#I just genuinely hope more Catholics than I think understand that their actions and what comes out of their mouths

[animezinglife]

Person: [offers different, factual approach and explanation to incredibly toxic idea to show why most women have a different opinion about said topic and the real-world consequences of what the toxic idea can bring]

The Catholic OP: WHY DO PEOPLE ALWAYS HAVE TO MAKE IT ABOUT THEM??? WE ARE TALKING ABOUT ME?? AND MY OPINION??

#yet more reasons I'm not Catholic #it's this. all the time. every time. #funny #personal #I mean no offense to my Catholic friends on here #it's not you #women's health #education #I just genuinely hope more Catholics than I think understand that their actions and what comes out of their mouths #do the opposite of make people want to find God. #I'm convinced if I'd been raised Catholic I'd be a hardcore atheist in adulthood. #Not to mention their so-called ''medical'' professionals at the Catholic hospital borderline TORTURED my friend #when she was trying to have her first child. #She's a tough woman who's been through a lot. #She'd been abused before and in her relationship. #She doesn't use the term lightly. #She's an older woman in her sixties. #They refused to give her anything for the pain because *they* didn't believe in it. #They treated her like garbage. #She was only seventeen and they abused her too. #They hurt her worse. #Not to mention all the delightful stories my DHS friend shares with me.

[myrddin-wylt]

that same British anon here

You know what. Yes I will take Ukraine to be the point of reference here, Ukraine know what they're trying to do and are trying to fucking do it, I can respect that.

But yes I've noticed that all the germans I've known are very scared to criticise the government, and I'm not sure why, might just be a culture difference considering the bullshit the tabloids do here, but they seem genuinely a little afraid

imo Britain's problem in general is that while plenty of Brits can agree that the current situation is Very Not Good, even a riot ain't gonna do shit if it isn't goal-oriented and 100% clear what tangible action people want the government to take, and I imagine there's currently a lot of disagreement rn. like the French have a very clear tangible thing they want from Macron: repeal the law raising the retirement age. Euromaidan had clear goals: Yanukovych needed to resign and the Azarov government be dissolved only being the first of a very long list. also I'm putting this under a readmore because I love to ramble.

as a wider, historical uprising example - and please excuse me for coming off as like, US-obsessed patriot American I swear it's just the document really is written as just a perfect example - the US Declaration of Independence is really fascinating to read because it is literally a list of tangible grievances. 'we are angry and have provided you with a list as to why: because you did [a], [b], [c] etc concrete actions. so we are gonna do [x], [y], and [z] (which just so happen to be high treason).'

so grievances like 'being a tyrant' isn't enough, nor is 'hey I can't afford to heat my house or go to the doctor because you fucking suck at running the country, fix this shit.' ya gotta pick a very specific action, and that's not something I think the general British population has agreed on yet? I mean, yall are very good at getting Prime Ministers to resign (and without needing to use violence to do so), which is a very concrete action! and I'm not saying that sarcastically or in a mean way, I really am being genuine. like the Germans could fucking never. Americans could never, or else Trump would've resigned during his term. so I'm still holding out hope for yall and you know what, what does it matter anyway how many PMs you've had in however many years, as long as the transition of power was peaceful and legal? it's better to swap em out as needed than cling onto one that has shown to be Not The One. like what are you, fuckin Catholic or something? divorce them. serve them the papers. also I really, really do not know nearly enough about domestic UK politics in the last 25 years to be making any of the statements in this paragraph but that won't stop me because I'm an American!

......re: the Germans, hm. I thought they were more complacent than scared, but if they are scared it's presumably because the freedom of speech laws in Germany are............ well, the Network Enforcement Act is not helping. in any case, the Germans have always erred toward the side of censorship when it comes to the freedom of speech/hate speech/misinformation dilemma so maybe there's a cultural attitude of "better to be silent and let others think you a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt," if that makes sense? maybe they're less concerned about the government censorship and more about social censure/conforming to popular opinion, idk. I feel like I'd have to be fluent in German to be able to understand the attitudes there. you'd need to ask a German about that.

#ask #anon #silly #or at least I'm being silly. gotta break up the monotony #look you gotta admit it's fun to yell. rolls right off the tongue #yall need to come up with a new demonym because yelling I'M A BRIIIIIIIT or I'M BRIIITIIIIIIISH isn't near as fun as I'M AN AMERICAAAAAAN #it just linguistically doesn't work as well

[geodaddy-fanfics]

"Way Down We Go" Nanami Kento X Fem!Reader

Author's Note: I was asked to write a Priest Nanami AU fic by a friend and decided to make it part of her birthday present. Happy Birthday! Hope you like it! (I've never written smut before so... I tried. Also this is smut, so be warned).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Churches, generally conceived as places of peace and worship, are also active locations for the creation of curses. The amount of loathing that accompanies the concept of “sin” plagues the congregations and buildings of God. As such, it was expected within the career of all jujutsu sorcerers for them to “serve” in at least one church and exterminate the various curses clinging to their hosts.

Said expectation (tied together with the conniving mind of one blindfolded loudmouth) meant that Nanami Kento, renowned sorcerer and loather of overtime, was currently masquerading as a priest and presiding over the evening congregations at a large Catholic church. Needless to say, Nanami was displeased with this assignment. Not only was he required to work beginning in the evening, he could not leave the church until he was the last one there. He had no set schedule and that irked him immensely, as well as the fact that he could not wear his usual attire, having to sacrifice his suit and tie for the black garb of modern priests.

It was a Sunday, the busiest day for churches of course, approximately a week into his service, and Nanami was once again seated inside of the confessional booth. It was exactly what he expected it to be, listening to the mundane problems of the masses while trying to match voices to faces of those unintentionally harboring curses. He’d been preaching and listening for hours, the time bordering on ten in the evening, and the small crowd was thankfully thinning. The final person stepped into the booth beside him, hidden from view, but the nervous breathing echoing through the box indicated that the individual was probably new to the faith, or at least hadn’t practiced in a while.

“Tell me, father,” the voice asked the awaiting silence. “Do we get what we deserve?”

The question piqued Nanami’s interest and he leaned towards the wall unintentionally. Usually people plopped down into the booth and listed out their various sins: liars, adulterers, thieves, and the like concerned not with change or forgiveness, but with societal standing. This woman with the quiet question had made this evening at least somewhat bearable.

“Explain to me what you mean,” Nanami questioned, racking his brain to see if he could place the face to the voice beside him.

There was a quiet sigh, as if the speaker had hoped for a simple answer. “Do you think that our actions matter? Like, if I live a sin free life or a sinful one, so long as I repent, does it matter?” The woman was clearly frustrated.

Perhaps this one question had been her only reason to turn to the church today, Nanami mused. “What, then, do you think you deserve?” He couldn’t help but ask, regardless of whether it prolonged his stay on sacred ground.

There was a moment of silence as the woman hesitated. “I’m… not sure. I work so hard every single day and I need to know if it matters.” Exhaustion poured through her last few words, the weariness of maintaining a life under society’s conditions. Nanami could relate, especially within the confines of the confessional booth many miles away from the comforts of his home and normal schedule.

“Well then, I can only recommend you one thing,” he stated. “I do not know whether our work pays off in whatever afterlife awaits us, if any. So, I suggest you take a break.”

“A break…” the woman replied, mildly confused. “I don’t understand, Father.”

Nanami didn’t understand it much himself, but as he pushed open the door to the confessional and stood surrounded by the altar's candles, he decided he could use a break as well.

Having heard the priest leave the booth, so too did the confessor. She wore an expression of wariness and confusion, but Nanami was distracted by the deep exhaustion present on her face. He was right in matching the voice to its owner, having noticed the woman in the congregation the last few nights. She had sparked his interest as one of few genuine people in the audience, even if she was skeptical about the religion, and hearing her in the booth only made it abundantly clear why he found himself mildly distracted by her during the sermons. They could both use one hell of a break.

The woman folded her arms in front of her, eyeing him with a mix of interest and doubt. “Are you planning to explain yourself, Father?”

Nanami held out his hand. As she placed her fingers gently in his palm, he tugged her forward and wrapped an arm around her waist. “A little divine intervention seems in order, my child.” She settled into his arms, seemingly comforted by his embrace. The blonde man tightened his hold on her noticeably and stared into her enticingly wide eyes.

“You better make this worth it,” she said, tilting her head slightly. “I’ve had a long day, you know.” It was clear she wanted what he was offering. Whether through attraction to him, a need for a distraction, or a mixture of both, the woman was leaning heavily upon his chest. Her arms slowly snaked up around his neck, her fingers playing with the ends of his hair invitingly.

Rather than waste more time on words, he brushed his lips up gently against hers, a silent vow to make this a godly experience. The woman seized the moment and eagerly kissed him back, turning the saintly, chaste promise into what they were both truly wanting. Nanami tightened his arms around her waist, digging his fingers into the soft fabric of her dark dress. It looked barely appropriate to wear to church in Nanami’s brain. The way it accentuated her body, the confidence with which she held herself, was too hard to resist and he was glad he stopped trying.

A light nip to her bottom lip was all the woman needed to let him into her mouth, his tongue slipping inside and providing the guidance needed to deepen their kiss. Nanami was all but drowning in the delicious sighs and moans gifted to him and diligently worked to achieve more. All the while, he gracefully guided their bodies towards the altar and thoughtlessly pushed aside the tools from his earlier sermon to sit his current subject of worship upon the chilled wood. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but it did the job just fine.

Nanami situated himself between the woman’s thighs, grinding every so often against her and earning tugs on his hair in return. “Tell me, little lamb,” he said, pulling back enough to meet the lust darkened eyes of his partner. “Will you sing for me?” His hands were on her thighs, pushing up the fabric of her dress and relishing in the soft feel of her exposed skin. He wanted nothing more than to lay her back and wreck her on this holy ground, but he waited as patiently as he possibly could to prolong this much deserved night.

“God, yes,” the woman sighed in response. Her hands wandered over his clothed skin, wondering what he felt like beneath, but rather turned on by the perfection of his priestly garb. His eyes gazed into hers, dark and wide, and color dusted sculpted cheeks. She wanted to comment how fitting it was for him to be a man of the lord when his calloused fingers hooked into her panties and gave a firm tug. All thoughts fled her brain and she moaned as a knuckle rubbed gently through the gathered wetness about her core.

“Just like that, darling,” Nanami praised, barely containing a groan as her fingernails dug delightfully into his shoulders. Swiftly, he fully removed her underwear and let it drop to the floor beside the altar. The man planted another kiss onto his partner’s blushing cheek before fluidly getting to his knees. Nanami braced his hands onto her thighs and parted them from where they had begun to close in around his face. He paused for only a moment to take in the glistening sight before him before descending his lips and tongue into the warmth before him.

He licked a broad stripe from her center to her already tender bud, huffing a breath of pure arousal at the breathy moan that sounded above him. The sound echoed off of the stone walls of the cathedral, accompanied by the wet noise that followed his tongue’s assault on her clit. Nanami relished the feeling of her fingers on his scalp and the soft spew of encouragement from above him. Already, he felt uncomfortably hard, but focused himself on pleasing the woman before him. As one hand left her thigh and traveled up under the fabric of her dress to caress the flesh beneath, Nanami slipped his tongue inside her pleading hole. He caressed the delicate walls, licking in an out to taste her fully. Her nails gripped onto his once neat blonde locks and he groaned at the feeling, the vibrations doing everything to bring her closer and closer to the edge.

Nanami continued his ministrations, burying his face into her sweet core and letting her legs close around him so his other hand could entertain her nub while he worked. With each circle of his rough thumb, he felt the woman coming undone around him. Her legs shook gently over his shoulders, but he relentlessly continued to thrust his tongue in and out of her, caressing as deep as he could in her tightening walls.

“Oh god, Father, I-” the woman attempted to say between moans of pleasure. “I’m going to-” She cut herself off with a silent scream, her face turned toward the chapel ceiling as Nanami worked her through the waves of her orgasm. He lapped up the fluids gathering around his tongue and soothingly rubbed circles onto the inner skin of her thigh, waiting until the iron grip she had on his hair relaxed and her legs no longer clamped around his head.

Nanami returned to his feet, the results of the woman’s first release glistening on his lips. There was no hesitation from either party as their mouths’ met, the taste of her on both their tongues as she greedily hugged him closer for more despite the light shaking of her body. “Please tell me that wasn’t all,” she breathed against his mouth with a coy grin.

Nanami huffed a laugh and pulled back slightly. “I’m delivering what you deserve, am I not?” He teased, grinding again against the wetness between them, not caring what it did to his black pants. The woman squirmed from the stimulation, her face a fight between a wince and the ‘oh’ of another moan.

Her fingers scrambled for purchase against the smooth fabric separating them. “I want to feel you…” She pleaded, the apprehension from earlier entirely gone. Nanami held back a groan by pressing his lips back against hers, loving how eager she was for what he wanted as well. He took the time to slip her dress entirely off of her, exposing her to the cool air of the church and the wandering of his hands. Nanami was in no rush, despite how he ached within the confines of his pants. He wanted nothing more than to continue to defile such a faithful child of god, to feel all of her skin against his fingers, to hear every little sound that left her beautiful mouth because of him.

Sadly for him, his partner was in no mood to delay. She tugged at the front of his pants, undoing the hidden button and zipper to free his lengthy and leaking member from its prison. Nanami watched her swallow from between partially lidded eyes as a small wave of relief spread through him at being exposed to the open air. “It’s not nice to lie, Father,” the woman chuckled, wrapping her hand around his cock and giving it a fair few strokes. “Those pants barely show a thing.”

Lord, was he worked up. Taking it slower would have to wait for another day. Regardless, Nanami gently placed his hand over hers, using them both to guide the head of his member to her entrance. “Then forgive me, for I have sinned.” He placed his other hand on her shoulder, guiding her to lay down against the altar and running his fingers tantalizingly down her body. Carefully, Nanami plunged into her, the stretch of her walls around him causing them both to release heavy groans towards the heavens. “God help me..” He whispered into the air with a chuckle while he waited for her to adjust to the intrusion. The sweet tightness swallowing him whole begged for him to start moving, to see how delicious it would feel for her body to milk every last drop from him, yet he waited until she impatiently twitched around him.

Looking down at her, Nanami couldn’t help but snort. “Patience is a virtue, darling.” His voice was strained from the effort it took to resist from pounding into her.

The shock of the intrusion gone, the playful smile returned to her face. “Does that mean I’ll be punished, Father?”

A genuine laugh broke from Nanami’s throat and he positioned his hands on her waist. “I suppose it is necessary. Virtues must be learned somehow.” He then began a sudden and harsh pace, pulling nearly all the way out before slamming back. The drag of his cock along her walls was pure bliss, the stretch barely painful beyond the pleasure being literally pounded into her body. Perhaps it was the euphoria, but the woman could swear his unrelenting pace hit places she never knew could feel so good, each slap of skin on skin eliciting gasps and pleas from her.

Even better was the look plastered on the ever stoic and serious Nanami, the priest she had only ever seen scowling from behind the altar he was currently railing her on. His brows were drawn and his jaw set tight around every groan and grunt rung from him. The sternness was different from usual, no longer the reproachful hand of god, but a man hellbent on finding and giving release. His fingers held on with bruising strength, moving her body for her as he struck again and again at her most sensitive spot. Her fingers clawed for purchase on the thin red fabric covering the wooden slab of the altar as stars shot in and out, throwing everything out of focus except for where Nanami’s body and hers connected.

With the echoes of their voices and skin bouncing around them, Nanami was getting progressively closer to climax. The time spent pleasuring his partner had sufficiently worked him up and the pressure wrapped around his cock was godly. Seeing the edge approaching, he released one hand from its forceful grip and moved it to toy with her clit once again and bring her along with him towards release.

The woman clung to the altar with one hand above her head, her eyes scrunched shut as the coil in her core threatened to snap for the second time that evening. It didn’t take much longer for orgasm to hit, her walls clenching tight around Nanami’s cock and her barely opened eyes staring fuzzily at the church ceiling as every nerve in her body tensed and released in waves. Nanami was short to follow, the pressure around him too wonderful and the expression of the woman before him enough to tip him over the edge. He pulled out with a wet pop before painting the woman and the altar in long spurts of cum. He braced his hands on the wood on either side of her body, their heavy breathing filling the space as they both reeled back into themselves.

Before a silence could settle, Nanami began to put himself back together, cleaning himself off with a handkerchief and tucking himself back into his pants. “I will be just a moment,” he informed the still shaking woman and went to retrieve a hand towel from the closet near the church’s restroom. He began gently and diligently cleaning her, then helped her back into her clothes. Aside from the red swollenness of their lips and the disheveled state of their hair, the two looked nearly normal. Nanami had been careful not to leave any visible marks on her, had kept his lips to hers or to places unseen, simply because they had not had the time to discuss what exactly was okay and what wasn’t beforehand. Despite having fucked a churchgoer on an altar just moments before, Nanami was a gentleman and respected any boundaries his partner may have had.

With the evidence of their “worship” cleaned up, the two adults walked towards the doors of the church. The woman paused at the door and looked up to Nanami with a broad, relaxed smile. “Thank you, Father. For the break.” An amused laugh bubbled past her lips and Nanami found himself grinning slightly in return.

“Any time, my child. I am here to serve,” he said, extending a hand with a simple business card in it. “Even when I am no longer part of this congregation.” While generally saved for curse work, Nanami always carried cards with his name and number on it. And this definitely seemed like a worthwhile time to give on.

The woman took it and tucked it into her purse securely. “I hope to see you again soon,” she said in farewell, leaving Father Nanami behind to finish attending to church duties. Perhaps the mandatory service as a priest wasn’t so bad. It certainly had its perks.

#nanami kento #nanami smut #jujutsu kaisen #nanami kento x reader #jujutsu kaisen nanami #jjk nanami

[reina-morada]

i find a lot of value in your blog if not necessarily comfort. i come from a place w one of the largest muslim populations in the world, and like many organized religions comfortably in the majority & systematically benefitting from inequality, i’ve witnessed and survived a lot of prejudice and abuse that (ostensibly) stems from how certain groups interpret islam’s teachings. like you, i was raised catholic but catholicism itself in this area is very much a result of colonialism & imperialism. to this day still, i cannot seem to find it within myself to separate the actions of believers from their belief. i don’t think of myself as an adherent, but i feel lucky that i’m able to see your perspective as one. at the same time i also envy you for not being saddled w this same baggage lol. in any case i wish u peace .

Salaam,

Your trauma is valid. It honestly wasn't until this last year during spiritual direction that I realized how much trauma I carried myself from my upbringing in Catholic institutions. It's very difficult to reconcile faith when you've had negative experiences with it in the past. Catholicism being forced upon my ancestors was not a selling point for me. Neither was the lack of education of my religion teachers, who threatened me with poor grades if I did not take consume Eucharist in middle school. Or the discrimination I experienced being openly LGBTQ at a Catholic high school.

It took me many many years, and more than four years of university level theology classes, to finally see the worthy tenets of Catholicism. I won't say Christianity as a whole because honestly I don't have personal experience with Protestantism. Liberation theology is the religious understanding I subscribe to in regards of Catholicism. The oppressed, who will always be with us, must be aided, loved, and liberated. We will never experience true "Catholicism" if we do not aid the poor and the impoverished, fight with the oppressed and the marginalized, and time and time again choose to love one another. I understand the Bible through a historical-critical lens, and I see it as a historical testament left behind by our spiritual ancestors, but not one we should interpret literally or as the fundamental word of God.

If people feel differently, it's sort of hard to argue with them. I've met Catholics who read the Bible and use it to justify all kinds of immoral behavior, from misogyny to homophobia to Islamophobia. They simply believe these things exist in the text, without any care for historical analysis or theological education. You can even throw theological study at them and they won’t believe it, they just won’t. It’s against their interpretation. But I can assure you, I've met equally as many Catholics (especially in my work) who do indeed live trying to emulate Christ's example as an oppressed, poor man of color.

I've spent the last year doing research for a textbook about ministry from the perspectives of people of color in the Catholic Church. The same issues many non+ex-Catholics have with the Church are the same issues many current Catholics inside the Church have. From the sex abuse scandals to women's ordination, to the colonization that forcibly converted millions- Catholics nation wide have expressed their horror. Black Catholics, Hawaiian Catholics, Indigenous Catholics throughout the Americas and so on have demanded the Church acknowledge it's impact on their history. They are theologians, lay ministers, ordained clergy both male and female, teachers, and volunteers. National parish leaders around the country are crying out and demanding the Church to address gun violence, oppression against women in the Church, racism and so on. They're just as angry and upset as the people who've left the Church. I got to talk to a theologian who was blacklisted by Catholic bishops for demanding women's ordination, and I felt like I was meeting a celebrity.

Don't despair, anon. No matter what your personal religious life, I can tell you with certainty that there are Catholics (and Muslims and Jews and so on!) who genuinely feel the way you do. Criticisms and all. And all this to say, maybe one day you'll be at peace with everything. Maybe you won't. You'll discover on the journey. Neither answer is wrong.

I hope this helps you.

#anon #answers #catolica

[chase-the-windandtouch-the-sky]

I saw a headcanon (I can’t find it, please link me to if you know it so I can give credit!) that Nicky always hands Joe guns because he’s a terrible shot goes through bullets faster than anyone. I thought that was one of the funniest reasons for all the shots of Nicky handing Joe guns, I had to write this. Please excuse my obsession <3

The van rolls over some rocks, Nile almost falling over. It’s small moments like these when she realizes that she really is only twenty-four and is surrounded by people who’ve lived hundreds of years. Nicky and Joe barely move from where they’re next to each other, Andy doesn’t say in her stance, and Booker merely grunts with annoyance in his sleep. Joe catches her slip up and a broad smile stretches across his face, crinkling his nose with amusement. Nile shoots him a look back, daring him to say anything.

“If you sit cross-legged, it lowers your center of gravity.”

It’s Nicky of all people who speaks and Joe lets out a loud laugh, the corner of Nicky’s mouth turning up. “Nicky, are you making fun of me?” Nile asks, too shocked to be embarrassed.

Joe beams at his love. “I think he might just be.”

“What would the Church say?”

“I was never a good Catholic priest anyway.” Nicky says, unable to stop the smile from stretching across his face.

“No,” Joe says endearingly. “You never were.”

“Ugh, someone put me in exile again.” Booker groans from the corner, his arm thrown over his face.

The two share a private laugh with each other, even Andy cracking a smile.

They were traveling across the desert, where Copley said a village had been taken over under the guise of religious freedom, but was swarmed with mercenaries doing all sorts of horrible things. Nile noticed how Nicky’s jaw clenched when he hear that particular detail, the shame of the Crusades apparent on his face. Nile noticed how Joe stayed close, every once and a while whispering something in his ear.

Once the van rolls to a stop, Nicky gets up sharply. Nile startles. “What—”

Swinging open the van, Nicky kneels, bends to look through his scope, and fires off a few shots. He catches the casings in his hand and stands, nodding to Andy.

Andy hops out of the van.

“What just happened?” Nile asks, blinking. She feels like she just missed an entire fight and she was sitting right there.

