the ordinance does is: give a pass to men to divorce their wives on the grounds of sexual assault, an easier way to dispose women who no are no longer useful, or who cannot produce male heirs (off the top of my head), *while* leaving no legal recourse to women. Or going to you know, reality, the ordinance can be used to uphold the impunity of AFSPA, stating that one can never be sure who assaulted whom. Because the rape and sexual assault rates in Kashmir and the North East need any further encouragement from the law.
ETA:
6. The statement does not identify the victim of sexual assault as any particular gender. Male victims of sexual assault and violence aren’t compromised in any way. Or any other gender identity for the matter.
I am so angry right now, I’m having trouble seeing straight.
In brief: I WOULD LOVE TO LIVE IN A FEMINIST UTOPIA WHERE LAWS ARE EGALITARIAN TO BEGIN WITH AND THEN IF WE HAD THE GENDER NEUTRAL CLAUSE, IT WOULD MAKE SENSE. WHERE WE LIVED IN A WORLD WHERE GROUPS OF PEOPLE AREN’T STRUCTURALLY DISENFRANCHISED BECAUSE THEY AREN’T HINDU MEN (OR WOMEN) BUT WE DO NOT. LAW DOESN’T HAPPEN IN A VACUUM AND GIVEN THE COUNTRY WE LIVE IN AT THIS POINT, HAVING THIS ORDINANCE CHANGED IS ALREADY A FUCKING CHALLENGE. SO, IT WOULD BE GREAT IF WE ALL ACKNOWLEDGED HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY AND THE PAST 200 YEARS ARE A THING.
yes. am fuckin done with the radikewl fb crowd on my newsfeed and their BUT WE’RE BEING SEXIST AGAINST MEN IF WE ACKNOWLEDGE THERE IS ANY DIFFERENCE.
people with money. only people with money (via daxsymbiont)
travelling the world, “dropping everything” and moving to another city/state/country, majoring in your liberal arts interest of choice, apply for your dream college, buying your dream house, working at your dream jobs, cultivating/building/guiding your own dreams, dreaming. living.
(via pussyharvest)
(via 2398358436-blog)
“How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o how strange, how strange. O how funny and strange.”
-Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth
[a study of light, or the lack thereof]
o how funny and strange
drst:
I’d love to see more discussion about the “how to get past the virulent message that fat people cannot have sex until they become suitably thin” part. I’m stuck there. I’ve been stuck there for-fucking-ever (pardon the pun) and I suspect I’m not alone. The caveat is the discussion cannot be more of the bullshit magical thinking “Just be confident!” crap that seems to be the only thing ever said about this.
I have yet to see a FA writer who talks about this part of the process in any way that feels similar to my experience of it. Most FA activists seem to have always been having sex, have never experienced the paralyzing pain of hitting this block and finding no way around it. It’s a part of the conversation about fat sex that’s missing. Everyone wants to skip past the hard shit of “everyone you’ve ever known has reminded you that you’re fat and therefore are not allowed to have sex or feel sexy yet somehow everyone expects you to have sex with SOMEONE” and get into mechanics/psychology for people who are already having sex (even if in some cases it’s not terribly healthy sex).
This isn’t a comprehensive answer, but for me, it was a non-intuitive piece of the puzzle.
One day, I posted a picture of me (just a regular face shot — I’d probably gotten a haircut or whatever) on livejournal. Somebody paid me a complement. I did my usual humble-I-thought dismissal.
But then the person got really mad. And like, not because I was being down on myself. They got mad because I had disrespected them.
What they said to me was really important, and it was this: When I dismiss their compliment, I’m saying that I don’t respect their judgment. And by so quickly and casually dismissing it, I’m relegating my estimation of their judgment to the lowest of the low, worth far too little to even evaluate.
They didn’t put it exactly that way, but it drove a point home. I’ve always paid lip service to being a relativist. I believe strongly that different people are beautiful to different people, and that there’s no one objective standard of beauty. And like most of us, I was conscious that I apply that to other people but not equally or fairly to myself. But I dismissed this as behaviour that, while it would be healthy to overcome for my own mental wellness, harmed only me. Not so.
When I dismiss other people’s opinions, I’m devaluing them and devaluing their input.
I was so focused inward when it came to the issue, I was thinking selfishly and not looking outward to see how it affected others.
Ultimately, it’s about respect, and about trust. I may not see what others see in me, and that’s not what I’m talking about here: I agree that it’s difficult or maybe impossible to just magically love yourself (and I don’t believe that you have to love yourself first before anybody else can love you — in fact, that’s a trivially disproven myth). What I’m talking about is respecting other people’s judgment and trusting in them to make those decisions for themselves. If someone sees something attractive or beautiful in me, even if I don’t see it, I need to have the respect for that person to trust that they see it, for themselves, and that they’re an adult who can make that decision for themselves.
If somebody thinks I’m attractive or beautiful, then that’s a decision they made for themselves based on their own perceptions of me, and that’s just as valid for them as my self-perceptions are for me, and imposing my opinions on them or thinking that they’ve had blinders on or once they see me naked they’ll think otherwise or any of those things is disrespecting their freedom and ability to make decisions for themselves, and it’s mean to them and wrong.
I’ve fallen back into the dismissive thinking, so it was good to see this post and get a reminder of that incident. The retraining doesn’t always “stick”, but I’m working on it, and I think I needed to have a kick in the butt in this regard.
the reason this wouldn’t have worked for me a year ago is that you can’t say ‘but fuq what other other ppl say YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL~*~*~’ when someone trashes you for being fat, and then turn around and say 'YOU ARE DEVALIDATING MY CAPACITY FOR FAIR JUDGMENT’ when the opinion is a positive one. i mean how does that work exactly? and it all insidiously goes back to “who really is the arbiter of your sexiness??”, when the truth is somewhere in the middle, i.e. you can be extremely confident in your body and attitude and there will be people who might have been attracted to you if not for your fatness and there’s NOTHING TO DO ABOUT THAT and you gotta work with that.
(via jhameia)
