I Hope Im Not Just A Blog You Follow But Also The Only Person With 100% Correct Opinions About The Little

I’ve gotten in trouble at almost every Thanksgiving family gathering starting from the time I reached about thirteen because I kept calling out my uncles for being racist, homophobic, or sexist. 

(And then everyone got mad at me for starting arguments. Um??? I??? Never?? started it?? I just refused to let it go when they said horrible things.) 

One time I flat-out told one of my uncles he was a bigot and he got super super offended. Insisted that he was not a bigot, and that I must never call him that again. I was fourteen at the time and I was cowed enough to apologize for saying that and to agree to not do it again. Still regret how I folded, sometimes, but at least I made it clear I still believed he was wrong.

Several times it’s been me debating against four or five of my uncles at once. Four adult men, one teenage girl. Everyone else always refuses to get involved, standing around with these uncomfortable looks on their faces. One of my aunts thinks it’s disgraceful, how much I’ll argue with ‘the men of the family’. It doesn’t feel like I ever accomplish much of anything by doing this, but I can’t just do nothing.

It’s hard because I’m close to my extended family, particularly some of my cousins who are my age, and I know that they all love me. But I cannot stand the things that they (my uncles and a couple of my aunts especially) believe. My mom agrees with me that they’re wrong, but always gets angry with me when I argue with them about it. ‘You don’t talk about politics with family,’ she says. ‘Family’s what will be there for you when everyone else leaves you, don’t alienate them.’ ‘Let it go, you’re never going to change their minds.’ ‘You’re embarrassing me.’ I’m always the one in the wrong for daring to speak up. 

I don’t think my mom really understands that I cannot be silent about these things. If I am silent, I am complicit. If I say nothing, then it’s as good as agreeing. I can’t do that. I just can’t, even if she thinks I’m starting drama without good reason and punishes me for it.

Sometimes I think that I should cut contact with my extended family entirely, for some of the horrible things they believe - if any of them openly advocated for violence, I would. But they don’t go that far, and I love them too much to erase them from my life right now. (Also, my mom thinks I’m insane for even contemplating that maybe I should. Cut contact, that is. Because in our family, where our parents and grandparents were refugees and immigrants when they arrived here and had only each other to rely on, family is everything. To her, family matters more than politics, every time. I don’t quite agree with her on that.) But if I am to continue keeping them in my life, the very least I can do is to speak up when I know something is wrong, and to refuse to be silent, no matter how many people get angry with me for it. 

I’m always glad to see people saying that yes, it’s right to call your family out when they do something racist/homophobic etc., because everyone in my immediate life says that I’m childish and immature for doing it, and that there’s no point in doing it. I hope though that maybe some of the things I say will get through to my uncles’ children, at least, if not my uncles themselves.

I grew up in northern California and I say crayfish

why are there so many terms for crawdads

apparently there’s some sort of recipe involving feta that has gone viral on tiktok? and apparently it’s reason why my grocery store was nearly out of feta when I went to buy it? idk I’m not on tiktok

I managed to get the last package of feta there which is good because I always have feta around and it would be sad if I didn’t have any this week

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

THIS IS SUCH A GOOD IDEA. I wish I could have gone to a school like this. Can you imagine an education that is academically well-rounded, teaches life skills and hobbies, ensures the overall physical and mental health of its students, and it’s ALL GIRLS? Girls who learn to be supportive of each other? No male teachers who ignore female students and put them down. no worries about being sexualized at school. (no teenage boys. no dress code.) 

this is the dream. I wish I could have gone there. I want to leave my astronomy class to go to figure skating and then later I have embroidery club and martial arts. 

just. please. I want this to be a thing. I’ve dreamed about something like this myself lol.

I want to meet the amazing, talented, well-rounded and extraordinarily competent and fierce women who would come out of a program like this.

My biggest personal feminism fantasy?

I make a lot of money. Enough money to buy an old estate on a large bit of property. Something like this:

Then, I modify it into classrooms and dormitories. I make common areas and a cafeteria that is open to the kitchen. All of this serves a purpose.