“Nicky makes sure we don’t get rained down on before we even get in.” Booker groans, hoisting himself up to his feet. “It happens more than you think. It’s just easier this way.”

It’s a bit hard to understand that the same man who was teaching her how to bake bread and would wax poetic over a Degas with her had such a cold side, but then again, he’s almost nine hundred years old. Nicky reaches in his pocket and pulls out a small pistol, handing it to Joe. Joe takes it without commenting, Booker snorting. Nile isn’t sure why exactly that’s funny, especially since Joe has a rifle of his own, as well as his scimitar. But the man takes it and pockets it, Nicky eyeing his rifle one last time.

The five of the move across the plain quietly, marching along as the village slowly comes closer. The scene is more grim than Nile is prepared for, the villagers being shoved as those with assault weapon shout. She can’t quite understand what they’re saying, but the fear in the children’s eyes is prevalent even from her vantage point. “You stay with me,” Andy whispers, shifting uncomfortably in her vest.

“Shouldn’t you be sticking with me?” Nile asks.

“You’re still new. You stick with me.” Andy turns. “Joe, Nicky, you take the south. Booker, you’re with me and Nile.”

“What are you thinking, boss?” Joe asks, frowning at the scene. “Budapest, ’23?”

Nile doesn’t ask when. She’s always wrong.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

Joe beams at Nicky who nods back in his hoodie, a warm smile on his face as he looks at his love. The two quietly flank to the left. Booker snorts. “So, what do you think? Four?”

“Too many soldiers with guns. I’m thinking seven.”

“What do you guys mean?” Nile asks. “There’s way more than seven soldiers here.”

“Not talking about soldiers.” Andy says, checking her own weapon.

“Then what are you talking about?”

Andy doesn’t respond, standing up to show that her part of this conversation is over. She turns to Booker, who just chuckles. “You’ll see.”

The world gets quiet, then loud and violent.

Nile was never used to war, and hoped to never be. As she watches Andy with her cold movements, she’s afraid she would be at one point. She and Booker run ahead, taking out a few soldiers, but she notices it’s a bit light here. “You’re okay,” Nile says gently to one of the villagers, frowning. “Where is everyone?”

There’s a shout and then a flurry of gunshots. Nile flinches, whipping in the direction of the noise. “That was fast.” Booker muses.

“They’re getting faster.” Andy offers, standing and marching toward the noise.

“It helps that they’ve stopped making out in the middle of battles.” Booker groans.

Andy smirks.

By the time the three get to the scrum of fighting, it’s in full bloom. Watching Joe and Nicky fight side by side is a thing of beauty, the two of them moving around one another, as if they were an extension. When Joe swings, Nicky ducks. Nicky gathers guns and hands them to Joe without looking, as if he knows he’s out of bullets before even he does. Perhaps he does. Nile notices Joe uses the gun a little less than Nicky, often choosing to switch to his scimitar when the figure is close enough.

“Let’s get in.” Andy states, unsheathing her labrys and marching down.

“Can’t let those two have all the fun.” Booker says, clapping Nile on the shoulder. “They’ll be insufferable.”

“They’re already insufferable.” Nile mutters.

Booker lets out a genuine, sharp laugh. “God, I’m glad you’re here. Let’s do this.”

The two run into the fray themselves, Nile doing her best to keep the civilians away. It’s then when she noticed Joe and Nicky had drawn the soldiers away from the village the best they could, the fighting far away from the houses built there.

Nicky grabs a rifle from one of the men he just took out, offering it behind him to Joe. “No out yet,” Joe grunts.

“Yes, you are. I’ve been counting.” Nicky offers.

Joe turns to shoot, and then the gun clicks. Sighing, he tosses it aside and takes the one Nicky’s offering. Booker runs past Andy. “That’s already past four, you win.”

“When will you learn, Book, I always win.”

That’s when Nile sees it.

In the midst of the fighting, Nicky never leaves Joe for too long, quietly offering one weapon after another, while keeping his eyes focused on the fight ahead. Every time Joe pauses, frowning at his gun, Nicky is there with another one, offering it to him.

When it is over, Nile feels the exhaustion in her bones and the blood of others on her. She hates it, it feels sticky, and she feels a desperate need for a shower. “Peace be with you.” Nicky utters to the growing group of villagers that are around him. There are children hiding behind the legs of their parents and Nile feels bad. She can only imagine what sort of sight this was, the five of them attacking. Then, an elderly woman steps forward, her eyes old and wise. She marches up to Andy, who is pretending she doesn’t have a bruised ribcage for everyone, but even Nile can see through it. The woman grabs Andy’s arm and clutches, saying more than words could ever.

Andy nods in response, her usually hard eyes softening.

Like that, the group moves out.

Once they’re settled, everyone grabbing rags from their packs to wipe the blood from their faces, Nile finally asks, “What’s with the guns?”

It had been quiet in the van, exhaustion hitting everyone. Then Booker bursts out laughing. “One job,” he says, turning to Joe. “All it took.”

Joe says something back at him in Arabic, but his tone is light despite being mildly annoyed with Booker. Even Nicky quirks a smile, looking down at his rifle as he is wiping it down. “Ah,” Joe groans, waving his hand at Booker after his rant. “It’s an over exaggeration.”

“You see, Joe is a terrible shot.” Booker offers to Joe’s arguments.

“I am not a terrible shot, I just may not be as consistent as Nicky and he feels the need—”

“—because of this, Nicky over the years has come up with a plan to keep him safe.” Booker laughs. “He discovered quantity of guns were better than quality of shot.”

“What?” Nile asks, finding herself laughing. “Why wouldn’t you just teach him.”

“It would not matter.” Nicky says with a shrug. “And he is not terrible, he is just better with his hands.”

“You know I am.” Joe says with a wink. The two dip in, Joe catching his lips and bringing his hand to the back of his neck, as if they aren’t close enough.

Booker rolls his eyes and shares a look with her and Andy. When the two finally break apart, Nicky smiles. “My dear Yusuf is too alive for it. I would never want him to learn how to be still. He is always moving and always light. I would not change any of it.”

It’s Nicky who initiates the kiss this time and Nile sighs. It seems a lot of her immortal life will be listening to Joe and Nicky wax poetic to each other and then kiss.

“You owe me 300 euros, Book.” Andy says offhandedly.

Booker grumbles when he pulls out his wallet, tossing the bills at her. “Next time, I want in on the action.” Nile says with a grin.

Booker snorts, crossing his arms and leaning back against the seat. Joe brushes a streak of blood from Nicky’s face when they pull apart, and Nile can’t help it. She smiles, closing her eyes as the van filled with the most important people in her life lived on.

#the old guard #the old guard fanfiction #tumblr drabble #joe #yusuf #yusuf al-kaysani #nicky #nicolo #nicolo di genova #nile #nile freeman #booker #sebastien le livre #andy #andromache the scythian #just for fun

[incomprehensiblelentils]

Lentils’ 2020 Christmas Movie Rankings

My wife and I watched a lot of Christmas movies this year, and I thought it would be fun to rank them based on which ones I think were most watchable and enjoyable. I’ve left out a few that we watched during this time period, which are classic Christmas movies (Miracle on 34th Street), action movies set at Christmas (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3), or older romances set around Christmas (While You Were Sleeping and You’ve Got Mail), because it’s not fair to rank these amongst, well, some of the movies we saw.

my top 5, for those of you who don’t like reading (which is fair): The Princess Switch: Switched Again, Dashing in December, The Princess Switch, Jingle Jangle, Happiest Season.

my top 3 Chaotic Christmas Movies: A New York Christmas Wedding, 12 Pups of Christmas, The Princess Switch: Switched Again. Please watch these movies if you enjoy chaotic plots. Please especially watch the first two I listed because holy shit my summaries do not properly convey the chaos.

The Princess Switch: Switched Again (2020): Some people on the internet have been VERY RUDE about this movie and I’m sorry they don’t appreciate a true chaotic holiday gem when they see it. This movie involves two Vanessa Hudgenses, Scheduled Vanessa and Spontaneous Vanessa, who are distant cousins and not twins, switching places to try to facilitate Spontaneous Vanessa getting back together with her ex the baker, but Scheduled Vanessa is intercepted by a third cousin Vanessa, Horny Vanessa, who wants to take Spontaneous Vanessa’s place as queen. I don’t want to spoil anything that happens in this movie so that you can experience the batshittery for yourself, but I found every second absolutely delightful. It also has two very good romantic couples who are cute and who genuinely seem to like each other, which is not something I can say for every movie on this list!

Dashing in December (2020): This movie has gay cowboys, is set on a ranch, and features a squaredancing scene, so if that isn’t your bag, you are probably not going to like it very much. I found it deeply charming and the only reason it isn’t #1 is that three quarters of the way through, the lead suddenly turns back into a giant jerk for no real reason and that was very upsetting. But it all works out in the end. The main romance is very cute, there are horses, the horsemanship doesn’t totally suck ass, and there are some fun side characters. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but it’s pleasant.

The Princess Switch (2018): Again, some people are mean about this movie and they shouldn’t be because it is CUTE GODDAMMIT. It is absolutely The Prince and the Pauper but with two Vanessa Hudgenses, but also, it shows the aforementioned two good romantic couples falling in love and they are delightful. I am not saying this is a great masterpiece of romance, but the filmmakers actually tried to give these characters reasons to like each other, which, again, is not true for some of the movies on this list.\

Jingle Jangle (2020): I kind of feel bad putting this movie on the same list as TV movies that were obviously just shit out by Hallmark or whoever, because this clearly had a lot of love and heart put into it, and it really shows. I was so immediately charmed by this movie that I didn’t even mind when it immediately went in very silly directions. I don’t know if the plot makes sense at all (a cute robot shows up for seemingly no reason other than that cute robots are fun!) but it doesn’t have to, because everyone is having so much fun and there’s so much joy in this movie that I was just happy to be along for the ride. Also, I would love to see an entire movie in the stop-motion style from the opening scene.

Happiest Season (2020): I absolutely understand why some people didn’t like this movie, and I don’t want anyone to feel like they can’t dislike it, and also, it’s MY movie, and I love it, and I’m not interested in fighting about it. It helped me come out to my parents and also featured two of my faves kissing and that’s all I need. 

Noelle (2019): I was previously under the impression this movie was bad, and I don’t know why, because it’s a little embarrassing and cheesy at times, but it’s sweet. I suspect what will make or break it for you is if you like Anna Kendrick, and because I like Anna Kendrick, I like watching her play a neurotic Claus sibling trying desperately to fix the problem she accidentally caused. One weird thing though: this movie tried to convince me about halfway through that she was both spoiled and selfish, and I don’t actually think that’s true at all. I think she was a little naive and sheltered and wanted people to like her way too much, but she’s not really shown to be a selfish person - she’s constantly paying attention to other people in the real world and her brother is the one who refused to admit that he wasn’t cut out for the Santa gig and instead fucked off to “find himself” or whatever. It was weird! But anyway, I liked this movie a lot.

I’ll Be Home For Christmas (1998): So this movie...one Christmas Eve when I was in high school, I was having trouble falling asleep for whatever reason so I went downstairs to get some water. My mom happened to have the TV on and this movie was just starting, and she invited me to join her. Fun fact: this movie went to theaters and it stars Jonathan Taylor-Thomas and Jessica Biel. It is one of the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen in my life and at no point does anyone in it actually behave like a human being. It’s about a smooth-talking jackass who has to be bribed to come home for Christmas and then, after one of his dumbass moneymaking schemes lands him in hot water, he gets abandoned in the middle of the California desert wearing a Santa suit and glued-on beard. He then has to beg, lie, and cheat his way home for Christmas dinner so that his dad will give him a vintage Porsche they fixed up together. I have no defense for this character; he is insufferable and only becomes marginally less so by the end of the film. But also, I have to watch this movie every year (usually with my mom, although not this year for obvious reasons) or it doesn’t feel like Christmas. 

A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish (2019): We own this on DVD and have seen it three times. In our defense, we wanted to support Gregg Sulkin from Runaways and Isabella Gomez from One Day at a Time, both of whom feature prominently in this movie, and also sing songs. This is just Cinderella But At Christmas, and if that doesn’t sound like fun to you, I don’t think anything I can say will change your mind. I will say that the songs are amusingly autotuned, there’s a disabled dog that’s very cute, and I personally think that the leads have slightly better chemistry than some of the pairs on this list. But it is literally just another Cinderella Story movie.

The Knight Before Christmas (2019): This movie is Thor (2011) But At Christmas, and it would have been slightly higher except I always forget about the plot where at the end the knight becomes a cop. Bad, obviously! But anyway, the plot of this movie is: nice but clueless dude crash-lands on Earth for Reasons and bumbles around trying to figure out what’s up, while falling in love with a nice lady. That’s just Thor and you know I’m right. And for as dumb as this movie is, at least it’s ambitious. I have learned that Christmas movies can do one of two things to please me: a) have actors that have decent chemistry and charm and are fully committed to whatever nonsense is going on, or b) have absolutely batshit chaotic plots. This movie is like a 4 out of 5 on the chaos scale and I like it a lot, besides the copaganda. I hope this also gets made into a trilogy and Cole isn’t a cop anymore.

A Christmas Prince 3: The Royal Baby (2019): I will get into my problems with the first two Christmas Prince movies later, but my main criticism is that they are kind of boring and not chaotic enough. This one decided to make up for that by incorporating a missing ancient treaty, a curse, and a ghost, as well as a subplot about Girl Power (I use this semi-ironically) and a subplot about cousin Simon potentially committing treason again. I was so excited that things were happening in this movie the first time I watched it that I may be a little biased, but oh well. Oh, I was also absolutely terrified it was going to be racist and it is...mostly not? There are a few questionable moments but like mostly it’s fine.

Christmas With the Prince (2018): I wanted to watch this because the summary on Netflix did not match the summary on Google at all, and that’s because, uh, they’re both sort of right? Ostensibly this movie is about a pediatric oncologist who comes back into contact with an old almost-flame, who just happens to be the prince of a tiny European country, because he fucked up his leg and needs somewhere private to stay. And apparently a pediatric oncology ward is the best place for that? But then after they fall in love this random Russian lady shows up and is like “that’s my fiance.” This happens maybe twenty minutes from the end. Anyway, this movie isn’t great but I liked the lead guy way more than I thought I would and it has some cute kids in it.

A New York Christmas Wedding (2020): I...am at a loss for words to describe this...motion picture. On the surface it is a cute idea: a young Black woman, Jennifer, is getting married to her boyfriend on Christmas Eve, but she’s given a chance by her guardian angel (stay with me) to go back in time and redo her life, after losing touch with her childhood best friend, Gabrielle, who she was always in love with but never confessed her feelings to. She wakes up in an alternate timeline, where she and Gabrielle have been together for years and her beloved father is still alive. Then the movie, uh...veers off into some very odd places! They go to their Catholic priest and ask him to marry them, and he is like “but the Bible” and they are like “but that’s bullshit” and he’s like “shrug” and then later during a sermon he’s like “actually that IS bullshit, everyone gay in this church come stand up here with me. We love you. Also we’re going to perform a wedding now” and then he marries Jennifer and Gabrielle. And then Jennifer’s angel shows up and is like “you have to choose between this life and your old life now” and then uh...I really hate to spoil this next thing. It is the weirdest choice I’ve ever seen a movie make and if you’re even the slightest bit interested in this movie, I think you should experience this plot point for yourself. I’m going to put the batshit spoiler in ROT13 in case you want to avoid spoiling yourself. (GJ: fhvpvqr) Wraavsre'f thneqvna natry erirnyf gung ur vf gur fba bs Tnoevryyr, jub va gur bevtvany gvzryvar tbg certanag nf n grra naq ure snzvyl frag ure gb n ahaarel. Fur zvfpneevrq naq fhofrdhragyl qvrq ol fhvpvqr. Uvf anzr vf Nmenry Tnovfba. Anyway, uh, this movie isn’t very good, unfortunately, the adult leads have no chemistry and Gabrielle’s adult self is actively unlikable (the teen versions of them are cute!), but I think it’s 1000% worth a watch for the sheer chaos of it all. I...recommend it for that, I guess? Oh, also there’s a sex scene that plays a slow sexy version of “O Christmas Tree” in the background and I felt like I was losing my mind. 

A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding (2018): As I said in my commentary on the third movie in this series, the worst sin this movie commits is being kind of boring. It also manages to make the romantic hero, Richard, even worse than in the first movie, where he was just kind of useless and petulant, because in this movie he is actively failing to do anything to revive the failing economy of his country. I have seen people complain that the prince in The Princess Switch and Cole in The Knight Before Christmas have no personalities; they are delightful compared to the wet paper bag of a man in this movie. Rose McIver is adorable and I don’t think any of this is her fault, she’s doing her best in these movies, but woof.

12 Pups of Christmas (2019): The Google summary of this movie, which we found on Hulu, is this: “Struggling to keep his dog GPS locator company afloat, Martin expects his new hire, Erin, to help him save the company and find homes for 12 puppies that were left behind after a photo shoot. As they work together, Erin and Martin begin to discover each other's positive qualities and find love just in time for the holidays.” My wife and I love dogs, so we put this on, expecting cute dogs. This movie contains approximately 80% chaos and 20% cute dogs. It opens with our heroine, a canine therapist, coming home from work to have dinner with her fiance and best friend. We find out that Erin and fiance are moving to California soon for her new job (they live in New York). Fast forward a few days to their courthouse wedding, at which point her fiance and best friend confess to having an affair, and she is dumped. Heartbroken, she moves to California alone, and ends up moving into the company-provided house. It is just a two-story house (??) that the CEO’s sister owns (???) and rents out to employees (????). Also Erin is, as the Google summary says, expected to come up with some grand idea to save the company. And there are 12 random puppies also. They are cute puppies. Oh, also Martin, the CEO of the dog collar company, hates dogs for some reason. Martin’s sister is aggressively friendly towards Erin in a way that I interpreted as sapphic. At one point, after they find a home for dog #3, Erin’s former BFF shows up on her doorstep (?????) begging to be let in. She insists that the fiance was also two-timing her, and she has proof that he had FIVE OTHER GIRLFRIENDS ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY - “that’s why he’s a traveling businessman”!!!! Erin never asks to see her proof, but I guess she believes her, because she lets her inside and then makes her take care of the remaining eight dogs out of spite. I guess they make up at some point. Anyway, somewhere in here Erin and Martin are starting to fall in love and also come up with a way to rebrand the business, so hooray for them. We also learn that the reason Martin hates dogs is that his beloved childhood dog, uh, ran away? Disappeared? Got eaten? He insists that “not knowing [what happened to him] was the worst part,” but I was out here expecting to see the child finding an actual dead dog like it’s John Wick or something so this was a little anticlimactic. They go on a business trip to New York talk with Important Japanese Investors, during which they fuck (it is? romantic? allegedly?), and then the morning of their meeting Erin’s shitty ex shows up in the hotel lobby to bother her. Martin decks him square in the face for not leaving her alone, and then someone calls the cops, because I guess this movie said ACAB, and both dudes get arrested and Erin has to do the presentation alone. And then in the last five minutes Martin gets out of jail and Erin says that she gave the presentation to the investors...in English, and their translator was twenty minutes late, and so the investors understood none of what she said. Thankfully we are spared actually seeing this “joke,” but they do play racist music over her explanation. Then Martin reconnects with his rich dad who bails out the company instead, and also he adopts the four remaining dogs. This movie was fucking bananas and very bad and I need more people to understand exactly how bad. Watch this movie.

A Nutcracker Christmas (2016): Amy Acker has two Christmas movies and this one seemed more palatable than Dear Santa, so here we are. I like to watch Amy Acker be cute and dance, and she has an adorable teenage niece in this movie that she’s helped raise. In this movie she’s a former ballet dancer whose sister (hilariously, one of the Wynonna Earp lesbians) died in a tragic car accident, and she never got to dance the part of the Sugarplum Fairy. Spoiler alert: she gets to by the end of the movie. Unfortunately the love interest is basically Satan incarnate and does not deserve her at all, so unless you like yelling at romantic leads I can’t really recommend it. 

Godmothered (2020): This movie is just, uh, Enchanted but worse, and also it should have been sapphic and it isn’t? Poor Jillian Bell is doing her best and is adorable, but it’s not enough to save this movie for me. If Disney were not cowards she would have fallen in love with single mom Isla Fisher. Oh, it also ends with the very white younger daughter doing a public cover of “Rise Up” by Andra Day that the audience joins in on, which, considering its use in the BLM movement the last couple years, felt, uh, not great to me.

A Christmas Prince (2017): It’s maybe not far to compare this to the rest of the Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe, because it was the originator. But also, it’s pretty boring. Sorry. Simon, or Fiddles (Fake Hiddles/Tom Hiddleston) is the best character.

Married by Christmas (2016): Apparently an alternate title for this is The Engagement Clause, which is sort of funny. Anyway, this has Jes Macallan and we, being big fans of Legends of Tomorrow, lost our shit when we found this on Christmas Day and had to watch it. The plot is that Jes’ character runs the family business, but their shitty grandma died and left a clause in her will where the business goes to the husband of whichever granddaughter gets married first. You would think that Jes’ sister and her fiance would postpone their Christmas Eve wedding to give Jes time to set up some kind of platonic wedding for business purposes, since Jes’ entire life is this stupid business, but nope, they immediately turn into monsters who are determined to get their hands on the business for ???? reasons???? It’s not very good, as you can tell by how low it is on the list. Jes Macallan is not a convincing straight businesswoman. I wouldn’t even really enjoy this movie as an Avalance AU.

A Princess for Christmas (2011): Here we are, the worst one Christmas movie I watched this year. I don’t actively harbor any ill will towards Katie McGrath, although I confess to feeling a bit “her?” but it’s fine. I was hoping this movie would enlighten me to her appeal. Instead, this movie actively got on my nerves in multiple ways, including trying to pass Katie McGrath off as a normal American retail worker instead of an Irish vampire/sorceress/supervillain/fairy/whatever she is. Her accent is shockingly awful, which I’m not sure is actually her fault, is there a reason her family wasn’t just British? That wouldn’t have saved the movie but it would have made it just slightly more palatable. At every turn it makes the worst choices, including a scene where Katie’s character puts on a rap song and she and the prince dance to it in an attempt to show them “loosening up,” and then the mean grandfather comes in and demands that they “turn this ghetto music off.” YIKES. I know these movies are the whitest movies ever by design but was that racism necessary? The only Black people I actually saw in this movie were some of the servants, I think? Speaking of the servants, at the end of the movie there’s a grand ball and Katie’s dress gets fucked up, and she’s about to leave the country, and then the servants are like “don’t go! We pooled our money to buy you another nice dress!” which, also yikes! This movie has a real classism problem. It also was so boring I zoned out of it multiple times, and I have sat through Manos: The Hands of Fate and Birdemic multiple times. This movie has no chaos whatsoever and I hated all the characters. 0/10 do not recommend under any circumstances.

#christmas #sometimes I write things

[starrynight0612]

OP of the latest Toews post is a PKane lover. You might not know but PKane and Toews are both well known as toxic so definitely don’t support them. Also they’ve been asked to answer for racism before and ignored it. They’re doing this to get brownie points and we shouldn’t buy it.

I am very aware of their friendship. And I’m aware of PK’s past actions and yeah, not a fan of that man. However, I’m going to talk about why I’m not going to hold that against Toews (but why I will hold him accountable moving forward). The main reason being if I write him off I violate my belief that people can genuinely change. I have to have that belief. Why? My goals in life as a result of my major and my experiences is criminal justice reform which I believe starts with reforming prisons to be rehabilitation centers, decriminalizing several laws, and believing criminals are capable of positive change. 

With that though comes the understanding that not everyone will have that journey. There will be some people who never change and repeat the cycle of crime, even if we were to give them every resource available to succeed. So if I believe gang members are capable of change what does it say about me if I believe this 30 something-year-old hockey player can’t?

I’m pretty sure I know which of my followers this is or an idea of a few people who this could be and we interpreted his speech differently. I see this as a person who’s always thought to themselves, “I’m not racist.” But you know it was the blanket antiracist statement the majority of people say because that’s what it means to be a good person. Then just goes on with life like normal not giving it much of a thought and when something does happen thinking people are sensitive because “Racism isn’t really that BIG of a problem. This isn’t pre 1960′s.” 

His statement spoke of someone who genuinely had been going through personal conflict. I was like him. I saw the riots and I about lost it. Like what in the damn hell? PEACEFUL PROTESTS. And God if that isn’t the biggest sign of social conditioning. Civil activism since the start has been glorified as the right way to do it and over the last two days, I’ve watched reactions and realized how even me, an avid BLM supporter, was still getting it wrong. The fact that he said this message was for white people and not black people floored me because how many of us keep addressing the population like it’s a collective whole, “ We need to...We must be..” Eff that. Black people know what’s wrong. They know what needs to change. It’s us white individuals who need to get with the damn program. 

Now Patrick Kane. Here’s where I disagree with a lot of people; stay friends with the racists. When we turn our back on racists we just keep them in their sphere of racism and if we want real change, genuine social change, we gotta stick with them as long as we can (I mean at some point we all realize that the person will never change and then I’m okay with walking away from someone). My mom, my strong Mexican immigrant mom who raised her children to be independent and passionate, and people say is the sweetest woman alive, was homophobic. Mexico is a strong devout Catholic country and so she knew no gay people. Her sister came out as a lesbian. When I tell you my mom and her struggled to maintain a friendship....or the amount of arguments she had with me and my cousins. Worst of all when I realized I like girls too and I’m not going to be able to express that part of myself because of my mom I was filled with so much anger and sadness. Then i was sent to live with my dad in Utah (we lived in New York). I called my mom the day gay marriage was legalized and said, “I know you won’t be happy but this happened and mom I’m overjoyed.” And she was like, “Why wouldn’t I be happy? That’s the best news I hear all day.” Turns out in the two years we lived apart she met countless gay people at her job and she realized she was damn wrong. Even when my sister started questioning her sexuality she had a family call and asked us all to chime in because she knew she was afraid of going about it wrong. And she’s struggling because it became even more real but we’ve had the best conversations about sexuality the last few months and I came out. She accepted me. I told my sister she’s too young to date (she’s 13) but when she’s old enough she isn’t going to be upset if she goes out with a girl and that’s her daughter. 

I could vilify my mom. Tell her she should know better. That she should have been this way all along. But I stuck with her and because of that my sister has a more positive experience coming out story than I do. I’m not telling people to forgive their parents. That’s your own journey to make and you decide what is best for your mental health and well being. My dad still on the whole homophobic front but I’m sticking with the man. Going to keep trying my damn hardest. 

Jonathan Toews is going to have to work with PK for probably the rest of their hockey careers. I’m hoping that Toews can take these last few days and make an actual change in those locker rooms. Let’s tell him to sign petitions to change the name of their hockey team since he brought up Native American’s in his speech. Tell him to hold PK accountable. Let’s use this moment to answer his question of “what can I do for you?” 

And if he does shit. If this is the extent of how far he goes. Well, I’ll be right there with you turning my back on the man. For right now though I’m holding out hope because I have to believe that these protests are going to actually change things. I believe they can. I’m already seeing so many of my white friends who usually stay quiet actually give a shit for once and speak up. If you don’t find value in what I’ve said and disagree completely then I give you two choices: unfollow me or engage in conversation with me. I hope you choose the second one. 

#jonathan toews #patrick kane #black lives matters #gay pride #bisexuality pride #let's have real converstaions #hold people accountable #hockey #nhl #chicago blackhawks

[juliabohemian]

backhanded compliments & the art of commenting on other people’s creative content without being a complete twat waffle

WARNING: This is a long post.

I'm a word person. That's probably why, when I do find myself becoming irritated by someone else's unsolicited critique, it is almost always due to their choice of words. Words are important and very powerful. Words have different meaning to different people. Which is why we need to take care when choosing them.

Now, whenever possible, I will click on the profile of the person who left the unsolicited critique and try to get a feel for what type of person they are. Just so I can better understand why they might have left the comment in question. If it is clear they are not a native English speaker, I stop right there. Learning a foreign language is hard. English is one of the most ridiculous languages on the planet. So, mastering its nuances is a challenge for someone who may not have grown up using it. I’m sure I have offended at least one person with my Spanish, at some point. I’m working on it.

BACKHANDED COMPLIMENTS

When I say choice of words, I am implying almost exclusively to something known as a backhanded compliment. A backhanded compliment is a statement that seems, on the surface, to be positive, but is actually an insult. If you are not familiar with the backhanded compliment, I direct you to the mom from American Beauty who says to her teenage daughter "Honey, I'm so proud of you. I watched you very closely, and you didn't screw up once!"

There are a lot of reasons why people make such comments. It would be reductive to suggest they are all suffering from some form of insecurity, although many of them probably are. Some may genuinely believe that they are being helpful. Others may be jealous of the attention another person is receiving and want to either sabotage them or find a way to get in on the action. 

However, it is most likely that the type of person to give a backhanded compliment is either very young, very sheltered or very privileged. And thus, they may not realize that their opinion about something may not carry the same weight on the internet as it does in other venues. Or they may not realize that the world is filled with people who are more informed and more experienced than they are. They mistake their opinion for objective analysis and therefore, offer it freely and without hesitation.

Now, I would like to state that if you see something and you REALLY think it is problematic, you should absolutely offer your critique. Note: if you dislike or disagree with something, that does not make it problematic. Anything that promotes the maltreatment or marginalization of any living thing is problematic. Even so, you should stop and ask yourself whether your critique will accomplish anything or if it would be more worthwhile to simply report the post in question and move on.

That being said, here is MY analysis of some of the backhanded compliments I have received over the years (amalgamated for brevity), and a guide to leaving more constructive/supportive comments for the content creators in your life.

ARTWORK (including photography)

“Definitely not my style, but beautiful.” Do we need to know that it's not your style? If you think it's beautiful, just say that.

“This is so great, but it would have been better if you had used yellow instead of red!” Color choice is a creative choice and its value cannot be objectively measured. Just say it’s great and move on.

“Wow, this is way better than your old stuff.” Do I need to explain why this is bad? I hope not.

“Wow, you're really improving.” Slightly better than the previous one, but still bad. This is a really good example of something that might even feel like a compliment, but actually isn't. Saying that someone is improving is basically saying that it needed to improve. 

Unless you are speaking to your own student or a child, or a really close friend or family member who has openly shared with you their desire to improve as an artist, this is completely unnecessary.

It's important to remember that not everyone is doing things with the same objectives as you. Not every artist or photographer is aiming for technical mastery. If an artist creates something that is very personal and feels pleased with it, the last thing they want is for someone else to come along and tell them what’s “wrong” with it.

Really ANY comment that suggests that the piece of artwork in question would be improved if it were altered in some way is a no no. Unless you are an art teacher or someone has specifically asked for you to give them this information, or you are paying someone to make something especially for you.

FANFICTION (or really writing in general)

“Oh man...I was so excited when I saw your story summary, until I saw the pairing.” Do not comment on a story just to tell the author that you don't like their pairing. Ever. If you accidentally click on a story without seeing the pairing and you are disappointed, your feelings are valid. But there’s no need to let the author know.

"This was good but I don't think (character) would say (quoted dialogue)." Then, you should go and write a story with that character, but where they say different things.

"I noticed you used a semi-colon in the third paragraph. Semicolons are actually supposed to...." Critique grammar, punctuation, spelling and writing mechanics ONLY if you are the author's editor, the author's teacher, or if the author requested it. Period.

If you are commenting to point out what you believe to be a factual error, stop and ask yourself...is this really an error? Is the error intentional? Does the error represent the views of the author or the views of a specific character in a fictional work? Does this story have a reliable narrator? If not, might that narrator be misinformed or biased? And the most important question to ask yourself before correcting an author...do I actually know what the fuck I'm talking about?

Once, in a story, I referenced Copernicus and mentioned that he was imprisoned by the Catholic church. Which we know that he was. Someone commented to leave a long, bullet pointed explanation for how this is a common misconception and that the Catholic Church never mistreated Copernicus, along with many links to articles and videos as evidence. Guess who made all the articles and videos? The Catholic Church. SKIP!

When commenting on a fictional work, consider letting the author know how the story is making you feel. Speculate about what you think might happen next. Express excitement and anticipation. Ask a question for clarification about what you just read. And you can never go wrong by simply thanking the author for taking the time to provide you with free entertainment.

MEMES & JOKES

I love to make people laugh. I have been making people laugh since I learned to talk. This was actually bourne out of an inability to interpret facial expressions. I couldn't tell when people were angry or annoyed. But when they were laughing, I knew exactly how they felt.

That being said, people on the internet LOVE to tell me when something isn't funny. The only problem with this is that humor is very subjective and often very esoteric. I have made memes that I knew were esoteric and knew that not everyone would understand them. I have memes just for birdwatchers. Hell, I have made memes just for a dozen people who participated in a specific academic discussion. But it amazes me how people who don't get a joke are often most compelled to comment and let me know that it isn't funny. How can you know if you don't understand it? Is it so hard to imagine that things exist for which you are not the intended audience?

It's perfectly okay to comment and say you don't understand, and ask for an explanation. But if you look at something and think "I don't understand this, therefore it lacks value" you may have some growing up to do.

Before reblogging someone else's joke to add to the joke, stop and ask yourself whether your intention is to correct or improve upon the joke, or if you are attempting to laugh along WITH the OP.

We've all done this, I'm sure. I know I have. But it really inconsiderate to hijack someone's meme, meta or artwork with a completely unrelated discussion. I can't tell you how annoying it is to post something and check my inbox days later, only to find pages of notifications of people reblogging my shit over and over as part of some completely unrelated discussion.

Once again, if you're commenting to point out a factual error, ask yourself whether the error was intentional. I recently made a meme about the Star Trek films in which Data uses contractions. All of his dialogue is ridiculously out of character, in fact. Which is kind of part of the joke. But someone felt the need to reblog AND comment to let me know that Data wouldn't say that because he doesn't use contractions. Which I already know. Because, well, I’ve been a ST:TNG fan since the day it first aired on TV. I don't even know what to do with a comment that, to be honest. I kind of feel sorry for the other person for not grasping the joke.

So, how DO you compliment someone whose work you enjoy? Imagine yourself speaking to them in person. Imagine that they are emotionally invested in whatever they have created. Consider your objective. Are you expressing appreciation? Or is there something else going on.

And avoid qualifiers. 

When a compliment includes words like "if" or "but" then it's probably not a compliment. You would be so pretty IF you lost some weight is not a compliment.

Choose words that are unlikely to be misinterpreted. 

If someone's art or writing IS improving and you really want them to know, a good way to do that is to use the word evolving. Wow, I really like the way your art is evolving. This works because it implies that the art is changing over time, as the individual grows as a person.

I know what some of you might be thinking...ugh...it's like you can't say ANYTHING anymore! Aww...boo hoo, fam. As a person on the spectrum, I’ve spent my entire life dancing around other people’s feelings, navigating neurotypical subtext and struggling to say things without offending anyone. This is a cake walk compared to that. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if actually thinking about how other people feel BEFORE you share your opinion would require a great deal of effort on your part, it's possible that you're just an asshole.

TL;DR

Creators of original content are actual human beings with feelings. Don’t offer them unsolicited advice or criticism. Think before you comment.

#I know this is long and no one is putting a gun to your head and making you read it #these are just my views #backhanded compliments #unsolicited opinions #unsolicited advice #how to comment without being an asshole #theory of mind #unwanted critique #critiquing #commenting on fanfic #fanfic comments #I have autism if I can be tactful then so can you

[kayincolwyn]

Trying To Find My Way In This Weird And Wild World

So it's been over a year and a month now since I've written a post for my blog... or my blarg, or my bleh, or whatever this is that maybe only a handful of people will ever read, and that I mostly just write for myself to get things out and try to process them. I guess you could say I’ve been putting it off for different reasons until now, and sure, I've had some ideas on what to write, and have had a lot that I've wanted to say, but, well...

Maybe I could explain it like this: I was listening to this guy on Youtube recently who was wondering if anything he had to say had any real weight, if he really had any right to say whatever he had to say, and he said something about how your words and ideas and beliefs may not have much value if they can't create real change, whether in your own life or in the lives of others. Or the proof is in the pudding as they say. I can relate to those reservations about what I have to say, here or anywhere else really, and I wonder how much real change my words or ideas or beliefs create, if any, and I guess that's part of why I've been putting this off, and is it even worth it to try to say something, when my words may have only very little, if any, power behind them? I've written a few things here and there over the last year, the occasional poem or reflection, mostly shared on my Facebook page, and I’ve wondered about those things too, if there was any real weight or value to them, beyond a few likes or a couple comments of affirmation from a friend or two about my writing.

And looking back on some of my older writings, like when I was in my teens or twenties, or even looking back on more recent writings, I sometimes barely recognize myself, the way that I thought and felt at the time, and there are times where I feel as though I come off in those writings as, well, kind of pretentious, or even arrogant (and especially further back), as though I am saying in them that I know and understand more about life than I actually do, which has been, and I have little doubt continues to be, not very much, or at least not with any real degree of certainty. The truth is I mostly use my words in writings like this not so much to speak truth (and how much truth do I really know for sure anyway, except the truth that I don’t know everything?) so much as to try to reach for the truth, to make sense of things, to try to hammer down the fluttering pieces of the puzzle of life, or at least of my life, to at least give me enough of a foundation to keep me from imploding or going crazy. I write partly for my own sanity. And I believe many of my words in writings like this are built on fragile hope more than solid confidence, meaning I am trying to point them in the direction that I want to move in, but that doesn't mean my actions always follow (if they follow much at all), or that I really live up to the vision of a path in life that I sometimes think about and talk about or try to lay out in writings like this. I may try to live up to it in fits and starts, but know that I fall short, and probably always will as long as I live.

I write about love for example, but love, at least for me, more often feels like some grand concept bouncing around in my head than something that I actually practice, or practice well anyway, that I genuinely manifest in my day to day life in the way that I wish to. It's like I can talk the talk with more confidence than I can walk the walk. The love that I show and give to others seems to be at best awkward, limited,  half-hearted, and more often than not selective (directed mostly towards those that I like but not much at all towards those that I don't like). Again, I fall short, struggling to practice what I preach. Because of this, this disconnect between what I try to express in my writing on the one hand, and then my everyday life on the other, sometimes I feel pretty disingenuous and fake. That said, even if I am at least in some part disingenuous and fake (and maybe all of us are more or less, as that may just be part of being human), I still feel like there is at least some part of me that is genuine and real, some spark within me that is reaching for something more.

I remember reading that the Catholic saint and theologian Thomas Aquinas once said, presumably after having some profound mystical experience, something like "I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw.” After this, from what I understand, he held to that statement for the rest of his life and didn’t write anything else, or at least nothing with any seriousness. I'm not a Catholic so may not be able to relate to the context of his experience, whatever it was, but I can relate to the sense maybe that there is something more that would make all your words, and no matter how eloquent or heartfelt, like straw.  And I wonder if in embracing that something more, or being embraced by it, there would then be no more motivation to write, no more need to use my words to try to reach for the truth, or to try to make sense of things, or hammer them into some shape I can recognize as meaningful.  Maybe it would be something like what Saint Paul says in 1st Corinthians 13 in the New Testament:  ‘For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.’ If I could come face to face with such a truth, or a Truth with a capital T, and know it or be known by it, then maybe there would be no more words for me, or no need of them anyway... and maybe then I could truly be at peace, down to the core, balls to bones (as the Oracle would put it in The Matrix). That said, while maybe there have been moments in my life where I’ve glimpsed images or have heard whispers of that something more, that truth, I'm still left searching and reaching for it... And so I continue to write, or try to, words being what I have to work with here, and even if my words may only be like straw in the final analysis.

So for now, well, here's some more straw for you...

So I've had a lot on my mind over the last year, have had a lot of ups and downs. There have been times over the last year that were painful, and other times that were joyful, times where life felt meaningful and other times meaningless, and everywhere in between, as has been true of every other year of my life, but of course I can't, nor would I really want to, try to chronicle or reflect all that has happened or has been on my mind, but I can at least touch on some highlights, or try to grasp a few of the fluttering pieces of the puzzle and lay a foundation as best I can.

At 37 now and coming up on 40 in a few years I find myself wondering more and more about the direction of my life, about who I am and what my place in this weird and wild world is, what my path, my way, is or should be. I guess I’ll try to write about some of what’s happened, some of whats been on my mind, and try to give some idea of what my wondering looks like, so from here on I'm gonna jump around, between the highlights and fluttering pieces, though I will try to tie it all together in the end as best I can.

So, I guess I’ll kick things off by diving into some stormy waters right off the bat, by going into one of the things that has got me thinking more about my life over the last year, that being my discovery of Jordan Peterson. For those who haven't heard of him or don't know much about him he's a pretty controversial and divisive figure at least in some circles, mostly among those on the far left or the far right of the political spectrum from what I can tell. I admit I haven't really opened up much on social media about my interest in Peterson and his work for this reason, as I've been kind of afraid I might be jumped on for it by those who disapprove of him for whatever reasons, but then here I am I guess. I had run across some warnings about Peterson online before looking into him myself, and had some negative assumptions about him for a little while, but then I have learned from some experience, like I did with Harry Potter or Rob Bell back when I was in church for example, that if a lot of people talk about how dangerous something or someone is, about how you shouldn't read this book or listen to that person or whatever, then it's more likely than not worth checking out for yourself so you can make up your own mind about it rather than letting others decide for you what to think. I was still a bit hesitant, but fortunately a friend of mine coaxed me into finally checking out Peterson for myself by sharing one of his interviews on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast with me, and I was intrigued and impressed by much of what Peterson had to say in the interview, so my interest in Peterson and his perspective went from there.

The reason most of those who don’t like Peterson don’t like him is because of some of his political or social views I think, which is the reason why he really came into the public eye in the first place. Just to try to get some of the controversy out of the way and swim through some of these stormy waters, Peterson was a professor and psychologist in Canada who first really came to prominence when he spoke out publicly against this human rights bill in Canada called Bill C16 that, part of which, from what I understand, would legally require the use of certain gender pronouns for people who are transgender or non-binary or others who fall outside the typical dual identifiers of male or female. From what I can tell, getting a clearer picture of the kind of man Peterson is over the last year, I don't think Peterson protested this bill because he is just some bigot who doesn't care at all for transgender or non-binary people, but rather because it really bothered him that his government would try to pass any law that required the use of any kind of speech, not only telling people what they shouldn't say but what they should say. In short, from what I can gather this was more about free speech for him than anything else, or at least that’s his claim anyway, which some may disagree with. Of course the whole thing is no doubt more complicated than the little that I have written about here, and I am sure there is still much debate about all of this, whether on the bill itself or Peterson's take on it and his protest of it, but this is my understanding of the basics of it at least.

Peterson does seem, having listened to him a fair bit, to have mixed feelings about the whole transgender and non-binary thing. I don’t believe he would want to give the time of day to anyone who was transgender or non-binary if they accosted him on the street and started screaming and yelling at him, calling him names or throwing accusations at him (which I’ve seen in a few videos), as that doesn’t generally inspire empathy or understanding from anyone, but I do believe if anyone transgender or non-binary tried to connect with him one on one just as a human being to share their story he would more likely than not be willing to listen and I think would try to empathize and understand, as he honestly strikes me as a fairly empathetic and understanding kind of guy (even if he does have a bit of a temper, which he himself admits) someone who cares about the struggle and pain of others, and I believe that would include people who identify as transgender or non-binary. I mean, heck, the guy is a trained therapist after all, so you would think he would be willing to listen as long as you weren’t putting him on the defensive. That said, I think he has questions or concerns about it, and like many people is trying to understand in what ways society should (or shouldn't) shift in order to accommodate those who don't identify in ways that are different from what most are used to or consider the norm. I admit to having mixed feelings myself about this, though partly, I admit, because I don't know or understand much about it, though I would be open to learning more. I admit I have some reservations about things like children transitioning (because I worry that children may not yet be mature enough to make these kinds of decisions, and that they may regret making such decisions later on because they weren’t as fully informed as they would have been as adults) as well as transgender women playing in women's sports, or transgender men playing in men's sports for that matter (because I believe in those cases there is an unfair physical advantage or disadvantage because not everything can be completely changed biologically in a transition, including things like muscle mass and bone structure, at least from what I understand), just as a couple examples. My heart tells me to live and let live and that it’s really none of my business, which is mostly how I feel about it, but my head sometimes wonders if going about these kinds of changes in society without thinking them through may end up having some unforeseen consequences. Of course I'm not above setting aside such reservations if others could convince me to do so, and by that I mean by making convincing arguments to support such things that make sense to me, rather than trying to shame or bully me into changing my mind, which some may be want to do, but trust me I’ve had enough experience with that kind of thing in my life, red flags go up all over the place when people try that with me, whether it’s in the realm of politics or religion or any other realm... let’s just say when I encounter people who are dogmatic and ‘my way or the highway’ in their thinking and want to evangelize and convert me to their position, well, I’ve learned to just walk away... not sure if that will keep people who disagree with me from just stopping here and passing judgment (even though from here I talk about empathy and understanding for transgender and non-binary people among many other things) and then going after me with torches and pitchforks, but hey, at least I’ve tried... and this, by the way, applies to everything else that I may write here that you may disagree with. Friendly or at least civil discussion about difficult topics is good and constructive in my opinion, but rage or personal attacks or a dogmatic insistence that I conform or else be put into your out-group (as I have experienced to some extent with), well, not so much. Anyways, despite those reservations I want to be empathetic and understanding  towards transgender or non-binary people, as I don't really know what it is like to be in their shoes or what they go through. Sure I can use my imagination some, i.e. watching shows like Sense 8 (great show, still bummed it was canceled) or even Supergirl (as cheesy as it is) that include transgender characters and some of their struggles, gives me some inkling of what it might feel like, but I honestly don't really know. I admit I've only interacted (or at least knowingly interacted) with one transgender or non-binary person, a co-worker of mine who was born male and now identifies as female. I call her her, and am okay with doing that, but it takes some getting used to I admit. I was a little uncomfortable around her at first, as it felt weird for me, and I still do to some extent I admit, but then having worked with her a little bit more recently, I can see that she's not a threat to me in any way and there's no reason to be afraid of her, and she's just another human being like me, who deserves a little respect and wants a little love and acceptance just like anyone else. Sure, like Peterson I would feel uncomfortable with being legally forced to use certain pronouns (in the same way I would feel uncomfortable if I was legally forced to salute the US flag, just for example), but that doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to it if it was something I could choose to do freely. Like Peterson (and many others) I’m not really a fan of thought police (which I have seen in religious circles and political circles and all kinds of circles), but I am open to changing how I think and feel for the sake of others and if it makes sense to both my head and my heart. I imagine that just as I used to be a little uncomfortable with gay people but have since learned to be more comfortable with them in spite of our differences, and now even have a couple of gay friends, in time I believe the same will be true of transgender and non-binary people or anyone else in those categories, who at the end of the day are just fellow humans. I just need some time to adapt and get used to it I think, and hopefully all of us will be able to adapt and figure this out (adding this to the excruciatingly long list of things that humanity needs to figure out), as it would be good to live in a world that is a little more inclusive and accepting of those who are different, and even if we may need time to figure out all the particulars and where to draw the lines and what the boundaries should be and all of that, which of course is complicated just as people are complicated. Bottom line is I think there should be some room for questions and concerns about this whole issue but it should always be in the context of trying to be more empathetic and understanding, because we're all human beings at the end of the day.