I open a girl’s school. Grades 6 through 12. It’s called something like

Artemis Academy

or some other strong female symbol name. It has no religious affiliation. It is scholarship based, maybe a pay-what-you-can model, but ideally we work our way to 100% donation based maintenance, with every penny going back into paying the staff and bettering the schools.

Our teachers and instructors are all women, highly educated women or women skilled in their trade. There is a STEM and Law focus, ideally, with plenty of the arts. The girls are taught history and painting and music and writing alongside biology and law and physics and calculus and coding. The curriculum does not hide women, it highlights them and their accomplishments.

They take shifts to help cook meals in the evenings with the female chefs, so they can be self-sufficient. There is a large garden on the ground that everyone tends so the girls have that connection to their food, that understanding and pride. Maybe there is room for chickens and goats too, for milk and eggs, and to teach them how to get their hands dirty. Chores like mopping, and dusting, and laundry, and mowing are divided among the girls and rotated so every one of them learns how to live independently.

Science classes can venture onto the grounds for sample collection, some instructors may prefer to give their whole lecture in the courtyard. A painting class may spend an afternoon setting up easles on the lawn to study capturing light.

The lawn is for physical activities: running, and yoga, and kickball. Any sports teams the girls want to form, maybe there’s a rec league run by the older girls.

Movement, and the possession of one’s own body, is important. Uniforms are comfortable and non-restrictive. Something like this:

Clubs are abundant. Poetry clubs, and book clubs, and dance, and knitting, and debate, and scary movies, and whatever they want! There’s a mentorship program that pairs each girl with one in the grade below her. There are event nights, for movies or crafting or “How To” presentations where the girls can teach things to one another (how to sew a button, how to draft a professional email, how to change the oil in a car). The community is diverse and close.

We bring in women judges, and physicians, and professors, and engineers, and sculptors, and chefs as speakers. They talk realistically on the struggles of being a woman in their field. They talk about how they overcame and thrived. They talk about career paths, and college admission, and navigating the world through the unique lenses of womanhood.

It is a school by women for girls, to let them become self-sustained, self-realized, self-loving, truly empowered women.

It’s my dream to make it happen.

I feel like this should say “Leaf me alone,’ instead of ‘Leave me alone,’.

everytime zuko goes out he leaves iroh a note that says “gone insane, back later”

my internal monologue when Ancient Egypt is mentioned: [don't talk about imhotep and the first codified diagnostic manual. the fact you know so much about it is deeply weird and nobody cares about medicine that much]

Our world does not welcome wild things.

As a zoology student, this is a brutal truth I must face. We slaughter keystone predators, leaving ecosystems to rot, then ponder why we are so overrun by the animals they hunt. We destroy forests, jungles, prairies and marshlands, then wonder why these pests dare encroach on our land. 

We hunt rare creatures for their tusks, for their horns, for their skin, for their bones, forcing those that remain onto reserves, culling them when their populations grow beyond our control. Our highest-ranking political figures publicly delight in murdering endangered species for mere thrill of the hunt. If a creature is fierce, or frightening, or mysterious, or beautiful… we kill it. 

This is why How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is important. Grimmel is a trophy hunter. He kills dragons for the fun of it. Because Night Furies are beautiful and rare and dangerous and the world heralds him as a hero for it. He doesn’t need another reason for it, anymore than any of the trophy hunters of our world need a reason for shooting an elephant and proudly posing with its bloody tail other than it boosts their egos. 

“Our world doesn’t deserve you…”

…because our world destroys all that which is fierce and beautiful and wild. So until the day comes when mankind stops desecrating, polluting, and exploiting the natural world we are meant to protect, I hope the dragons stay hidden, where man cannot reach them. 

Nobody gives two shits about an ENTIRE COUNTRY being hit by two cyclones consecutively. It’s displaced over 160,000 people and destroyed over 30,000 homes.

Yet no one cries.

No billionaires or other countries have talked about donating or helping the country out.