I won't go any further into this though as I'm not here to talk about the whole transgender and non-binary debate (though apparently I’m talking about it a bit, but hopefully not in a way that will get me crucified by those who disagree with my mixed feelings about it), which is very complicated and multi-faceted and has a lot of strong feelings about it on all sides, but I just wanted to at least touch on Peterson's stance (at least as I far as I understand it) about it as it was what brought him into the limelight originally, and my stance as well, at least to try to get it out of the way before I go any further.

Peterson strikes me as a bit right of center in some ways (although he identifies as a classical liberal), open-minded in some areas but a little old-fashioned and traditional in other areas, whereas I think of myself as a bit left of center I guess. Peterson talks about the value and place of both the left and the right politically and socially fairly often, like when he points out that those on the right are there to maintain structures and boundaries and keep things running (he also adds that conservatives tend to be better managers) but that those on the left are there to update structures or boundaries or push for change as it is necessary (he also adds that liberals tend to be better entrepreneurs), and there needs to be a dialogue between the two sides on when things should be kept the same or when they should change, and how.  That said, maybe Peterson at times seems to contradict this way of thinking when he focuses a little more on the problems of the left and doesn't focus quite as much on the problems of the right, which may be a sign of some biases towards the right on his part, even if at other times he seems to be trying to find that balance between the two. To be fair if he’s not completely consistent then neither am I, and it’s probably fair to say that not many of us are. Anyways, Peterson's tends to equate the far left, and things like identity politics and postmodernism, with communist or Marxist ideology, and I admit he does come off as a little paranoid at times when it comes to that, sometimes going on rants about communists and Marxists in a new disguise on college campuses and branching out from there into society. I can somewhat understand why he might feel as he does though when he immersed himself heavily for years in studying totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, including communist regimes like those in the Soviet Union and China, wanting to understand them on a psychological level. He sees equal horror in the history of both Nazism (more equated with the right) and communism (more equated with the left) in the 20th century, but perhaps he focuses on the threat of communism more because he feels that people don't talk about it as much as the threat of Nazism nowadays? Maybe, but I don’t know for sure. I recently saw a little note plastered on the inside door of an elevator in one of the buildings that I clean in downtown Portland that said ‘Fuck Nazis’ among other things, which is a message I would concur with, as I’m no fan of Nazis either, even if I’m not really sure how helpful such notes would be in dealing with the problem of Nazism. I wonder though if I will ever find any ‘Fuck Commies’ notes plastered in elevators in downtown Portland, if there are those who feel communism is just as much of a threat. I think I might have even seen a protester flying the hammer and sickle flag when I was going past on the max train the other day, which I found a bit weird to say the least. I wonder sometimes when listening to Peterson’s concerns if there really is as much concern about communism as there is about Nazism, even though both have had horrific and bloody histories that involved the suffering and death of millions.  I mean, isn’t there just as much of a dark history of violence and death behind the hammer and sickle as there is behind the swastika? To be fair though, maybe some on the right aren’t as concerned about Nazism as they should be, just as maybe some on the left aren’t as concerned about communism as they should be, as it’s much easier to focus on the potential craziness on the other side rather than the potential craziness on your own. Anyways, maybe when you immerse yourself in that kind of dark history it's no wonder you might come out feeling a little paranoid and would worry that history might repeat itself. Maybe a little too paranoid? Sure, you can always be too paranoid, like Joseph McCarthy Red Scare witch hunt kind of paranoid, in which case you might need an Edward R Murrow to come along and knock some sense into you, but then maybe a little paranoia is understandable or even healthy. That said, while I'm not really a big fan of identity politics (or political correctness as some would call it) myself and have mixed feelings about the deconstructive nature of postmodernism (I’m all for questioning things and for holding them to the fire but not so much a fan of completely pulling the rug out from under yourself so you have nowhere left to stand or of leaving yourself with nothing to hold onto), still I’m not sure about Peterson’s equating all of that with communism/Marxism, maybe a little paranoia is okay but not too much... though all in all this is really lower on the list of topics that Peterson goes into as far as my level of interest or even agreement goes, so I’ll just leave it at that. Peterson sometimes points out that people are complex, but also says that people can be beholden to their ideologies (their ideas and beliefs), and says that ideologies can have people rather than people having them (he references psychoanalyst Carl Jung on this point), and I would agree on both points, but would add that those who are beholden to their ideologies always have more to them than whatever ideology they may ascribe to, and there’s a spectrum to how beholden people can be to their ideas or what they believe in, and whether that be in the realm of politics or of religion or in any other realm, and of course people can change and can learn and grow, and they need to be given room to do that. I know I’ve certainly changed and learned and grown in different ways over the years.

I have known people from all walks of life, the religious and the non religious, liberals and conservatives, and everyone in between, and while there have been a few who were too radical and extreme in their ideas or beliefs for my taste, most people that I’ve known seemed to be more or less sane and reasonable, more or less decent people trying to live their lives as best they can while not having a 'my way or the highway' attitude towards others, not wanting to evangelize and convert others to their position but just wanting to get along as best they can and agree to disagree agreeably. Anyways, my guess is that Peterson would agree to this assessment, as I have often heard him encouraging nuance and dialogue between people of all kinds, though perhaps there are times when he falls into the trap of focusing too much on those who are a little radical and extreme, who are the minority, if the loudest voices in the room, and not as much on those who are more sane and reasonable, who are the majority, if a comparatively quiet majority ... But then again perhaps all of us sometimes fall into the trap of focusing too much on the loudest voices in the room, and not as much on the quiet majority of everyday people who can have meaningful conversations even in spite of their differences.

Anyways, for a little more context to all of this, and to focus in on another part of my journey over the last year, one of the things that led me to become interested in Peterson and his philosophy was watching a documentary called The Red Pill, which was made by Cassie Jaye, who once identified (but no longer identifies) as a feminist. I first heard about the film when a friend on Facebook shared this video of Cassie’s TED Talk called Meeting The Enemy, and I found the video to be pretty powerful and appreciated Cassie and her empathetic attitude, so I wanted to check out her film. In the film she explores the men's rights movement, a movement claiming to fight for the rights of men (much as feminism is a movement that claims to fight for the rights of women), initially planning on showing how misogynistic and absolutely nutters these men (and those women who ally themselves with them) are when she began making the film, but overtime found that some of what they had to say was thought-provoking and compelling and so she began to gradually change her mind about the movement and her own feminist ideas and beliefs, even to the point of no longer labeling herself as a feminist by the end of the film, though not taking up the label of men's right activist either, but instead letting go of such labels and simply wanting to care for the struggles of both men and women equally and encourage more empathy between men and women.

Much like Peterson, Cassie Jaye's film has been controversial and divisive, and while I felt the film was itself thought-provoking and compelling in some ways, thinking on it now I would say it wasn't a perfect film. For example maybe Cassie didn't look at the darker and more negative side of the men's rights movement as much as she could have, though in her defense, perhaps her goal in the end was to try to look at the other side of the movement in order to give a more balanced view, as the media generally only focuses on the darker and more negative side of things when it comes to this. I think the film’s limitations though may be mostly due to the fact that such broad and complicated issues as gender relations and gender rights, and more generally human relations and human rights, can't really be covered to the fullest extent in a two hour documentary. That said, I think Cassie's main underlying message in the film was that men deserve empathy as much as women do, because men are human beings as much as women are, and seeing men as less important or worthy of empathy is no better than seeing women as less important or worthy of empathy, and if we all really want to move forward and end the ongoing battle of the sexes then we need to learn to have empathy for one another, and I appreciated that message, both as a man and as a human being.

I admit though after watching this film I fell into the men's right activist mindset for a little awhile, losing some focus on that central message, and while I didn't dive in completely I definitely put my feet in the water, whether through listening to men's rights podcasts or watching men's rights videos on Youtube or reading men's rights articles online here and there, and for awhile I was very antagonistic to feminism, even arguing with some of my more feminist friends, seeing feminism not so much as a pursuit of equality between the sexes as it claimed to be but rather as a destructive ideology that sought to, whether consciously or subconsciously, divide men and women rather than bring them together. But after a little awhile I pulled myself back from that mindset, recognizing that men's rights activists, while having some valid points about men's issues, can sometimes be self-righteous and overly critical of women but not critical enough of men, just as I felt (and still feel) that feminists, while having some valid points about women's issues, can sometimes be self-righteous and overly critical of men but not critical enough of women. I think there are some radical and extreme people in both movements but also think there are a fair number of sane and reasonable people in both movements as well, and I hope the latter, those who care about the other side as much as their own side, get the microphone more in the long run. I believe now that neither movement really has a complete picture of the shape of things, and wonder why sometimes they don't just team up to try to hash things out and balance eachother out, try to find ways to move society forward for both men and women without demonizing one another or trying to one up one another's suffering, as though suffering were a contest, and who wants to win a contest like that anyway? It’s like when my sister and I would argue as kids about who had it harder or got bullied more in school when the truth was school kind of sucked for both of us, even if it sucked differently for both of us. Again, not a contest you want to win anyway. Do men have it harder than women? Do women have it harder than men? Yes and yes? Maybe it just depends on the situation and circumstance, or maybe it comes down to the level of the individual, but then all I really know for sure is that being human is hard for pretty much all of us in one way or another, so why not just try to empathize with one another as best we can instead of arguing about who has it worse? Easier said than done I know, but I suppose we could at least try.

I guess much like Cassie I have settled with neither identifying with feminism nor with men's rights activism, feeling that both feminists and men's rights activists have their valid points but also their blind spots, and feeling that both women and men have their problems and struggles, and also feeling that both deserve some measure of respect and empathy.

I've followed Cassie Jaye a little bit since watching her film, and I still admire her empathetic attitude, and her bravery in making a film that I'm sure she knew would ruffle some feathers (and it did), and she continues to be brave through sharing some of her own personal journey including some of her struggles on her online blog and elsewhere, even opening up about the turmoil and grief of having had two miscarriages in the last couple of years, which led her to abandon plans of doing a documentary on postmodernism (which would have included Peterson himself) and instead is considering doing a documentary about miscarriage, a difficult topic that is rarely discussed openly in society, and I hope she does as I imagine it would speak to a lot of women out there (as well as their partners) who have suffered through miscarriages. Reading about her own personal, and painful, experience with her miscarriages was a reminder to me that women struggle with things that men don't (or at least don't as much or in the same way), and are deserving of empathy, just as her film was trying to point out that men struggle with things that women don't (or at least don't as much or in the same way), and are deserving of empathy.

I admit for sometime after watching The Red Pill and diving into the insane world of gender politics, I was planning on doing a blog post where I would try my best to tackle gender relations and being a man (with the tentative title of Measure Of A Man) as I had tried to tackle race relations and being a white man in my post White Man about a year ago. I even began writing a couple of rough drafts, but then the more I dug into things the more complicated and hard to unravel it became, and I just didn't feel confident enough to really dive into the whole thing (and I didn't really feel confident enough to dive into the issue of race either in White Man, to be honest, but then I I tried my best I suppose, though I'm sure I only scratched the surface on that issue, and I may even go back at some point and try to revise it some as since then my views on race have shifted a bit, though they are mostly the same as when I wrote that).

I suppose going down the rabbit hole somewhat on this post (which is appropriate as Cassie used that metaphor, of being like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, in her film) by touching on the whole transgender and non-binary debate (though I definitely only scratched the surface on that) and bringing up Cassie Jaye's documentary and touching on gender issues, will have to suffice for that, and as with Cassie the main message I want to put forward here is one of empathy and understanding, and on all sides, and as hard as that may be, as hard as it may be to back up these words with actions, because I believe that's how we will all move forward...

If this was just a post about gender relations and being a man as I had originally intended it to be, I could have talked about Peterson and his effect on many men throughout the world, and that would certainly fit. A lot of young men around the world, and men of all ages really, look up to Peterson, some seeing him as a kind of father figure, and I can kind of understand that appeal even if I may see him in a more complicated and nuanced way myself. I will say that Peterson’s core message of the importance of the individual and finding meaning through responsibility resonates with me a fair bit. I agree with him that the individual rather than the group is the level to really look at as it is really our individual choices that make or break our society (though to be fair some individual choices may impact society more than others, depending on the power and influence of the individual), and we shouldn't only focus on rights but also on responsibilities, because your rights are my responsibilities and vice versa.  And I agree that there is something about individual responsibility, whether that is in the realm of relationships or work or creativity or spirituality or pursuing some other passion or cause (or picking up a cross and carrying it as Peterson would put it, referencing Jesus) that can give you a sense of meaning and purpose that you otherwise may not have. In other words, while carrying too heavy of a load can crush you, and carrying too little of a load can make you feel aimless, carrying a load that is the right size for you can help make you into who you are meant to be. Not that I have found a way to apply that to my life as much as I would like, but at least it rings true to me. Of course that doesn't mean that groups don't matter, as we are all interconnected more than we can imagine, or that rights aren't important at all, as Peterson points out that rights give us room to exercise our responsibilities, but I wonder if Peterson sometimes doesn't focus enough on how that interconnectedness can positively or negatively effect our individual choices, or on how the system can hold people back from moving forward, from being who they could be, because sometimes no matter how hard you may try you can still be held back not so much by yourself but by your environment or your culture. That said I would agree that the level of the individual is the most important one because that is what you need to build up from, the seed blossoming into a tree, so responsibility shouldn't be forgotten or set aside, that and sometimes it isn't so much environment or culture that is holding you back as it is yourself. But of course the makeup of our lives is no doubt always some combination of both of these things, it is some combination of our own choices as individuals, and the choices of others around us and how they may complement or conflict with our choices, and the limits of nature both internally and externally which effect us all.

But beyond his message of the importance of the individual and of responsibility and how we can find meaning in it, I resonate with Peterson most of all when he he seems to be reaching for that something more, that deeper truth, which I was talking about (or trying to talk about) earlier in this post. I may only go along halfway with Peterson on his political and social views, which he admittedly does get a bit ranty on at times (though many of us do, including myself, so maybe we don’t have much room to judge), and I don't agree with him on everything in that area or any other area, but when he delves into the territory of psychology and philosophy (which he says he is more interested in anyway, and so am I) and religion and spirituality I find more common ground with him, and also find what I appreciate most about him. Peterson is something of an existentialist thinker (he is especially fond of existentialist Christian thinkers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn) and is fond of Carl Jung and Jungian theory as well as well as other psychologists, like Freud and Carl Rogers among others, and believes in evolution and evolutionary biology, so he often speaks of religion and spirituality in those frameworks and contexts, but I can resonate with much of that, as both a former atheist and a former evangelical Christian who is trying to find his way.

I watched a recent interview with Patricia Marcoccia (on the Youtube channel Rebel Wisdom), director of the documentary The Rise Of Jordan Peterson, and she said she initially became interested in him for much the same reasons even before he was really in the public eye, and she like myself describes herself as left of center and has mixed feelings about his political and social views, so I guess I'm not the only one. As the saying goes, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and in the case of Peterson I honestly feel that there's a baby in all the bathwater of controversy and drama that surrounds him.

Over the last year or so I have listened to (mainly via podcast while working) probably hundreds of interviews with and lectures from Peterson, as well as reading his book 12 Rules For Life, and while there's a lot of his stuff that I haven't gone through yet (like there's a lot more interviews and lectures of his on Youtube that I haven't listened to yet and I haven't gotten hold of his harder to find first book, Maps Of Meaning) I feel like I have gotten a pretty good idea of the kind of man Peterson is and how he thinks and feels, at least from hearing what he has to say.

I believe Peterson is, like anyone else, just a human being with faults and flaws, who has his weaknesses and blind spots and can make mistakes and get things wrong like anyone else, but there are times in his interviews or lectures when you can see (or hear if you are listening in a podcast as I often do) him reaching, trying to gather the fluttering pieces of the puzzle and build a foundation, and you can see or hear the emotion well up in him when he is trying to find words for something that words maybe can’t quite describe, something that would make your words seem like straw.

Peterson describes himself as a pessimist for the most part, and he says that life is in large part suffering tainted by malevolence, but he also says that underneath that pessimism is a faith in humanity, a faith in that divine spark within us that enables us to overcome and persevere in some amazing ways, and he has a faith in the power of love, which he describes as the sense that life truly matters and is worth living in spite of all the suffering and evil in the world, and as a desire that things would be the best that they can be, that things would be truly good, for you and for others and for the world, and individual responsibility is in part acting on that sense and that desire in whatever way you can to bring that vision into reality (or at least in my case to connect what I write more with my day to day life). At bottom I think Peterson believes, as he tries to say this himself when he is reaching for words to describe it, that the darkness in the world and in ourselves is powerful, very powerful, so powerful that he feels it unwise to deny its power and not talk about it openly, but even so the light in the world and in ourselves is even more powerful, and in the end is greater than whatever darkness there may be... and I can resonate with that belief.

And I believe Peterson is, even with whatever faults and flaws he has, a decent human being, or he is trying to be one anyway. As an example of this, when Peterson was at Liberty University, a well known evangelical Christian college run by Jerry Falwell's son, a young man who was struggling with mental and emotional issues and was off his medication, ran up on stage trying to approach and talk to Peterson, and when he was restrained by security he fell to his knees crying, having a breakdown. Peterson was confused by what was happening at first, but once he realized what was going on he came over to the young man, knelt down, and tried to comfort him as the other men on stage prayed over him. I honestly don't know for sure how much the other men on stage truly cared for this young man or how much they were at least subconsciously using him to promote their religious beliefs (I only say that, as insensitive as it may sound, because I was in the evangelical Christian world for a number of years so I know that kind of thinking is often somewhere under the surface, though not always to be fair, because again people are complex), but with Peterson I think it was just plain and simple compassion on his part, which I found moving. You can also see how passionate he is about others improving their lives and finding greater meaning and purpose in them, like when you see him with tears in his eyes when he talks about how people just need a little encouragement and he just wants to offer them that to them if he can, and you can see that that is what he really wants to do, and even if you may disagree with him on some or many of his views you can’t really fault him for wanting to help people. And of course it's pretty clear, at least to me, that he loves his wife and children, his family and friends, etc.

But even decent men still have their faults and flaws or struggles and problems, and recently Peterson checked himself into a rehab to try to get off of an anti-anxiety medication that he had started taking after his wife Tammy had been diagnosed with cancer (and from what I understand the whole situation with that was and is very complicated), which needless to say caused him a great deal of anxiety, which only added to all the anxiety he no doubt has had to deal with over the last couple years since coming into the limelight. I can't say that I blame him for turning to medication to try to take at least some of the edge off, and maybe that was a mistake, but it was an understandable one as far as I can tell. Sadly a number of his detractors or former supporters have been using this against him, berating him or expressing disappointment in him for seeking treatment, accusing him of being a drug addict and the like. Even if you're not really a fan of Peterson at all or disagree with him on most everything, I think it's kind of shitty to kick a guy when he's down like that, to berate a guy who was already struggling with anxiety for taking anti-anxiety meds when finding out the woman he loves has cancer (and I can kind of empathize with that having lost a good friend to cancer recently, though I will talk about that later in this post), or for trying to do the responsible thing by getting off of it when he realized it wasn't good for him (even if it could perhaps be reasonably argued that trying to quit cold turkey like he did may have been unwise, as some have been saying, but hey, no one is perfect, and that’s no reason to kick him when he’s down).

Sure I could understand if those who put Peterson on a pedestal might be disappointed that their idol had shown such human weakness, but after following Peterson for about a year now I realize that he's just a man and shouldn't be put on a pedestal (not that he would want to be anyway), and should be cut some slack for only being human.

If anything I find it somewhat encouraging that even the messenger struggles sometimes to apply their own message. As Christian minister and author Frederick Buechner once said (paraphrasing this here), 'I preach to myself my own sermons', meaning the message applies just as much to the one giving it as the one receiving it, and I am sure that Peterson is well aware of that, and would not deny that making good choices as an individual, that taking on responsibility, that tapping into that inner light, that walking the way of love, is just as difficult for him as it is for anyone else. The same is true of my writings here. I write to myself as much as to anyone else who may be reading this.

I empathize with Peterson and his struggles, and hope that others will as well rather than judging him too harshly, as we all have our faults and flaws and struggles and problems in life.

Recently I joined a Meetup group here in Portland where they discuss Peterson and his ideas, or better yet use him and his ideas as a springboard for wider and deeper discussions about various topics. It's a pretty cool group, with an interesting assortment of different kinds of people with different perspectives, and I've gone to the group a few times now, though only when the timing is right and the topic is interesting to me. In the most recent meeting I went to we actually talked about Peterson's checking himself into rehab and the flack he has gotten for that, and how being in the limelight and being something of a lightning rod for the current culture wars has taken a toll on him and his family, and we used that as a springboard for a deeper discussion on empathy and understanding. It was a really good discussion that ran all over the map but focused mostly on the importance of empathy and understanding in moving forward both as individuals and as a society. I think Peterson’s personal struggles are just a reminder that we should all try to be kind to one another for each of us may be fighting a hard battle, and even if others may not see it or know about it.

My dive into Jordan Peterson and his philosophy on life has led me into thinking more about things like this, and has got me thinking more about my life in general, and I see a bit of a kindred spirit in Peterson sometimes when I can see (or hear) him struggling to find words (words that seem like straw) to describe, at least in his own existentialist and Jungian and evolutionary way, something that may be, well, for lack of a better word, mystical.

Jumping out of the frying pan of politics and into the fire of religion here, I think one of the things that bothers some of Peterson's detractors, or even some of his supporters, is how he dances around the question of God's existence.  Peterson says he gets kind of annoyed with the question because he thinks it’s not a simple question to answer (and I think he may have a point there if you really think about it), but he tries to address it as best he can, and more or less says that he acts as though God exists, because it's how we act rather than what we think or feel that ultimately shows what we believe, and that's certainly a valid point I think. But I can definitely relate to the desire to dance around that particular question, as it's a question I have wrestled with a great deal throughout my life, and continue to wrestle with.

Of course I have written about the question of God in other posts here, and will no doubt continue to write about that question, but as far as it concerns finding my way in life, it's an important question. Is it up to me to decide what is the best path for me to take, or is there some other force that can or should decide that for me, or that could at least help me figure it out? Is there some deity, some guardian angel, some spirit guide, or some other higher power beyond this world or myself that can help me on my way, or am I on my own, do I need to figure this out on my own, maybe with a little help from other people who are trying to find their way too, but essentially alone in this?

Outside of a wedding or a memorial service I haven't been to a church in years, but I still pray (or I try to pray anyway) nearly everyday (and usually when I take a shower after I get out of bed, I guess you could say it's kind of a prayer closet) usually focusing on four areas, namely my relationships, work, creative life, and whatever my spiritual path is, or in my head going through this prayer written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (while he was in a Nazi prison of all places) which I have memorized:

In me there is darkness But with you there is light I am lonely But you do not leave me I am feeble of heart But with you there is help I am restless But with you there is peace In me there is bitterness But with you there is patience I do not understand your ways But you know the way for me

When I get to the end of that prayer in my mind I sometimes kind of internally hold my hands up, hold my heart out, reach out, without really knowing or understanding, but with hope that something or someone is listening and does know the way, or at least knows it better than me, and can help me to find it.

As I said earlier in the post I feel like I have at times in my life glimpsed or heard whispers of something more, of some deeper truth, or Truth, and perhaps that Truth is some higher power, or God, that can help me find the way, though I don’t know for sure.

One of those times within the last year where I felt I connected with that something more, that truth, whatever it may be, was when I was at a concert for the wonderful Norwegian musician Aurora Asknes when she came here to Portland back in February. I wrote about Aurora Asknes in the last post that I wrote (titled Mad World) before my year long hiatus here, and if you haven't checked her or her music out yet I highly recommend that you do so, as she’s a real gem. Anyways, I went to the concert by myself, and I felt a little lonely there I admit, and I was feeling a little down too as I was trying to emotionally prepare myself for the following day when I was going to help put down my sister's beloved cat Smokey, who had been in our family for a number of years, but then when Aurora came on stage I found myself enraptured by her warmth and playfulness and humor and charm and surprising wisdom as so many of her fans are. What really hit me hard though was at the end of her concert she stopped and got kind of quiet, a hush falling across the crowded room, and then she dedicated her last song of the night to everyone out there who feels different or sad or broken or alone, and while I can't remember everything she said (sometimes I wished I had recorded it on my phone, but before the concert I had promised myself I would try to set aside my phone for most of the concert so I could really focus on it and take it in, which I did), I do remember that she spoke with such tenderness and sincerity and caring that I was moved to tears standing there in a crowded room, and after that she began to sing what may be my favorite song of hers, Through The Eyes Of A Child, which I reflected on in my Mad World post. Hearing that song in the earbuds of my music player as I’m walking home from work at night is one thing, but hearing her sing it on a stage maybe only 30 or so feet away was something else entirely, and the emotion in the room was palpable, and even as messy and awkward and weird as I felt standing there leaning against a wall (like a true wallflower, I know) crying alone in some crowded room in Portland, the moment still felt somehow holy and pure and real, and when she finished the song with the quiet but heartfelt line  'please don't leave me here', it felt like a cry from her heart, and it was a cry from my heart too, a cry that has been there so many times in my life, a cry to not be left here in the dark, to be loved, to not be alone, to be free...

I remember when I was there there was this young woman nearby me who really wanted to give Aurora a package with Aurora’s name on it, presumably with some long letter or series of letters addressed to her, or perhaps some other gift or offering, but she wasn't able to as Aurora wasn't doing meet and greet, and I saw her crying on the floor when she found out she couldn't connect with Aurora in a more personal way. I could at least partly sympathize with her as I too would love to meet and connect one on one with Aurora (much as I would love to meet and connect one on one with Peterson, or really any other public figure out there that I respect or appreciate in some way), as she seems like a wonderful human being, but then on the other hand I was kind disturbed as this lady seemed to have an unhealthy fixation on Aurora, like Aurora was some idol she was placing on a pedestal, or some goddess that she worshiped. There was also a message on Aurora’s Facebook page that I saw sometime after the concert about that particular concert where someone was trying to defend Aurora’s honor in some very weird and uncomfortable way, having felt that the venue somehow disrespected Aurora, to which I was like, um, okay... I can't say that I would really blame anyone for having a worshipful attitude towards someone like Aurora, or for even wanting to try and defend her honor (well okay that’s, um, okay), as Aurora is a very unique and magnetic person, and you can probably see some of that in how I or many of her other fans out there talk about her, and being in that room that night I could feel the power that that lovely young woman who seems like someone straight out of a fairy tale or some kind of fae queen had over her audience, could feel the love and admiration that people there felt for her, but just as with Peterson or any other thinker or musician or other public figure that I respect or appreciate I can still recognize her humanity, and am sure that she too has her own share of weaknesses and shortcomings, her own faults and flaws, and am sure that she sometimes makes mistakes or gets things wrong, that she too struggles in life. For example she is ironically something of an introvert who gets drained meeting a lot of people, even though she is also deeply empathetic, which is a difficult combination to be sure. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, as it hasn’t yet been released in the US, but apparently this aspect of her life is delved into in a documentary about her called Once Aurora. I’ve heard fans who have watched it were sobered by getting a better idea of how much of a drain Aurora’s fame has been on her at times, as much as she loves and appreciates her fans. And I’m sure she has other struggles as well, because even if she is a truly wonderful human being, she may still have some darkness within her that she has to contend with, as is the case with all of us, and I imagine it's no more easy for her to live out the message of love and kindness that she shares with her many fans (whom she affectionately refers to as Warriors and Weirdos) than it is for them. I'm sure she sings her songs to herself as much as she does to anyone else.  

Anyways, listening to Peterson sometimes, in those times when he is reaching for that something more, that deeper truth, there is something in that that seems holy, pure, real, or whatever you may call it, like a poet trying to find the words to describe the indescribable even if those words seem like straw, but then at Aurora's concert it felt overwhelming. It's not because Aurora is a goddess (well, maybe she is metaphorically speaking, though not literally speaking, well, you know what I mean, hopefully... hey I know she’s only human but that doesn’t mean she isn’t great), anymore than Peterson is a god, but because as a human being she opened up and welcomed her audience of fellow human beings into that reaching, her own reaching for that something more, that deeper truth, and I think we all, or at least many of us there, could feel that in some way. It honestly felt in some ways like taking communion at times felt for me in church (or at least in those times when the pastors or the elders leading in prayer weren't laying on the religious guilt too thick... yeah not helpful guys), individuals coming together, messy and awkward and weird though we may all be, to try and reach out, hold up our hands, hold out our hearts, in the dark, hoping that something or someone can see us, hear us, and can help us find our way, can somehow help us, heal us, lead us, guide us, through the dark and into the light. (By the way, the next day when I had to help put down my sister’s cat Smokey, including being there in the room with him when he was put to sleep, was definitely still a difficult day for all of us in the family, but then Aurora’s concert the night before encouraged and strengthened me somehow, which helped me get through it, and I am thankful to Aurora for that.)

In Through The Eyes Of A Child, Aurora sings about seeing the world through the eyes of a child, which leads me to another place where I felt a touch of that something more, of that deeper truth.

In the summer I read a book called Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, which is easily one of the best books I've read in a long while, and it is one that has stuck with me since reading it. The book follows a year in the life of 12 year old Cory Mackenson in 1960, where Cory is trying to solve a murder after he and his father witness a stranger in town, already dead with his throat slit, having his car, with him strapped naked in it, sunk into a local lake. While this murder mystery helps drive the story, there is much more to it, as you read about Cory and his three friends and their adventures over the course of the year, adventures that seemingly blend fantasy and reality, and at the core of the story is this sense of magic, of a world behind or beyond the one that we live and breathe in, that many of us experience more when we are children, and how that sense can easily fade away as we get older if we don't hold onto it, but also at the core of the story is the message that at least in some sense none of us ever really grow up, or at least not completely, as deep down there is a child in each of us still, beneath all of that jadedness and cynicism that can build up over the years.

In one of my favorite scenes in the book Cory has a dream where he encounters in her classroom one of his school teachers, Mrs. Neville, who had passed away only a few days before the dream, and in the dream she tells him a secret, which is this:

"No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it's just a disguise, it's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts."

Mrs. Neville goes on to say that the clay of time can hold us back from playing as we once did as children, and that we would like to come home to a mommy and a daddy who can love us and take care of us and keep us safe but can’t anymore when we are adults, and there is a sadness in wanting something that we can no longer have because of the passage of time, but I think what she tells Cory is on some level also hopeful, as it means that the magic is somehow still there in us, that we are still connected to it. On the one hand that we are still children deep in our hearts is a sobering truth, as I think it means that we are all more or less clueless and scared and uncertain at the end of the day, at least on some level, just as we often were as children, but then again it's also hopeful because we all still have the ability to see the world, as Aurora would put it, through the eyes of a child.

We still, even with the clay of time, have the ability to sense the magic, to see or feel the world behind and beyond the one we live and breathe in, because it's still there, and we're still connected to it somehow.

There was a dream that I had not too long ago that I can't remember much of aside from the final image, which was of a little girl with vibrant and shining red hair running ahead of me and then turning as I was on the edge of waking and saying 'don't give up'. For some reason that image has stuck with me. An acquaintance of mine who is a professional medium, the British Claire Broad (who actually did a reading for my wife Kaylyn and I back in December, though more on that later), told me that perhaps this was my spirit guide trying to communicate with me, and maybe appearing in the form of a child to remind me of that child within me, which may represent that divine spark that Peterson talks about sometimes, or that lens of a child’s eyes that Aurora sings about, or that sense of magic that Robert McCammon talks about, and maybe appearing to me as a little girl because I need a little more tenderness and gentleness and kindness in my life, maybe I need that same kind of feminine energy that I felt coming from or through Aurora while at her concert just a few months back.

(Just as an aside, I remember Peterson once sharing a story about a woman who had a psychedelic induced vision where she asked about him during that vision where she apparently encountered a being or beings, and was told that he was a representative or channel of the divine masculine, a story which Peterson found quite amusing but also kind of wondered about. I remember this coming to mind for a moment while I was at Aurora's concert, and found myself wondering if Aurora could perhaps be a representative or channel of the divine feminine as Peterson could perhaps be a representative or channel of the divine masculine, keeping in mind that the representatives, or channels, or messengers, need the message just as much as those they are sharing the message with. Maybe there is something to this, my making weird connections in my head in some strange Jungian archetypal way in order to say that we all need to try to find a balance between our masculine and feminine sides, that the divine spark within us or the magic in us is both masculine and feminine [which reminds me that towards the end of Boy’s Life there’s a passage where McCammon says that this is also a girl’s life, and that’s something us boys need to keep in mind] and to be whole we need to embrace both within ourselves... or maybe this is all just crazy talk... but whatever the case, I would love to see these two, Peterson and Aurora, as different as they are, get together and have a conversation, just to see what happens... heck, I would even pay money to see that.)

Sound a bit woo? Yeah, maybe dreams of little red-haired girls running around is a bit woo, but I don't know, and possibly I don't care as long as whatever it is is something good that can be trusted and can bring more of that divine spark or sense of magic into my life, can bring me closer to that something more, that deeper truth, whatever it may be. Maybe it was a message from beyond, and that message was ‘don’t give up’.

Speaking of woo, I remember this lady named Amy telling me something along the same lines, about my inner child and being embraced by feminine energy, when giving me my first ever tarot reading at this annual campout of mostly down to earth and laid back aging hippies (said with fondness) that my friend Keith and I went to over the summer called Feast Of Madness (which was a lot of fun by the way), and I remember her saying that I need to tap into that inner child more and not be afraid to get out there and play in the sun. Maybe that little girl in that dream was in part encouraging me and reminding to do just that, to wake up and seize the day and not give up on life, I don’t know. For someone who spends so much time in his head maybe I need to remember to not just think about living but to also, well, live. Maybe the little girl was in part telling me to not give up on life, life which is in large part suffering tainted by malevolence, but also a divine spark and magic, and full of sorrow no doubt but can also be full of joy, which can be, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, as poignant as grief.

And speaking of dreams, there was another dream I had in the last year that stuck with me, where our family friend Bryan, who had passed away from cancer a couple years ago, seemed to appear to me. It was the first dream I can remember Bryan appearing in since his death, and I haven't had a dream about him since. It wasn't particularly vivid (as I’ve heard ‘dream visitations’ tend to be) and it felt  vague and weird as most dreams do, and I don't think I even saw his face. I just remember giving him a hug and saying I was glad to see him, and all I can remember him saying to me was something about Troutdale, which is a city here in Oregon. I asked my mom, who knew him better than me, about it, but she didn't see any connection between him and Troutdale, and for a couple months I had this knocking around in the back of my mind, wondering about it, until one day while at work it hit me to look up if there was any connection between Bigfoot (which was, for anyone who really knew Bryan, his favorite thing in the world) and Troutdale, and was amazed to find that in just a few weeks time the Oregon Bigfoot Festival was going to be taking place in Troutdale.

I took this as a sign from Bryan, and a few weeks later Bryan's youngest son Kyle, Keith (who like me thought of Bryan as something of an uncle while growing up) and Keith’s 4 year daughter Sophie went to the festival. We all had a good time and I think it was a great way of remembering and honoring Bryan, even as simple and silly as it may have seemed, and we even talked about maybe trying to go every year, and we may do that if we can.

I suppose some might call the dream I had and the connection that I made because of it a coincidence, just some random fluke, others might think of it as some kind of precognition, and still others might indeed see it as a sign from someone who has passed on. I honestly don't know what it was for sure, but I know I felt compelled to act on it when I found a meaning in it, and I know that some good came out of it, and that all of that happened at all makes me wonder what might be going on behind and beyond this world that we live and breath in.

(Claire Broad ^^^) I also wonder about my reading (my first ever reading with a medium, have had a few weird firsts over this last year, that’s for sure) with Claire Broad back in December (which we did via video online since she lives in the UK), where Kaylyn's maternal grandma, who had passed about a year before Kaylyn and I met, and her aunt, who had passed a couple years ago, seemed to come through for Kaylyn, and where, strangely enough, my paternal grandpa (and part of me had wondered and hoped that my maternal grandpa, who had passed only a couple years ago, would come through for me, but no such luck), who had passed at least two to three decades before I was even born and when my dad was just a boy, seemed to come through for me. I admit I was pretty skeptical of mediums up until recently, or up until connecting with Claire anyway, but I am more open now, because while some of what Claire shared didn't seem to fit or make sense, a lot of other things did, including some things she couldn't have known or guessed, or at least not as far as I can tell anyway.  That and I’ve known Claire for awhile now and have gotten a feel for what kind of person she is, and even if some so-called mediums out there may not be legit, she doesn’t strike me as being among them and I think she’s genuine and not just some bullshit artist or huckster or whatever, that and she strikes me as intelligent and kind and I believe she just wants to use her abilities, whatever they may be, to help people. I still don't know what to make of all of it honestly, especially what she shared about my paternal grandpa who I never knew, but I do know that it gave Kaylyn some comfort on her end and some food for thought on mine, and I suppose that is something, and again it makes me wonder. These and other strange experiences make me wonder.

(The late great Art Bell ^^^) As I've said in other posts I have always been fascinated with the paranormal, ever since I was a kid, and have always had an interest in metaphysical and spiritual things as well, and most specifically the strange personal experiences that people have. Over the last year I've been listening to a lot of paranormal podcasts. One of my favorites is one called Strange Familiars with host Timothy Renner, who aside from being fascinated with the paranormal like myself also has a love for history and folklore and delves into that sometimes. I've also enjoyed listening to old episodes of Coast To Coast AM with Art Bell (who I found sadly passed away sometime last year), a radio show that my dad's cousin Cliff, who was into all things weird, often talked about and referenced in our conversations when I was a kid, although I'd never listened to the show myself up until recently. Anyways, one of the things that gets talked about in these shows and others that I listen to is that perhaps all of these things, whether they be cryptids (Bigfoot being one example) or ghosts or UFOs or shadow people or strange lights or time slips or synchronicities or out of body and/or near death experiences or miracles or whatever they may be, are somehow all interconnected, and maybe the true nature of reality is both more terrifying and more wonderful, and more just plain weird and wild, terrifyingly and wonderfully weird and wild, than any of us can imagine, and maybe there is a kind of magic in the world that you can only see through the eyes of a child, magic both dark and light.

I think part of what draws me to these topics is wondering what if, what if these things are real, what if these things are true... sure, I have little doubt that many strange experiences that people claim to have, or even that I have had, could be explained away through some natural or scientific or mundane means, but then I really have a hard time believing that all of them can, including some of my own, and even if just some of these things are real and true, then what does that mean for my life, and what are these strange or meaningful experiences that I and so many others have saying to us, if anything? Maybe one thing they are saying to us is it’s good to keep an open mind because even with all of our knowledge and understanding of the world gained through observation and exploration and experimentation there is still room for mystery, and as difficult as it may be for us to admit there is probably still more that we don’t know than what we do know. Whether it’s through the words of thinkers like Peterson, who in between debates about politics and philosophy have moments when they are are trying to find the words to describe something that may be indescribable, or whether it’s through the music of artists like Aurora who invite others into their reaching and their longing and their aching for a better life and a better world and to try to see the world through the eyes of a child, or through magical stories like Boy's Life, or through magical dreams like that of the little redheaded girl who turned to me and said 'don't give up', or through Bryan seeming to give me a sign, or through thought-provoking tarot or medium readings, or through other strange or even seemingly otherworldly experiences that I and so many others have had, I sense that there is something more, some deeper truth, or Truth, just behind and beyond the veil, and perhaps touching this reality, this deeper underlying reality, is somehow key to finding my way in life, as many others believe.

Of course there are different ideas about what this something more, what this deeper truth, is, if there is any such thing at all Some would say that it is God or some other higher power or powers, some would say that it is the higher self or some collective unconsciousness, while others would say it's none of the above or there really is nothing more, no such truth, and on top of that just about everything that I have said here is pretty much bullshit anyway and really who the hell cares and instead of trying to search for any universal meaning or purpose just try to make the most of your short and miserable life before you find yourself in the grave.

Well hey, I honestly don't know for sure who's right about this, if anyone is, and don't know for sure what is behind and beyond this world that we live and breathe in, if anything, I don't know what or who might be listening when I pray, or try to pray, when I hold up my hands and hold out my heart, or when I look for help to find my way in life, or to keep walking if I am already on the path, if there is any path at all... Maybe I am on my own, in trying to figure things out, or maybe I’m not... I suppose only time will tell what the case may be.

(My friend Erin ^^^) I wonder if my friend Erin McCarty, who passed away from cancer just a few weeks ago, knows better than I do now, and I hope she does, I hope to whatever or whoever may be listening that she does. Erin and I were friends for about eight years or so, and we never met in person, never even talked on the phone or Skyped or anything like that, our friendship was exclusively via Facebook Messenger and email and the occasional package back and forth, but we were good friends nevertheless, and I remember Erin and I would sometimes talk about things like this, the deeper mysteries of life. Erin herself was a devout and committed Christian, albeit a pretty open-minded and non-dogmatic one (the best kind), and her faith was important to her, but even she sometimes struggled with questions and doubts about the nature of reality, as most of us do at some time or another, though I believe she generally had more faith than myself. I would guess that she had very little fear of death in the end, and maybe there was part of her that even looked forward to it, wondering what was waiting for her beyond and behind the veil, including loved ones who had passed on before her. Knowing how adventurous in spirit she was that wouldn’t surprise me. But for me the very fact of Erin's death is a struggle to understand and accept as a part of reality, as it lead to questions and doubts on its own, with someone so kind and generous in spirit as she was dying so young, at only 38 years old, only a year older than myself, when she had so much more that she could have offered to the world (although in her 38 years she gave so much). I mean I don't really get it, and neither does anyone else out there who knew and cared for her I can imagine, but I will cope with the reality of it as best I can, and hope that someday I will get it, that someday things like this will make some kind of sense, that suffering and death will make some kind of sense, or at least hope that I can be at peace with the reality of them more or less in the end.

My last exchange with Erin was just a couple days before she died, after reading her dad's post about how she was going into hospice care and she probably didn't have much longer, and I shared with her in Messenger this Youtube clip from The Return Of The King where there is this exchange between Gandalf and Pippin in the midst of a siege by the forces of Mordor on Minas Tirith:

PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.

GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.

GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.”

All she said was 'Thank you Matt <3, that is one of my all time favorite movie moments.' and I didn't hear any more from her after that. I suppose with her and I both being nerds, who enjoyed nerdy things such as Lord Of The Rings, and who often liked to discuss philosophical and spiritual things as well, this last exchange seems somehow appropriate and feels right when I think about it, and is even, at least to me, another one of those glimpses or whispers of something more, of some deeper truth.

I shared this and some other thoughts on Erin in a post on Facebook, and towards the end of my post I said this:

'Erin, in spite of her own struggles with doubt from time to time, had more faith than me I think, but even so I do believe, with whatever faith I may have, though a flickering candle it may be, that there is something more behind and beyond this life, that death isn't the end, and I don't say that in denial of some cold and cruel reality that we all must face to simply try to comfort myself or others at that heavy thought of a wonderful person such as Erin no longer being in this world, but because my heart tells me it is so.

I don't know what it is like, what it consists of, what the metaphysics are, or how it all relates to God and everything else that human beings have argued and debated about for millennia, but I do believe that there is something more beyond death, that death is just a gateway to something else, that it is a night that is followed by a new day, and my hope is that it is something like what Gandalf was talking about, and if anyone should be able to step foot on white shores and walk into a far green country with a swift sunrise, it should be Erin.'

I think Erin found her way in life, a way of kindness and generosity, and she went down her path (or up her path) like a lightning bolt, and maybe now, I hope, on the other side of the veil she has answers to whatever questions she had in life, or at least whatever answers she needed anyway, answers that may even be beyond words or the need of them, that may make all of our questions and doubts, like our words, seem like straw... And I hope that she has found a joy as poignant as grief, including the grief of her family and friends that remain here on Earth missing her, and I hope that someday all of us who knew her and cared for her will know the joy of seeing her again (or in my case, for the first time)...