Please help by donating to charities and fundraisers dedicated to helping provide humanitarian aid to Mozambique!

https://support.savethechildren.org/site/Donation2?df_id=3241&mfc_pref=T&3241.donation=form1&cid=Social_Network:Twitter:Emer_Mozambique:Scus_Lp_Post2:031919&hootPostID=23abdd2d4250de3d6b684c68a4fb250b

Save the Children

Cyclone Idai and Cyclone Kenneth Children's Relief Fund - Save the Children

I just donated to Save the Children to transform children's lives and the future we share. Join me.

https://www.allhandsandhearts.org/programs/mozambique-tropical-cyclone-relief/

All Hands and Hearts - Smart Response

Mozambique Relief - Tropical Cyclone Response

Program Summary  Disaster Profile On March 15, 2019, Tropical Cyclone Idai slammed into central Mozambique as a category 3 storm. After

https://www.msf.org/msf-response-wake-devastating-cyclone-idai-mozambique-malawi-zimbabwe

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International

MSF response in wake of devastating Cyclone Idai | Mozambique | Malawi | Zimbabwe | Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International

Cyclone Idai has ravaged parts of Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, causing widespread flooding and damage. Our teams are responding to the m

Hiccups Vignettes (Astronomy)

Okay, so I have this weird thing: I have the hiccups. Perpetually. I always have the hiccups. Every single day, since I was about eleven years old. Yeah, seriously. Now, it’s not like I hiccup all the time. They just kind of happen randomly throughout the day. For all I know, the next one will be in two minutes, twenty minutes, or two hours. All of this is weird enough. But they’re not just consistent, they’re loud. And ridiculously high-pitched. I emit a high-pitched squeak that is frequently mistaken for a puppy, a bird, or a dying mouse. (And on one odd occasion, a horse.) Now, I have quite a lot of stories relating to my hiccups, but this is the one that people tend to find the funniest. Actually, it’s more like a series of funny vignettes.

So, in my freshman year of university, I was taking Astronomy 101. And you know, it was one of those big lecture hall classes with a couple hundred people in it. So when I hiccuped during class, it echoed around the room. Everyone could hear it, but no one could figure out where it was coming from. When it happened, my professor would pause for a second, and everyone would glance around, looking for the source of the strange sound. Again and again it happened, throughout the semester. Then in the last two weeks of school, this happened:

First: I was standing in line at Starbucks on campus one morning, and I hiccuped. The girl two people in front of me turned around, stared for a second and said, I kid you not, “Are you in my Astro 101 class?” She recognized me purely from the sound of my hiccups.

Second: Astronomy had just let out, and as I was walking out of class, I hiccuped. The two guys in front of me were like, “Did you hear that?” And then they started speculating about the weird noise that had plagued the class the entire semester. I’m standing behind them, blushing bright red, and so I interject into their conversation. “I have really weird hiccups!” I said. They both turned to look at me like I was insane. “That sound,” I explained. “It’s me. I have really strange hiccups.” Then of course they started laughing. One of them suggested that I should go up in front of class and explain to everyone – actually, that I should just stand up and announce my hiccups in every class at the beginning of the semester. I was still blushing, and I was like, no! I’m not going to do that.

Third: My dorm was having a movie night at the end of the semester to watch The Polar Express. So I’m sitting on the couch in the basement in front of the TV chatting with this guy, and I hiccuped. And he gives me an odd look, hesitates, and says, “I’m sorry, but are you taking astronomy this semester?” And I was ready to facepalm. This was the second time in like six days that someone from that class had recognized me by my hiccups. It hadn’t happened all semester – it hadn’t ever happened like this at all, really.

Finally: Spring semester starts. I’m taking Astro 102 and I have the same professor. This time, the class is a lot smaller. There were thirty-six people in the class. (Only four of us were girls, by the way.) On the first day of class, I hiccuped. The professor stops. This time, instead of brushing it off and moving on, he asks the class, “What is that sound?” I suppose because it was a smaller class. So anyway, I ended up explaining my hiccups to him in front of the entire class. Sigh.

That’s basically it for the Hiccups in Astronomy Vignettes.