On Halloween night I was rewatching one of my all time favorite films, 1982's Poltergeist, with my friend in Kenya, Annie (whom I've mentioned in other posts), who was watching it with me on her laptop as I watched it on mine and while we commented on it back and forth on our cellphones. Annie hadn't seen it since she was a kid, being terrified of it then, and had been too scared to watch it again since then, but she was willing to give it a go with me being there at least virtually for support. She was of course still pretty terrified, but she also enjoyed it, and enjoyed sharing the experience with me. One of my highlights for the year for sure.

Anyways, perhaps my favorite scene in the film, even above all the spooky goings on, is the one where Dr. Lesh, a parapsychologist who is trying to help this family, the Freelings, to bring their daughter Carol Ann back from the astral realm after she was dragged there by an evil spirit that they call the Beast (if you haven't seen the film you're missing out, it's great), and in the scene she is talking with Diane, Carol Ann's mother, and Robbie, her brother, about her understanding of the nature of life after death, with Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant and beautiful score playing quietly in the background, and one of the things she says to them is this:

'Some people believe that when people die, there's a wonderful light -- as bright as the sun. But it doesn't hurt to look into it. All the answers to all the questions that you ever want to know are inside that light. And when you walk into it, you become a part of it forever.'

My heart stirs sometimes when she says this in this scene, perhaps another example of one of those glimpses or whispers of something more, of some deeper truth, and in this case nestled somewhere in a classic 80s horror film. I hope that something like this is true when we die, I hope something like this is true for Erin and will be true for all of us, that there is a wonderful light waiting to embrace us all...

I imagine that some who read this will wonder what kind of weird brain I have, jumping from talking about Thomas Aquinas and words like straw, to talking at some length (maybe a good third of this post at least) about a popular but also controversial Canadian professor and psychologist that liberal media outlets sometimes equate with the 'alt-right' (if unfairly so I believe) who nevertheless in between his political rants says things that really resonate with me spiritually, going from touching on gender (including transgender) issues and rights and relations and more generally on empathy and understanding, to a 23 year old Norwegian musician who made me cry in a crowded room in Portland, going from a murder mystery/coming of age story about the magic of seeing the world through the eyes of a child, to strange dreams that might be from spirit guides or from the dead, as well as touching on all things weird or paranormal or that are behind and beyond what we know and understand, from the death of a friend who I will miss and who so many will miss and whose death I really can't understand but hope to understand someday, to a classic horror film that came out the year that I was born and in between the scares has moments that speak to me. What is it all of these things have in common, what ties all of these things together?

I don't know, or at least I'm not sure, but I can throw some more straw at it anyway.

I had initially intended on trying to write a post about gender and being a man about a year ago, and maybe I gave you some idea of what that might have looked like in the first half of this post, but then strangely enough trying to delve into that complicated topic helped in some ways to lead me into deeper issues of humanity and what it is to be human, much as Cassie Jaye's own experience with suffering and loss through her miscarriages has led her away from wanting to talk about something that is more political and abstract and towards wanting to talk about something that is more personal and raw, and looking into someone like Peterson who is known in the mainstream mostly for some of his more controversial and divisive political and social views, and who is mocked and disparaged by all sides, led me to finding something of a kindred spirit in someone who, even if I may disagree with him on some things, is trying to walk a path, and lay out that path for others to try to help give their lives more meaning and purpose, and who, in between his political rants, is trying to reach for something more or for some deeper truth in his own imperfect human way, just as I am... Going from something that is more on the surface, to something deeper, from something in the realm of ideology and the games that people play, down into the soul...

I had initially planned on ending that blog post, whatever it might have been, on the note that whatever gender we are, whether male or female or transgender or non-binary or whatever, we are all of us human beings under the skin, and we all share this world and are in this together, and whether we may like it or not, so perhaps it is best to try to learn to empathize, and to understand one another as well as we can so we can move forward, even if that may be much more easily said than it is done, but again we can at least try.

And maybe that is one of the things that connects all of these seemingly disparate things... moving forward, even with all our faults and flaws and struggles and problems, or in the words of C.S. Lewis, further up and further in.

Jordan Peterson often talks about our aim, what we are aiming for, that we should aim for a better life and a better world, even if it is only incrementally, just one step at a time. He uses as an example the story of Pinocchio, where Gepetto wishes on a star for a son, and Pinocchio wishes to be a real boy, looking to the blue fairy, where he dives into the belly of the whale to rescue his father, and all the archetypes and symbols and metaphors and dreams that may be lying underneath stories like these.

This reminds me of one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books, The Neverending Story (a scene that sadly wasn't in the film) where Bastian had to go down into the depths of the land of Fantasia (or Fantastica in the book), which is literally built on the dreams of humanity, into a mine full of glass images of dreams, to find a dream of his father's, and he finds this image of his father trapped in a cage, where he is in sorrow and pain, and he needs rescuing and above all love, which in the end Bastian is able to offer his father when he returns to his own world, which sets his father free to live again after being crushed by grief after losing his wife, the mother of his son, sometime before.

And why am I reminded of that, what is the connection? Why does it mean for the father to reach for the son, or the son to reach for the father? The mother for the daughter, the daughter for the mother? The masculine and the feminine, culture and nature, the old and the new, intertwined in symbols one after another in dreams that speak in a language we only rarely if ever understand? Why do we reach for the stars, and why must we dive into the dark to find what we're looking for? Why does grief crush us and can love free us? What is my aim in writing all of this? Again I'm not sure, but here again is more straw. Maybe in our art and our poetry, maybe in our words like straw that we aim in the direction we want to move in, maybe in the archetypes and symbols and metaphors and dreams, maybe in the conversations and the music and stories and experiences and in our lives and in our deaths and maybe in our lives again, maybe we are reaching, reaching up, or reaching in, or down, or out, reaching in every direction, or in the words of the poet Walt Whitman:

'A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.'

Maybe on some level many of us, perhaps all of us, are digging, digging, digging (like a boy digging through a mine of dreams), through all of these things, through all of the philosophy and politics that we argue about, and all of the art that we enjoy and appreciate, and all of the experiences that we remember and struggle with and hold onto, and all of our beliefs and the questions and doubts surrounding them that we wrestle with, and everything that we think about and talk about and wonder about and feel, so we can find a bridge to walk across, so we can find something to hold onto, so our souls, like noiseless patient spiders, can catch something firm, something solid, something holy and pure and real, so we can find a way forward, a way further up and in and down and out, and with no need for words... maybe.

Well now... Ground Control to Major Matt, take your protein pills and put your helmet on... I get carried away sometimes, so back down to Earth I go...

(Krissy Lynn in her mirror video ^^^) Another one of the things I discovered over the last year was the Youtube channel of Krissy Lynn, who is a porn actress of all things. And yes I have also seen some of her, um, other videos online. Full disclosure here, bringing things well and truly back down to Earth: I have watched a lot of porn throughout my life, and I still watch porn (though fortunately I have steered clear of the really twisted stuff, like child or rape porn). It’s a long story of the hows and whys and it’s not a topic that I want to really get into here, partly because it is such a sensitive topic, both for me and for society, but suffice to say that I have mixed feelings about it, about the whole industry of porn itself as well as all of my experience with it since I was a kid. And any shade that anyone out there may want to throw my way because of it isn't anything I haven't already thrown at myself at different times in my life, and trust me shame is an emotion I know all too well, especially when it is combined with religious guilt which I had in the past when I was an evangelical Christian. That said, one thing I've learned over the years is it does me no good at all to hate myself or berate myself for it as I have done in the past, so if you feel at all disposed to you could judge me all you want about it but you aren't going to be able to push me to hate or berate myself as I've done that plenty myself, and I know it never did me any good (and a real big surprise there, as that seems to be the case in any situation, that hating and berating yourself never really does any good, and it usually just makes things worse). There are those who wrestle with a weakness for drugs or alcohol, others for gambling or gaming, still others for food or shopping or you name it, just about anything you can think of can become a weakness or something you can feel shame about, but for me one of my weaknesses has been and continues to be pornography, and it is what it is and it's something that I wrestle with and that's just part of me and my life, and I'm not afraid to admit that here. Is it a sin (if sin is even the right word here, sin meaning missing the mark)? There’s debate about that (though certainly no debate about certain forms of porn like child or rape porn, which I think most would agree are vile and evil) and I’m of two minds about it myself, but I will say this: May he (or she) who is without sin cast the first stone. Anyways, with that out of the way and out in the open... Krissy Lynn has been one of my favorite porn actresses as she is, um, very attractive to me, but when I discovered her Youtube channel I admit it really surprised me. Even though some would find her career choice to be contradictory to this, in her Youtube videos I found that she is actually a pretty thoughtful and kind and even spiritual person at her core, or at least she seems to be someone who really wants to learn and grow spiritually and in general as a person. Some might assume that everyone who works in the porn industry is pretty shallow and surface level, but then in some of Krissy's videos she shares about her journey in life and how she is trying to learn and grow and better herself. Sure she has the occasional video where she dances around sexily and shows off her admittedly gorgeous body (which I enjoy, not gonna lie), but then in many of her videos she shares about her journey in life and shares from her heart in meaningful ways. I don’t think she’s ashamed of what she does for a living, or at least she doesn’t give that impression, and she doesn't let the nature of her career keep her from exploring deeper things or trying to find ways to feed her soul, and I can respect and appreciate that. One of her videos that has really stuck with me was a video where she talked about and demonstrated this exercise she called 'mirror work' where you stand in front of a mirror and talk to yourself, telling yourself what you are proud of, what you forgive yourself for, what you commit to for yourself, or anything you want to say to yourself. In her demonstration of the exercise when she got to the part where she forgives herself for something, she was in tears when she forgave herself for how she hid away as a kid because she was afraid of connecting with others. That really spoke to me having had a similar experience when I was a kid.

I've since been trying to do this mirror work exercise myself, usually when I get out of the shower. I tell myself (in my head though as doing so out loud feels weird for me) as I look at myself in the mirror, for example, that I am proud of you for getting out of bed to face the day today or for being kind to a friend or for working hard, or that I forgive you for watching porn or for getting pissed off about stupid things or for making an ass of yourself or for being a scared kid yesterday or today, or that I commit to trying to move forward one step at a time... that sort of thing. And I got the inspiration to do this from a porn actress of all people, a porn actress who is, even if she may to some extent objectify herself and let others objectify her, also a human being with a soul like you and me. I admit in a strange way it feels more real to me to be getting life advice from someone like Krissy Lynn, someone who is probably seen as an object of scorn by some (as much as she is seen as an object of desire by others) because of what she does for a living, than it does receiving it from some spiritual teacher or guru living in some cloistered space. Also there is something meaningful to me about receiving a message of healing from someone who works in porn, which has been a source of shame for me throughout much of my life, there’s something about that that speaks to me for some reason, I don’t know, like it’s a light coming out of the dark, or perhaps whatever sexual wounds I may have are like cracks where, as Rumi would put it, the light gets in.

Jordan Peterson, who I agree with on a number of things but not completely here, has a pretty low view of pornography, as many people do, which is understandable I guess, even if my own feelings about it are more complicated and nuanced (partly because I have listened to a lot of podcast interviews with those who work in porn, on podcasts like Holly Randall Unfiltered for example, and they have diverse perspectives and experiences within the industry, some negative for sure but others positive, or some combination thereof), but I wonder what he would make of someone like Krissy, who is trying in her own way to better herself and improve her life and dig deeper to find meaning and purpose, and even while she basically gets paid for having sex on camera.

John Green once said that we should understand people complexly (going back to the point that people are complex), and Krissy, with her career in porn, and also me, with my weakness for porn, are really no exceptions to that rule I think, as we can both stand in front of mirrors and sometime have a hard time saying something like 'I love you' to ourselves, but then we should be able to because we are still worthy of love I believe (even though I admit to having my doubts sometimes, and don’t we all), even as messy and awkward and weird as we may be, as are we all.  

In Krissy Lynn's most recent Youtube video she talked about loneliness and how the answer to it is loving yourself, accepting yourself, even admiring yourself, more than it is looking to others for validation. I wrote a post on Facebook recently where I reflected on loneliness and isolation and towards the end I included that thought, that learning to love ourselves may be part of answering loneliness, though I also acknowledged that people being able to connect more may be part of it too, as there seems to be a real disconnect in some ways between people these days. Maybe there is more of a kind of connection via the internet and social media over the last twenty something years since the dawn of the internet, which can be valid and meaningful in its way (my friendship with Erin or Annie being examples of this), but face to face and one on one connection seems to be harder to come for many people nowadays, which is ultimately more important and more needed than any other kind of connection, as hard as that may be to accept in this world of social media, tweeting, texting, and virtual reality. So I think it's both, we need to love ourselves but also need love from others, as it's all intertwined I think. There was another video I watched recently by a lady named Savannah Brown who also talked about loneliness, as well as the difficulty in connecting with others in meaningful ways, and in the video she shared some of her struggles, but ended on a poignant note of hoping that, even if she can’t read the minds of others or step into their shoes completely, she can still understand and can be understood in some way, even with all our limitations and the walls between us. I share in that hope.

(tired and disheveled and kind of sad me while writing this ^^^) I wrote a poem about loneliness (which is somewhat revised here) back in August that I think captures some of what loneliness feels like, at least for me: Loneliness is a weight That settles in my bones Is it right to walk alone Or to be only one With the deep sky above And the abyss beneath That I gaze into And gazes back at me Oh I wonder, I wonder Surrounded by the crowd People who love and hate But the weight remains And the bones still ache The deep sky calls to me And the abyss cries out My fingers in the air My toes in the water Oh I wonder, I wonder But to combat loneliness maybe like Krissy Lynn says I need to learn to love myself more, and even with all my faults and flaws and weaknesses and shortcomings and limitations and everything else.  When I look in the mirror I see a scared kid behind those eyes, behind the clay of time, a soul within a body that is slowly but surely aging, a bit more weathered and tired than I was as a boy or in my teens or twenties, a little more jaded and cynical and pessimistic, or as the late great George Carlin put it in an interview with Art Bell that I listened to recently, like a disappointed idealist, and sometimes feeling, as Frederick Buechner would put it, like a man who, when he looks in the mirror, sees at least eight parts chicken, phony, and slob... But underneath it all is still that scared kid, who feels he doesn’t really know or understand much for sure, who feels like love is something he’s not very good at actually practicing, who sometimes feels he is too pretentious and arrogant or disingenuous and fake, but who may yet have a spark of something genuine and real in him, a spark that reaches for something more, for some deeper truth with a capital T, that will set him free and bring him peace, and who is still learning what it means to be a man or a human being in this world.

This scared kid is still trying to find a way, a path, through the darkness and towards the light, maybe towards the wonderful light that will embrace him, or perhaps already does...

I've listened to debates (which were really more discussions) between Peterson and popular atheist thinker Sam Harris where they talked about truth and fact and their value and the differences between them, which were in some ways debates between science and religion, though not exactly as neither of them are overly dogmatic about their positions, or not as far as I can tell anyway. Anyways, something that gets brought up by Peterson is the danger of nihilism, which a non-religious worldview can lead to (or at least more readily), and something that gets brought up by Harris is the danger of fundamentalism, which a religious worldview can lead to (or again at least more readily). Having been both non-religious and religious at different times in my life, and now being in some weird place in between those two poles, I can attest that both concerns are valid as I have put my feet in the water of both.

To me nihilism (which is usually found in non-religious contexts but perhaps can be found in religious ones sometimes) is basically a worldview in which life has no meaning or purpose or value save what we may impose upon it, which is arbitrary at best. This worldview can leave you feeling lost and aimless and empty, with no real sense of identity or value that is intrinsic and objective, and you are just some speck in a cold and impersonal and uncaring cosmos, believing that life is either some sick joke, or just a spectrum of pleasure and pain to choose from without much consideration for any morality or ethics outside of those we may choose to invent for ourselves, because they don't really matter anyway, and nothing really matters, and life is basically just suffering and loss and madness all the way down mostly, with only brief and transitory pleasures that may give some semblance of meaning and purpose and value but all of it being only an illusion, and (at least in those non-religious contexts that have no belief in an afterlife) followed by our inevitable death, the grave, and finally oblivion, and in time probably the death of the sun, the implosion of the universe, and then nothing.

On the other hand, to me fundamentalism (which is usually found in religious contexts but perhaps can be found in non-religious ones sometimes) is basically a worldview where there is a strict and inflexible and narrow meaning and purpose and value to life that is imposed upon us by someone else or by some tradition or expectation that cannot be questioned at all or if at all very little. This worldview can leave you feeling trapped and like you're in a straitjacket (maybe in a padded room, or maybe in a room with brick walls) and at best only conditionally loved or accepted, your identity and value tied tightly to whether or not you remain devoted to your belief system and everything that goes with it, only a servant to some higher order or principle that cannot be reasoned with, and life becomes a set of do's and don'ts, rules to be followed, or else you will be punished, perhaps even (at least in those religious contexts that have some kind of belief in an afterlife) punished eternally after death, burning in fire or banished into darkness forever and ever, pick whatever literal metaphor strikes your fancy, in which case you would probably be wishing for oblivion.

I've experienced both of these extremes at different times in my life, and there is a danger of falling into either of them whether you are non-religious or religious, and I suppose one of my aims in life now is to find a way or a path between these two extremes.

Peterson often talks about a balance between order and chaos, the masculine and the feminine, the yin and the yang, which is a balance that is often talked about in Taoism. I admit I don't know much about Taoism (I have a copy of the Tao-Te-Ching but haven't read it yet, though I plan to), but I am familiar with the yin-yang symbol and what it means at least roughly. The symbol is a circle of black and white, the black half of the circle, or paisley, being yin, representing darkness and chaos and feminine energy and moving inward, and the white half of the circle, or paisley, being yang, representing light and order and masculine energy and moving outward. (Just as another aside, from what I can understand the black paisley, yin, doesn't necessarily represent evil, nor does the white paisley, yang, necessarily represent good, or at least not in any traditional sense, or I think it's much more complicated than that anyways. Just wanted to touch on that as I know that some women are understandably bothered about the feminine being equated with darkness and chaos [and this is sometimes brought up when Peterson talks about things like this as well], which are often seen in a negative light, but I think in the case of yin it is more representative of what’s hidden and unknown and of mystery and creative forces [whereas I think yang would be more representative of what’s seen and known and of answers and structural forces], and with women bearing children, who are for a time hidden and unknown and a mystery and a product of creative forces, this would make some sense symbolically and I think there is a beauty in this symbolism and I believe women can take pride in it, being the bearers of mystery and having a creative force within them. Of course this doesn't mean at all that women only have value as bearers of children, far from it, but I think this is an aspect of the feminine that is unique to women and should be a source of pride rather than shame. And hey, this is all coming from a guy who apparently needs a little more yin in his life, going by what I said above about feminine energy and all, so there's that.) In the black paisley, there is a dot of white, and in the white paisley, there is a dot of black, as there is a bit of yin in the yang, and a bit of the yang in the yin, and they are interconnected. In other words, darkness can come out of light, and light out of darkness, chaos can come out of order, and order out of chaos, the feminine is in the masculine and the masculine is in the feminine, sometimes in order to move inward you need to look outward, sometimes to move outward you need to look inward, etc.

To give a couple real life examples of this principle of the yin being in the yang and the yang being in the yin. For the first example, during the summer because of some complicated financial struggles my family had our electricity shut off, and we weren't able to get it back on for two weeks. It was only through the generosity of family and friends that we were able to pay our huge electric bill and finally get our power back on. The experience was painful for us, and one of both literal and figurative darkness, but the light in it was the generosity of others who helped us, and we wouldn't have been able to experience that generosity if we hadn’t lost our electricity. Also this experience has helped us to maybe not take things like electricity so much for granted. The yang in the yin, light in darkness, and the light was even more meaningful in that darkness. For the second example, towards the end of the summer my wife Kaylyn and I went to the beach up in Washington for our five year anniversary. All in all I think we had a good time, whether it was shopping around or eating Chinese food or watching the Lord Of The Rings trilogy in its entirety, but then on the day before we returned home Kaylyn lost her cellphone to the ocean when we were walking out on the beach together, and needless to say Kaylyn was upset and it kind of put a damper on the rest of our trip. But even this was a reminder to us to try to make the most of things even when they don't go the way we want them to, that sometimes, well, shit happens and we have to roll with it as best we can. The yin in the yang, darkness in light, and the darkness reminded us to appreciate what we still have.

And earlier this year I wrote a poem inspired by the concept of yin and yang, as well as using imagery from some real life experiences of mine, which I tentatively titled Yin and Yang: In the light of darkness In the darkness of light I remember crying to The silent stars And climbing stairs to Caress the shadow of heaven Tearing at the fresh grass When I wouldn't grow And sitting in silence with peace Drawn in the rock and the dust Numbers and letters Blending into fading miracles The hope of an embrace Holding me in my pain Pictures and poetry and names Lighting my way in the dark Bargain with demons in the day Wrestle with angels in the night

The Tao (or the Way), is about finding a balance between the yin and the yang and moving forward as you try to keep that balance, at least as I understand it. And perhaps this applies to finding a path or way between the extremes of nihilism (which one might describe as extreme chaos, where there is really no or very little solid ground to stand on, like an open ocean that drowns you) and fundamentalism (which one might describe as extreme order, where the ground is just too hard and packed and there is no or very little fertile soil to allow for things to blossom and grow, like a barren desert that leaves you dry and thirsty).

I've been in the open ocean of nihilism and the barren desert of fundamentalism at different times in my life (mainly dealing with the former in my teens and then the latter in my 20s), and while it was painful and difficult on both accounts, I feel like I learned from my experiences, for one learning the lesson, in the words of Walt Whitman (who put out better quality straw than mine for sure by the way) that I should 're-examine all I have been told, and dismiss what insults my soul', and that is what I have been trying to do through my 30s thus far. Both extremes told me that I as an individual human being had no intrinsic or objective value, that my life was either meaningless full stop or that my worth as a human being was dependent upon meeting certain standards, and I'm finding that neither extreme is right, whether about that or any number of things, and that I don't have to believe or accept either anymore, I don't have to believe or accept those insults to my soul anymore. Sometimes it feels like a tightrope act, avoiding these extremes on either side, trying to find a middle ground that offers some kind of foundation to stand on but also room for change and growth, but I think this is the way that I need to go, or the path that I need to find.

Maybe it's like trying to hammer down just enough fluttering pieces to have something to stand on, but not so many pieces that there are none left to fly, if that makes any sense... I remember one of the quotes I was thinking of using in the post I had planned to write called Measure Of A Man was this quote from a film called, of all things, Measure Of A Man, about a teenager coming of age during one summer, and this is something that an older man (played by Donald Sutherland) who ends up becoming a kind of mentor to him, tells him at one point:

I think this applies not just to men but to women as well, and people in general, and the storms of our lives that need to be navigated are of course both external and internal, both the difficult circumstances of our lives that we have to struggle with and the choices of others that are at odds with our own, and the inner turmoil and unrest that we must deal with within ourselves on a day to day basis as well as the weight of our own choices and how those choices may impact those around us.

And the measure of who we are may be in our ability to find the proper shore through all of this, through all of these storms ... though, then again, maybe there is some power or presence around us, with us, in us, that can be help us through the storms, or at least I hope there is.

One of my favorite prayers (which I also have memorized and sometimes recite in my head while taking a shower) is the Breton fisherman prayer:

'Dear God, please be good to me, for the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small.'

I often feel like my boat, this youngish but still aging body with this little scared kid of a soul in it, is so small, and the sea, this life and this weird and wild world and this universe, is so wide, so I pray, I hope, that I'm not alone in all of this, that I'm not alone in the sea or in my boat.

Sometimes when I imagine myself there, there in some small and frail boat out in a vast open sea, I imagine Jesus there in the boat with me, yes that Jesus, who I admit I rarely think of these days, though there was once a time when I thought of Jesus just about every day back when I was a Christian, or when I was trying to be one anyway. But when I think of Jesus now I don’t think of Jesus so much as some vague and mysterious historical figure that legends have been built around along the lines of whoever may or may not have inspired the legend of King Arthur, nor some mere composite of doctrines and dogmas of the church that exists simply to get as many theological ducks in a row as possible, or even as the enigmatic and paradoxical figure in the Gospels that seemingly claimed divinity and was crucified for it and came back to life a couple of days later at least in part so some skeptical guy like me could put their fingers in his scars and believe. ... Not any of those but more, well, the Jesus of my own imagination, and not imagination as in something that is completely made up off the top of my head, but more from some place deep down where dreams come from, that substrata or mine of dreams that we sometimes tap into.  And this Jesus takes on something of that classic image of him, wearing a robe and sandals, strong and sturdily built like a man who works with their hands, with the deep tan of a man who spends plenty of time in the sun, with long and somewhat brown hair (though not the cascading perfectly combed luscious locks that are sometimes given to him in films about him), and a ruggedly handsome though somewhat weathered face (that of someone who has known struggle and pain) with deep brown eyes that are somehow both penetrating and kind. And this Jesus is simply there with me, sometimes holding my hands, just reassuring me with no words that I’m not alone. And this Jesus in the boat with me, much like the red headed little girl in that dream of mine, tells me to not give up, and not so much with words but just with his reassuring presence. I’m reminded of the beautiful classic song Suzanne by Leonard Cohen, which I sometimes find myself listening to in the middle of the night, and that strangely beautiful second verse about Jesus: And Jesus was a sailor When he walked upon the water And he spent a long time watching From his lonely wooden tower And when he knew for certain Only drowning men could see him He said "All men will be sailors then Until the sea shall free them" But he himself was broken Long before the sky would open Forsaken, almost human He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone   And you want to travel with him And you want to travel blind And you think maybe you'll trust him For he's touched your perfect body with his mind I don’t know what Cohen meant by all of that, what was going through his head when he wrote that, but I wonder... Maybe there is a reason we are in these boats, why we are sailors out on this sea that we call life, but maybe true freedom will only come when we are no longer afraid of the sea, the sea of life... perhaps God is the sea, and Jesus, being a human symbol of God in the minds of many, is like the sea in that boat encouraging me not to be afraid, because the day will come when the time for being a sailor will be over, when it will be time to jump out of this small and frail boat of mine and dive into the depths, and perhaps rather than drowning in those waters I will be able to breathe in those waters and be embraced by them and call them home, and perhaps in this case the proper shore isn’t on land, but in the sea itself... 

I'm also reminded of one of my friend Erin's favorite songs by one of her all time favorite bands, Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water:

When you're weary, feeling small When tears are in your eyes, I'll dry them all I'm on your side, oh, when times get rough And friends just can't be found Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down When you're down and out When you're on the street When evening falls so hard I will comfort you I'll take your part, oh, when darkness comes And pain is all around Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down Sail on silver girl Sail on by Your time has come to shine All your dreams are on their way See how they shine Oh, if you need a friend I'm sailing right behind Like a bridge over troubled water I will ease your mind Like a bridge over troubled water I will ease your mind

Is there some power or presence, like the Jesus in my imagination, like the sea that I need not fear and will not drown but rather embrace me, that is beyond us but also with us, that will dry our tears, be at our side, comfort us, take our part, and sail right behind and ease our minds, that can somehow help us navigate to the proper shore, even if that is in the sea itself, at least until that day that we are no longer sailors but will be freed and embraced by that which we need no longer fear? Maybe... I hope so... because I would rather not be on my own having to figure this out on my own, and I would rather dream of freedom and being embraced... but one way or another, I will have to keep moving forward as best I can, trying to find my way.

Earlier last week I had a breakdown, crying alone in my bed for different reasons, partly because of my feelings of disappointment in myself, disappointment because of how I relate, or fail to relate, to others, disappointment in not really doing much with my life, being a janitor who cleans toilets for a living and who can’t drive and who still lives with his mother (and with his wife and cat, but you get the idea), disappointment in being an aspiring writer who has all of these ideas for books but has yet to publish one because of a general lack of motivation and confidence, disappointment in myself for being kind of aimless and lost and not being able to imagine my life beyond 40, wondering if I will die young like my friend Erin but unlike her that my life will not amount to much at all in the end. I felt like a failure, felt that I’m just not loving enough or mature enough or successful enough or grounded enough... I felt worthless in those moments, like I’m just not good enough... which unfortunately is far from being my first time to feel that way in my life, and I am sure it won’t be the last. The following night when walking home after a difficult day at work, feeling tired and drained and alone, I was thinking about these things again, and was even thinking about death, dancing around the idea of suicide, part of me wishing that no one cared for me (I could lie to myself and say that no one does but I’m not at that point yet thankfully) so I could opt out without hurting anyone, wrestling with those thoughts and others in my mind. I was listening to music in my earbuds on my music player as I was walking, and the beautiful Corrs cover of R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts came up on my playlist and started playing, and when Andrea, their lead singer, got to the part where she sings  no, no, no, you’re not alone’ it broke me, and I began weeping while I was walking, partly because I was afraid it wasn’t true, and partly because I hoped that it was. I hoped that those beautiful words backed by soaring violins were true, and that maybe God, if he (or she, or both combined) was listening, or whoever was listening that cared, was saying that to me through that song in that moment... And this week has been really rough for me too, in large part because of a deep and complex problem in my life regarding a relationship of mine (a problem that I don’t feel comfortable sharing about here), and all in all I’ve been pretty shaken up and depressed. I had another breakdown (this many breakdowns in such a short period of time is kind of unusual for me, at least these days) while lying in bed, crying out to God or whoever was listening for help, after which the number 145 started flashing in my mind, which led me to this big book of religious and spiritual poetry that I have that has thousands of poems that are numbered and categorized, and turning to page 145 I found a poem about Jesus as a child that ended with a reference to Gethsemane (where Jesus apparently sweated blood because of how much anguish he was in, which I can really relate to), which kind of said to me that God truly understands (in the same way that Savannah Brown in her video hopes that we can understand one another)  what I am going through in my life, and then when I turned to poem number 145, it was one that talked about the haunting presence of God, and beneath that, poem 146, there was an excerpt from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam that really jumped out at me: That which we dare invoke to bless;      Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;      He, They, One, All; within, without; The Power in darkness whom we guess; I found Him not in world or sun,      Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye;      Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun: If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,      I heard a voice `believe no more'      And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep; A warmth within the breast would melt      The freezing reason's colder part,      And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd "I have felt. "No, like a child in doubt and fear:      But that blind clamour made me wise;      Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near; And what I am beheld again      What is, and no man understands;      And out of darkness came the hands That reach thro' nature, moulding men. This excerpt of Tennyson’s poem said to me that in my crying that my Father (or my Mother, or my Creator, or whatever you may call it) was and is near, and that there is maybe some higher meaning or purpose (that moulding) to my whole situation in life, that I am not alone and one day I may understand, and all of this helped me to calm down and rest a bit. Since then I have still be struggling off and on, but I feel like I am beginning to level out somewhat, partly because of little encouraging glimpses and whispers like these, and partly through the encouragement and kindness of friends, and while I’m not out of the woods yet, I’m seeing a little more light and have a little more hope than I had before, though of course I will continue to have my ups and downs as all of us do... whatever the case, I will keep trying to move forward, will keep trying to find my way, will keep trying to hold on, hold on, believing with whatever faith and hope I have that no, no, no, I’m not alone, even, or especially when, I am crying in the dark.

I believe each of us is like a portal into another world, and through my words (which no matter how hard I try seem like straw at the end of the day) I try to open my portal so you can maybe get a glimpse into it, or hear whispers from it, and of course this world that you may call Matthew or some guy you know more or less, but that I call my life and my soul, is just one world among billions of worlds on this World, with a capital W, that we call Earth and that all of us share, and the Earth of course doesn't revolve around me anymore than it does anyone of course, or at least it shouldn't anyway. And of course your perceptions of me and your interpretations of what I have to say here will inevitably be different from my own perceptions or interpretations of myself and everything I've written here, that's a given and there's no way around that sadly. I've talked about empathy and understanding here but just because it's important doesn't make it easy, as maybe some of you reading this disagree with me or take issue with me on this or on that in all my weird and wild jumping around, whether it is on politics or social issues or philosophy or religion or my ideas or beliefs or perceptions or interpretations or experiences or whatever it may be, heck, maybe you even disagree with my taste in music or books or movies for all I know, and maybe some of you may find it hard to empathize with me or understand me for whatever reasons, and as sad as that might be for me I know that it's always a possibility. I can’t make everyone like me, let alone love me, anymore than anyone can make me like or love them. It’s always a choice for each of us. Not through my words or even through my actions could I ever hope to gain respect or love or acceptance from everyone that I come into contact with or comes into contact with me in whatever way, that hasn't happened and that's not going to happen, which goes back to the importance of learning to respect and love and accept myself, and of course having empathy and understanding towards myself isn't any easier than having empathy and understanding towards others, but hey you gotta try to start somewhere, right?

I remember in an audio drama that I was listening to recently called Olive Hill, in the last episode the main character said something about how it may be that life will never be completely satisfying, that we will always be searching or reaching for whatever it is we are longing and aching for, and as sad as that is maybe that’s okay, because maybe it is what keeps us moving forward, maybe hope keeps us moving forward, further up and further in (and down, and out).

I hope that my writing here, my blog or my blarg or my bleh, is better than some of my writings in the past, that it is less pretentious and arrogant, that it is not so disingenuous and fake, and that there is a spark of something genuine and real in these words like straw, and that they are aimed in the right direction, maybe towards a star. I hope that I can learn to be at peace, balls to bones, not knowing or understanding everything, and that I can learn to walk the ways of love with more confidence, and can learn to be more empathetic towards those who are different from me. I hope that I've gathered enough of the fluttering pieces to say something with some weight or value, to lay some kind of foundation, though perhaps leaving some fluttering pieces to fly, leaving a little room for mystery, perhaps the kind of mystery that will embrace me in the end, like a mother embraces her child. I hope I've been able to swim through all of the stormy waters here, and that there is a baby in all of this bathwater, and some proof in all this pudding. I hope that I will have it in me to carry my cross, but also hope that I will not be alone in carrying it. I hope that I have been able in some small way to invite you and include you in my reaching, my longing, my aching, as messy and awkward and weird as it may be, and that there is a kind of communion between us here somehow, holding up our hands and our hearts, as you read between the lines and as I write between them. I hope I and all of us can hold onto the magic, that in growing up we don't lose it entirely, I hope that even beneath the clay of time it is still part of us somehow, and perhaps we are a part of it. I hope that I will always have the strength and courage in me to not give up, and to remember that life is not only sorrow but also joy, joy as poignant as grief. I hope that I will continue to be able to see the signs and be able to follow them wherever they may lead, even if it gets a little weird and wild. I hope that one day I too, like my friend Erin, will set foot on white shores leading into a far green country with a swift sunrise, walking into a wonderful light, and will see face to face and will know even as I am fully known. I hope that I can find the dreams I need to find in the mines of my soul so I can carry them into the world, whether the world in me or the world around me. I hope that my soul can find somewhere to stand, that my threads can catch somewhere firm, even if they may feel like petty cobwebs sometimes. I hope that I can learn to respect and love and accept myself, even if I may still be a scared kid deep inside. I hope that I can find the middle path, or the way, between those extremes of open oceans and barren deserts, between darkness and light, chaos and order, yin and yang, that I can find the balance. I hope that I will somehow be able to navigate to the proper shore in the worst of the storms, even if it is in the sea itself, though also hope that there is something, or someone, with me here in this little boat of mine, holding my hands and letting me know to not be afraid and to not give up, and promising to help me along the way, sailing right behind. I hope that I can hold on, hold on, and remember that no, no, no, I’m not alone, and even when I am crying in the dark, believing that one day I will understand.

And lastly, I hope that, after having picked away at this post for about a month, that something here in all of this straw of mine speaks to you, encourages you, challenges you, or in some way or another helps you along your way. I hope that we can all stumble along the way together, here and now in this weird and wild world.

#finding the way #weird and wild world #thomas aquinas #jordan peterson #cassie jaye #men and women #empathy #understanding #god #prayer #aurora asknes #boy's life #tarot #bigfoot #claire broad #paranormal #erin mccarty #white shores #poltergeist #wonderful light #neverending story #walt whitman #krissy lynn #loneliness #yin yang #nihilism #fundamentalism #measure of a man #jesus #everybody hurts

[gascon-en-exil]

Joining the Game Late: S1E1 “Winter is Coming”

I’ll be starting off with a brief synopsis of each episode, so those following along don’t have to go back and rewatch or look up what happens in each one.

Synopsis

Suddenly, ice zombies. There’s a dead man at court and the queen and her brother are acting suspicious. Rigid Anglo legalism on display in the North in spite of the aforementioned ice zombies. Heavy-handed foreshadowing with dead animals and Bran climbing stuff. The king has a request for Ned and they’re very close, but don’t worry - there’s a dead woman in there to make it not weird. Jon gets called a bastard every two sentences and this makes him sad. Daenerys’s creepy brother marries her off to ethnic Other eye candy, she gets dragon eggs, and then the eye candy rapes her. Dead man’s widow, also Catelyn’s sister, suspects foul play and flees the capital. Bran discovers the Lannister twincest and gets shoved out a window.

Commentary

I had heard that the first few seasons of GoT were consistently decent to good, and after watching this pilot I have to say I’m genuinely impressed. Admittedly if I were coming into the show completely blind back in 2011 I’d have been overwhelmed trying to keep up with the characters and plotlines this episode sets up in very short order, but that’s one of the perks of approaching this kind of media in hindsight like I’m doing. As it stands there’s some interesting plots and some good material for a number of character arcs already, and I’ll be looking forward to watching some of them in particular develop.

But...yeah, like I thought I’m immediately not really into the Starks as the main PoV family. Ned quipping to Cat that “it’s your gods with all rules” is such a lie even when I barely know anything right now about the pseudo-Catholic faith of the southern kingdoms (except that the tolling of their bells for a funeral service sounds suspiciously similar to the bells rung before Mass), because these Northerners and their “old ways” keep to such simple-minded notions of oaths and justice and such. Also, the men of the Night’s Watch have to be celibate for...some reason; I guess with them freezing half to death at the edge of the world for the rest of their lives they’re expected to have blue balls in addition to blue everything else. It’s not like any of the Starks individually offend my sensibilities - hell, if they keep building Ned like this I might actually have an emotion when he gets executed and loses his decoy protagonist role - but nothing about their culture appeals to me. I hope the action shifts to the south soon, even if it’s mostly to the treacherous King’s Landing.

As for the party come up to visit them in Winterfell: Robert’s a boorish slob and I totally get why Cersei’s not into him, Cersei appears to have been placed in a terrible situation to which she’s responded by becoming terrible herself (fully understandable), Jaime is a handsome dick who’ll attempt to murder kids and has the worst taste in places to have a booty call (I would not fuck anyone on the floor of such a filthy tower), Tyrion gets to be poignant with Jon and has a couple of funny lines besides (what do they say about Northern girls, Tyrion? That they wear medieval jockstraps?), and Joffrey hasn’t said anything but I have no idea why Sansa thinks he’s so hot when he’s decidedly average. A crown in your inheritance is like having everyone around you wear super beer goggles, I suppose.

The Daenerys plotline hasn’t got much to it other than what I’ve already mentioned so far. At first I thought the detail about the Dothraki cutting off their braids when defeated in combat was a sign that they didn’t fight to the death and were more pragmatic than might be expected of a warrior culture...but then one of them gets disemboweled at wedding party and his opponent chops off his braid so what’s even the point? Is it just a dick joke? If that’s the case Khal Drogo is fittingly packing, because up until the rape scene he’s really just a built half-naked guy to ogle if you’re into that primitivist look. It’s not like there’s any other male nudity on offer, apart from a scene of Robb and Jon (plus that one guy who hangs around with them who hasn’t been named yet) all shirtless together and looking as bloodless and unimpressive as Anglos always do. But there’s so many topless women, eesh. I guess I should just try to get used to it. It’s a bit odd, too, because already there’s this undercurrent of how men use sex to control women, or how it’s just a hobby for some of them (like with Robert and Tyrion) even as all these topless scenes were clearly shot with the (straight) male gaze in mind. This plays into my theory as to why the details of Dany’s wedding night were changed from the book, where I’ve heard it’s consensual but where she’s also noticeably younger. The way it goes on the show allows it to keep the creepy factor while also casting an actress old enough to expose herself for the camera. So sex as power play used to subjugate women + fodder for fap material, set against a backdrop of a seaside cliff at sunset like a twisted harlequin romance novel cover.

Oh, and I forgot about the dragon eggs. If dragons are supposed to be extinct or nearly so and their eggs so incredibly rare, isn’t it a little strange that someone just gives Dany three of them as a wedding present? I know she’s the one to eventually hatch them, but it’s not like she or anyone else knows that at the time. Would the Targaryen association with dragons count as reason enough?

One last note on the gore: a minor reason I was holding off on watching GoT was because I’d heard that it was graphically violent which is not something I care for. Based on the first episode however the gore seems unrealistic or stylized enough to not bother me, though that could always change later.

#Game of Thrones #GoT

[somarysueme]

WicDiv Thoughts, some overly personal

stiiiiiillllll can’t really put together my feelings about the end and epilogue.  I will say that I liked the ending and epilogue more than I expected to*, and the longer I sit on it, I find more things to like about it.

(* Except for everything about Baal and Mini)

That said, there’s still that huge, unpleasant gap between what I wanted/expected this comic was supposed to be, and what it actually intended/was. I wrote this post after 43 (the “everyone does the thing” chapter), using bits of a half-written reaction to 39 ("Laura did the thing” chapter) to talk about that gap. I decided to sit on it til everything was said and done Just In Case, but I mostly still agree with what I’d written. 

So Here Are My Thoughts

The full pantheon abdicating! This is basically where I expected us to go. Since 39 it seems like the natural place for the story to be headed. Laura’s revelations, along with the Daddy Forgive Us special made it clear that the only way out of the game was not to play it. I was kinda luke warm on that concept, but it made sense for where the story was at that point. I was waiting to see how it actually played out before getting fussy about it.

I give him a C for execution here. Maybe a C+. 

I thought Dio’s moment was great. Jon’s was beautiful. Inanna’s I definitely could have gotten behind if he’d actually gotten to have any of that arc on the page instead of getting put on a bus 30 chapters ago. 

The rest range from “meh” to “yikes.”

I could have liked this, I wanted to like this. Given how much “OKAY” has been miles more thoughtful than Mothering Invention, I was genuinely hoping to like this. I would have loved to see these kids find something more important than godhood to live for. But that’s not what we got.

We did get them realizing that being a god is not worth dying for. Which is good!  And essential! And basically the central conceit of this comic! 

But.

But...  

I really wanted to see our cast value their lives period. And while there was some of that, there was far more of seeing them be humbled. We saw them beaten down until they had no choice but to admit they Were Not Special (or at least, were not as special as they thought). I was hoping for them to find a capacity to value their lives because their lives have value whether or not they are special, but instead it was a story about being humbled, and I guess to me, I just can’t see that what young queer artists need is help being humbled. They need help being valued as people, they need the internal presence of self to command that value be respected, and they need the external support to give them a fighting chance at that.  And not to be That Fan, but that fighting chance doesn’t come from individual actions. It comes from worker solidarity and respect for labor as labor.  It just doesn’t work for me to have a series around the exploitation and consumption of young talent and leave anything material about money and labor practices out of the material.

(McKelvie’s My (6000 F) pantheon has unionized joke, but unironically.)

Anyway this comic was all about Don’t Let This Happen To You.  And that’s a good start, but I was hoping for it to be so much more than that. It could be that this is me looking at WicDiv and wanting it to say something broader about specialness and creativity and mental illness and exploitation. 

(There’s a lot to be unpacked wrt presenting itself as a story about the whole world through all of human history, while also intending to be  psuedoautobiographical for a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s not this post.)

It’s weird because like, Fandemonium already delivered masterfully on Laura learning to value herself outside of godhood.  Laura’s last pre-apoptheosis soliloquy about “I can’t save any of them, but I can still help them” was one of those wham moments that really cemented this book’s place in my heart. Living through Fandemonium and realizing that the gods were people, and needed actual love and support from people who cared about them as people, and that just being a decent friend is something worth living for, fuck!! That’s good shit!! That’s fucking excellent!! 

And for the rest of WicDiv’s run, I was always waiting for the story to get back to that place, but it never really did. 

 (ETA AFTER 45 IS OUT: ok fine I fucking love that Laura saved Luci. Big Gay Hero Girl drags naughty non-devil out of hell and they kiss, fucking A+. But “can’t save but CAN help” is still something I wish the comic had followed up on more. The friendship thing got touched on a little bit too,  but never in a way I found as satisfying as Fandemonium.)

So anyway Luci going Full Diva. Her future is this and her future is nothing.

The longer I chew on it, the more I like it, and the more it seems like the inevitable place for Elanor Rigby’s story to go. It’s a good continuation from where we last saw her have any scrap of agency, but also frustrating in that “the lat time we saw her have any scrap of agency” was basically the entire comic ago. It was jarring to have her go from [One Sassy Line Per Issue] to [Maybe I’m The Final Boss]. Her story suffered deeply suffered from all the time she spent off screen. But despite all that, I’m very much really looking forward to whatever the fuck Laura Wilson’s going to do about this. 

I’m trying not to get my hopes up for Talk Her Down ending. It seems perfectly in line with this series to end with the moral of “sometimes, no matter how kind or brave or caring you are, people you love pick their addictions over living.” That’s a song I’ve already heard live and in person, and I don’t really want or need to hear anyone else’s studio cover.

Uh final thought on 43 is.... Minanke DOES seem to count herself as part of the 12, which still lines up with my Emily Was Also A Fake God theory (Fauxmaterasu theory? Nokami hypothesis? Amaterasuspicion?) but it does seem unlikely to actually be a Thing between now and the epilogue. shrug.

(ETA AGAIN: I had to write out my feelings on 39 and Laura’s own abdication (unpotheosis?) to properly respond to 43. So here’s a draft of another unpublished post that I fleshed out.)

I have extremely mixed feelings about chapter 39. 

First Feeling: thank fuck the pregnancy plot is over. 

Second feeling: establishing abdication as an option established a nice overarching shape to this book. Things have felt directionless for many chapters, but this does make it seem like we are back on some kind of track.

Third Feeling: kinda liking abdication as a general direction for endgame.  For most of the series, I was hoping the whole that there actually was Something Important about the recurrence, but since it's clear now that it’s basically all lies, I like this this angle well enough.

Strongest Feeling: hell fucking yes to Laura’s shaved head. 

(Tangential Feeling: buzzing your own head is good and you should think about doing it. Doing it for catharsis in a moment of crisis is A-OK, but I did it once just because I felt like it and it was fucking great. banishing your high maintenance hair does not cure depression, but it does give you back an hour of personal upkeep every day and the fuzzy head is wonderful to touch.)

Contrary to most of the fandom, though, I absolutely loathed Laura’s monologue here, and the context that it puts around her not-choice. There’s a lot of shitty Hot Takes out there about how mental illness and addition and creation intersect. A lot of people will suggest that being unhealthy makes you a better artist, and what’s more that being a better artist is worth being unhealthy.  This series is unambiguously and steadfastly against that message, which is one of the absolute best and most important things about it!  I don’t want to diminish that.

But that all said, seeing Laura alone in the dark describing “an addicts moment of clarity” was... jesus it was all kinds of personally painful and upsetting. It hurt real bad, and not in the way I though I had agreed to be hurt. And I’m not sure how to spell out why.

I have thousands and thousands of words on why it struck such a sour cord in me, but a lions share can be summed up with “fuck absolutely every story where a Troubled Girl just needed to get traumatized/humiliated/humbled enough to Realize How Bad She Was Being.” Double fuck this one in particular for showing the girl getting over addiction/mental illness by literally sitting alone in the dark thinking about how much she fucked up.  That story is tired, and cruel, and dangerous, and thank Christ I encountered this comic at 30 and not 19 because I would have swallowed it down with all the other poison that Helpful Adults fed me.

But yeah though, her shaved look is fucking adorable as shit.  Neither she nor Britany made any hair mistakes.

ETA ULTIMATE: That last bit is the one thing in this post I don’t quite still stand by. By the end, it’s clear that the above wasn’t at all the story this book was trying to tell at all. I thought WicDiv was trying to tell some Epic Truths, Hard-Facts-About-Human-Nature shit. But despite the sweeping setup (All Across The World and Through All Of History) the book was using a complex allegory for a very specific situation (Selling Your Soul and Name and Life To Creative-Industrial Machines), and that made it muddy.  

(Insert Principal Skinner meme here “Am I out of touch? Was I simply interrogating the text from the wrong perspective?  No, it’s the original creators who are wrong!”)

I’m from a family of mentally ill, addiction-prone, recovering-Catholic artists.  Laura is in my blood. Half the people I love are Laura.  I have Laura’s painting on my wall and her books on my shelf. I’ve sat with Laura’s mother a few years after Laura’s death, as her father now slowly dying in the next room, and listened to her music for the first time. (It was good. It was really good.  And I never even knew.)

These experiences colored my read, but how could they not?  

I do now, I think, understand what Gillen was trying to say- the addiction he was talking about was to stardom, the attention and accolades, and free pass to make your own shit be everyone else’s problem. I understand now that the “art” that the gods made was always supposed to be Not Real Art, that there was no true “message” from their songs- all noise, no signal. It was never about Laura’s art, or even Laura as an artist.  And that was unpleasant to reconcile.

Because when you're Laura, or Elanor, or any of them, life doesn’t have to grant your ill-advised wish before it fucks your head and kills you. Sometimes you fight as hard as you can with every fiber of your being and you’re still in Hell. Sometimes you’re doing all the Meetings and self-reflection and therapy you can manage and you’re still a Destroyer. But the shit you create while you’re down there is worthy of creating. What you do with your too-short, too-fucked time matters. A fucked up life was still worth living because it was your life to live. And... I guess, from the story presented in Faust Act and Fandemonium, I sort of thought that this was what WicDiv was supposed to be talking about. I thought it was going to be about doing something good even when life is fucking you. But instead it is a cautionary tale that  that suggests you could have stopped getting fucked at any time if you had just gotten over yourself and said the magic words.

We spent half the comic watching Laura drag herself through the mud. Half the comic was focused on Her Mistakes, when so little of her circumstances were actually her fault. “Punish Ophelia until she gets over herself” is not at all what WicDiv meant to be about. I imagine the creators would be aghast to hear that’s what I got out of it. But the text is what the text is.  While it is intended (and successful!) at being many other very good things, this one really bad thing is still part of that mix, and that sucks.

Maybe I should have picked up on the discrepancy between my read and the intent sooner. Probably I should have just done myself a favor and stop reading once I did.

2016, 2017 while my life was going a bit to shit, this comic was exactly what I needed. Being in the fandom made my life better and helped me meet cool new friends and get through some of the hardest shit to happen to me since I was a kid. Then in 2018, it slid into source of frustration and soured promise. Now at the end I have no idea if I liked it or not. 

But that’s fine, now that it’s done. The ink is dry, the ritual is over. It’s just a comic book now.  Some pictures I still love and some words I don’t always agree with. A lot of noise, arguable amounts of signal, but not a song I want to play on loop anymore.

I have no real conclusion to draw here. I respect at how firmly WicDiv rejects dark and unhealthy parts of being a professional creator- especially unhealthy things that are generally just accepted as Common Wisdom. I don’t think it took enough care in spelling out what it was rejecting, though, and I do think it was remiss in not finding good healthy things to embrace as an alternative.

All of the above notwithstanding, I have to give it credit for delivering almost exactly what I wanted in terms of lesbian nonsense. That ain’t nothing.

I give this series ?????/∞ and am happy to be safely clear of Kieron Gillen’s Wild Ride

#wicdiv #wicdiv spoilers #somewhat negative #its a mixed bag tbh

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

8, 11, 17, 22

Hoo boy this got LONG so I put it below a cut, haha.

8. Have you received anon hate? What about?

Ahaha, yes, yes I have. Occasionally I’ve gotten very random, strange anonymous asks that are angry but not I don’t think directed at me? But anyway one time I did straight up get anon hate and it was because I shot down a previous anon’s ask about Flynn being Jewish.

How it went down is basically a friend of mine (not tagging her because if for some reason a bored person wants to give me hate for this I’m not going to let them go after her as well) came up with the idea that Lucy could be Jewish. This is because of the ways that we see Lucy handle the concept of fate, faith, and God in season one, some fun etymology we discovered about the name Rittenhouse, and because Lucy never specifies what religion she grew up in. Now, my friend made a post in which she went into a lot of detail about the name thing, rather than the bits about Lucy’s handling of faith/God.

I reblogged the post, and then I (instead of my friend for some reason) got an anon saying that based on the research they’d done on Flynn’s names, Flynn could be Jewish.

I responded as politely as I could and explained that Flynn couldn’t be seen as Jewish, and that if you wanted to write him as Jewish for an AU that’s fine, but Flynn is Catholic. Unlike Lucy, who never states her religion or gives us any real clue which religion she believes in--we just know she is spiritual--Flynn is seen in a Catholic church, talking to a priest. Flynn is also from Croatia, which is overwhelmingly Catholic as a religion. The anon also pointed out that Asher could be a Jewish name, I pointed out in response that Judaism is passed down through the mother and that given how important his mother was to him and how Flynn literally never mentions his father, it was more likely he’d go with his mother’s religion growing up.

My point was basically what my point always is: writers leave gaps in the writing, and we can use those gaps to decide whatever “headcanons” we want. But if you want to see a character as something that directly goes against canon, that’s not a headcanon, that’s an AU. So if you wanted to write Flynn as Jewish, you could, but it would be an AU, you could not say given the evidence that it was canon. With Lucy, you can.

Now, I do think maybe my friend’s emphasis on name meaning and origin and such made the anon think that was all you needed, when that was actually only part of why my friend and I decided Lucy could be Jewish. But in any case, I immediately got anon hate from someone telling me I was anti-Semitic and a bitch and so on.

I responded to the first anonymous message, trying to be firm and a little sassy but also polite. I tried to pretend that the anon was my much-younger sister, and thought about how I’d treat her if she acted this way towards me: with firmness and some sarcasm but also with love.

I explained my reasoning over again, had some fun gifs, and ended with telling the anon that I was sorry they were having a bad day and to please take care of themselves, and that I knew they were a better person than this.

The anon sent another nasty message, which I just deleted. I also privately messaged the original anon, who had reached out to me to continue our talk privately, and I asked her if she was the nasty anon and if so, she was welcome to express any opinion she wanted to my face, and I was happy to talk with her honestly if she had more frustrations than she was letting me know about. She told me that the anon was a friend of hers and that she had been bullied in another fandom, and that her friend, seeing this, had jumped the gun with me in protectiveness towards her friend.

I was not surprised to find out that both these people were young teenagers.

I told her I understood overprotective friends, since I am one, and told her that if she or her friend was struggling with anything that I was always happy to listen and provide what support I could. That was, as far as I can recall, the last of our interactions.

What the first person, with whom I was privately messaging, didn’t tell me (and I chose not to call her out on it) was that she has publicly on her blog talked about how I’d shot down her “Flynn as Jewish” idea, implying I was anti-Semitic. She was, in our PMs, clearly horrified that her friend had said such awful things to me and told me she’d immediately started telling her friend to back down the moment she saw what was happening, so I think that she didn’t, being so young, realize the cause and effect of her post. I chose not to call her out, since I didn’t see what good it could do, and since I felt she was genuinely contrite.

And, well, she was (and is) just a kid.

So there you have it, the time I got anon hate. If I’ve gotten anon hate before or since then I don’t remember it. I like to think of it as a cautionary tale, for other young people out there. Be careful what you post on your blog. What you post is public, everyone can see it, and people will take action or form opinions accordingly. So if you say something, you have to be prepared for the consequences, whatever those are, and to take responsibility for them if so. You might think you’re venting and “oh I didn’t really mean that!” but once it’s out there... nobody can tell that you didn’t really mean it or that you were just letting off steam. They’re going to take you seriously.

I think it’s also a classic tumblr example of looking for something problematic and jumping down someone’s throat. I said that the main heroine of a TV show could be seen as Jewish, and was excited over that fact, and then when another person suggested that a Catholic character could be Jewish instead, and I pointed out that would be against established canon, got called anti-Semitic. When... um... I had just been celebrating... the idea... of the main character... being able to be written in fanfic as Jewish... uh...

Let’s hope it’s the only time I get that experience, shall we?

11. Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?

Um... I mean, Wyatt is popular or unpopular depending on which part of the fandom you ask. I liked him in season one as a foil to Flynn (they have an insane amount of parallels) and I thought there was a lot of potential to make him very much like Eliot in Leverage. I thought he could be a lovely Soft Boi. Season two severely disappointed me, but I decided that as a writer the possibility of writing a redemption arc for Wyatt intrigued me and would be a fun challenge (this is a habit of mine as a fanfiction writer--I take bad shit that happened in canon and fix it, or show how I would’ve done it differently, as in my Age of Ultron Redux).

So I like Wyatt, but I don’t excuse his behavior, and I understand why a lot of people don’t like him and why he’s unpopular with a large portion of the fandom now. I see opportunities with him but he was a toxic pile of shit so I don’t blame anyone for just nope’ing out.

What I don’t understand is when people take it to huge extremes like saying they want to set him on fire, or doing a huge meme on twitter about all the violent ways his own kids can murder him, but I see that sort of thing in every fandom about various characters and I’ve never understood it so that’s nothing new.

Actually I also don’t think a lot of people care about Jess? I don’t know, I just don’t see her a lot. I think people just don’t quite know what to do with her? If you’re a Garcy shipper you can have her be with Wyatt but that’s all you really need, and if you’re a Lyatt shipper you turn her into a one-dimensional bitch, so... I love Jess, I love her so fucking much, she deserved so much better and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.

17. Instead of XYZ happening, I would have made ABC happen…

Instead of Lucy and Wyatt turning into “you’re in love with Lucy” so quickly in season two, I would have just had it still be a crush like at the end of season one where they said “I’m open to possibilities” and then have had Jess come back. Honestly, shoehorning Lucy and Wyatt together so quickly was the one thing that was wrong with season two. Unfortunate that it was such a big thing.

Wyatt spent all of season one showing us time and again how he was still deeply in love with Jess. He wanted her back not just out of guilt but because he still loved her. It’s understandable that, after he screwed up in 1x13 and all that went down in 1x16, he’d start to realize he needed to move on, and Lucy is his close friend and a beautiful woman and one of the few people in the world who knows about time travel and so he wouldn’t have to hide a large part of his life from her.

But to go from “I’m open to possibilities” and considering moving on to “deeply in love” in just six weeks? Um. No. Especially when in those six weeks, he and Lucy are separated. He didn’t interact with her. That sounds not like love of Lucy herself but fixation on an idealized version of Lucy in his mind.

Lucy certainly wasn’t focusing only on Wyatt all those six weeks. I think that Lucy’s arc in season two is mostly unchanged if you take away her romance with Wyatt. She was kidnapped by her own mother, who then tried to brainwash her, and she was about to commit suicide when Wyatt and Rufus found her. That’s plenty of reason for Lucy to be drinking vodka and spiraling. Let Lucy deal with those things while Wyatt deals with the return of Jess.

Would I have had Jess still be Rittenhouse? Y’know, I’m not sure. I do think Rittenhouse had a hand in her death and my theory is that in the original timeline Jess was a reporter, because Wyatt states that Kate Drummond, a reporter “even looks like [Jess]” after he sees her and Lucy has just told him who Kate was. This implies that Kate was similar to Jess, i.e. had the same job as Jess. My bet is that Jess was murdered by Rittenhouse because she, like Flynn, found out about their existence. So bringing her back... yeah I think that would mean either she never found out about Rittenhouse so there was no reason for her murder, or she was a Rittenhouse agent.

Either way, I sure as fuck wouldn’t fridge her. I don’t think I’d have her and Wyatt end up together as endgame, because I’ve been in and seen others in abusive relationships (platonic, familial, and romantic) and I’m a firm believer in the idea that just because an abusive or toxic person changes their unhealthy behavior doesn’t mean the person they dumped that behavior on owes it to them to stay with them or go back to them. Jess was Wyatt’s high school girlfriend. They’re in their thirties. That means she put up with his shit for half of her life.

I would have Jess and Wyatt ultimately realize, after Wyatt has done his appropriate redemption arc, that they aren’t meant for each other anymore and part ways amicably and she ends up with Amy who is of course brought back from nonexistence. Then I would have Flynn and Lucy be together romantically for the endgame, with implied Wyatt/Lucy/Flynn a la Leverage.

So yeah. No forced ridiculous bullshit “we’re in love uwu” Lyatt in season two. Focus on Jess/Wyatt instead. Lucy’s got enough on her plate already.

22. Popular character you hate?

I actually don’t think I hate any character that’s popular. The characters I hate are characters we all love to hate. I mean, I hate Wyatt’s behavior in season two and think he’s got a lot of shit to work through and I write him as realizing that and redeeming himself, which doesn’t sit well with the Wyatt-worshipping side of the fandom I’m sure, but I don’t interact with them and they don’t interact with me so? *shrug*

#mads answers things #sorry that anon story got long #there was a whole explanation attached to it #rather than a random 'fuck you' or whatever #it cracked me up the lack of logic that those kids were showing #but then they were kids and on tumblr so #the automatic response is attack for bigotry first #ask questions later #ah well I hope they're both doing okay #and growing and being better people #koortega

[dicecast]

The Problem with Thanos Part 2

So the first video is basically about what is actually wrong with Thanos and by extension, Malthusian theory.   Today I want to pivot to something a bit more complicated, Thanos as a character and why he is a less good character because he isn’t a racist.  

I’ve said before that Thanos is a good character and I think that is basically true but I want to clarify.  Thanos is a good character for you know…Superhero movies, where most of the characters at best are a list of consistent traits with a consistent voice and maybe one or two issues that define them . Thanos’s motivations make sense (they are morally and intellectually wrong but it makes sense), he has a general personality template, and he has more complexity than most marvel villains.  But there is a larger issue with his attatchment to Malthusian economics, namely that it doesn’t make any sense he’d be so attracted to it.  

Let me jump back for a moment here.  See, in real life, the Malthusian notions of population control and necessary brutality for the sake of preserving the world’s resources is an ideology that comes with a lot of baggage attached.  From the start, Malthusians aren’t just saying we need mass purges to keep population in check, it always comes with a larger ideological view point about which people should be purged. Malthusianism in real life was directed at the Irish, Catholics, and the poor, and theories influenced by Malthus would be directed at African Americans, Slavs, and Jews, and today it tends to be used in the context of India, China, and Africans.  While it would be a simplification to say that the Nazi concept of “Useless Mouths” is purely Malthusian, the ideas are linked.  Eugenics, Social Darwinism, Imperialism, and Scrooge esc classicism have always been associated with Malthusian though, and that is why this doctrine is still around despite being debunked in the 19th century.  Its less a factual ideology as much as a world view, one obsessed with “us vs. them” mentalities and beliefs in “Nature is a warzone” despite the fact that this is not how society works.  

      Now in theory you could have a debate about Malthusian population control without dipping into the ideologies always associated with it, but in real life…yeah good luck with that. Malthusian economics are like IQ, or Social Darwinism its some people get into to justify their existing racist prejudice, not an ideology that leads them to racism.  That is why it always falls apart so easily when you apply real science to it, because it isn’t just a false scientific theory, its using scientific jargon to justify the same old prejudice.  

 But Thanos is that, he is a Malthusian without any of the baggage, he isn’t racist, classist, religiously intolerant, or a warmonger.  Thanks to the power of the plot, his population control method is actually unbiased, unlike real life Malthusians he doesn’t target a specific group as deserving extermination.   When Thomas Malthus spoke of necessary population control he wasn’t referring to his own group of middle class Englishmen, he meant the poor, the Irish, and the Catholic.  Thanos is truly “Unbias” in this view of extermination, which is equally stupid but lacks the bigotry that comes with Malthusian theory.  

    Now let’s pretend Marvel actually understood the themes of their own movie and they genuinely wanted to talk about this world view, it is understandable they would want to desperate the idea from the baggage surrounding it, otherwise it is too easy to dismiss it.  So while in real life Malthusianism is linked to a bunch of other horrific ideologies, for the purpose of fiction it might be worth debating it on its own merits rather than as part of something else.  It’s not much of a debate because its objectively wrong, but I get the idea.  Try to argue with the theory on its own terms rather than what it is associated with.  

Here is the problem, I’m not sure if it is actually a good thing to separate these ideologies.  Cause Malthusianism literally doesn’t make sense if it isn’t linked to a larger world view, and more importantly Thanos doesn’t make sense.  What I meant by this is that Malthusianism is basically a rational that bigots come to in order to justify their existing bigots.  You embrace Malthus if you already regard the Irish as subhuman, and you need a justification killing 1.5 million of them.  Or if you already don’t want to pay taxes for social programs that help the poor, or if you already don’t want to send aid overseas or sell weapons to war zones.  It’s not a true ideology so much as it’s a way to make standard selfish bigotry seem more reasonable and palatable.  You don’t become a Malthusian because of the strengths of its argument, you become a Malthusian because you already wanted to dehumanize large groups of people and this is a method lets you not come to terms with your own actions.  And this is why Malthusians aren’t convinced by evidence, cause its less a scientific theory so much has a psychological defense mechanism.  

      And that is the problem, Thanos isn’t a bigot, so his attachment to Malthus doesn’t make any sense.  There is no reason why Thanos wouldn’t listen to anybody who suggests to him that “Hey this isn’t how like…anything works” or do some damn research on the subject.  Which means that Marvel is either

Positing Malthusian theory is correct in the universe of Marvel which is basically saying “In this world, Eugenics is real, but we should do the right thing anyways

Thanos is actually a really dumb guy who fell for the pseudo science and never checked his assumptions.  Which you know...isn’t impossible, but that isn’t how he is presented in the film, instead he is shown as a thoughtful if cruel man.  If his main flaw is not his indifference but instead his stupidity, then the movie did a very bad job of conveying that 

      Now this entire time I’ve been giving Marvel the benefit of the doubt and assuming they were doing this on purpose in order to fight back against Malthusian economics, but lets be honest, they don’t deserve that much credit.  Which goes back to the earlier post, which is that they keep mistaking Malthusian for Utilitarianism.  So it is again presenting killing half the population as “Practical but evil’ vs. the protagonists “Moral but inefficient” but as I mentioned before, this simply isn’t the case.  Malthusian theory of population isn’t just immoral, its actively incorrect.  But that isn’t how the conflict is framed, when Thanos and Dr. Strange argue, Strange is like “This is wrong because Trillions will die” while what he, a scientist, should be saying is “This is wrong because....that would not fix the problem like...at all”.  Because again, Thomas Malthus ideas were debunked in the mid 19th century, the only reason why they continue to be relevant today is that they provide a handy justification for racist practices, and as Thanos is not a racist, it doesn’t make sense that he would believe this.  

This also leads to another uncomfortable bit, in his discussion with Dr. Strange, Thanos says ‘Titan was like most planets, too many mouths, not enough to go around.  When we faced extinction I offered a solution”  That is actually quite similar to the “Useless Mouths” rhetoric used in post WWI Germany.  Historical context.  During WWI, Britain placed German under a blockade which basically put the whole country under siege.  Since Germany’s best chance of winning the war was a defensive conflict, slowly giving ground as the allies lost millions and hoping that the ally states would collapse, the steady lack of resources due to this blockade was devestating to the German War effort.  While France and Britain could endlessly resupply thanks to their colonies and the Americas, Germany steadily ran out of oil, iron, lead, and food, and the civilian population of Germany, largely unexposed directly to the war, slowly starved, particularly in the “Turnip Winter” of 1916.   While there was still food, most of it went to the army, leaving the civilians with nothing. About 763,000 German civilians*, the vast majority of German Civilian deaths during WWI, were due to the famine rather than Allied Weapons.   This is not counting those who died of the Spanish Flue epidemic, and an additional 100,000 civilians who died during the negotiation period.  This blockade would eventually lead to the fall of the Kaiserreich, as the civilian government eventually overthrew the Kaiser and negotiated the surrender of Germany.  

Hitler, a soldier in the trenches and thus not starving, was among many of the German army who felt the civilians had betrayed them, leading to the “Stabbed in the Back” myth.  One of the big right wing talking points after WWI was that “we could have won the war, if only we had killed all useless mouths, or “useless eaters”, Lebensunweertes Leben.  Specifically the disabled, though this theory would also be applied to a lesser extent to Jews, Roma, Homosexuals, Slavs, and leftists.  The term used was basically “Life unworthy of life” and the idea was that the weak Kaiser government should have killed all the ‘worthless” people so that Germany could have won the war, and Hitler’s government used this to justify their own extermination of the mentally ill, the idea was faced with starvation, Germany should have made the “difficult choice” to kill the weak for the strong to survive.  

(I hate this fucking story.)  

   Now obviously this world view is immoral but its also....wrong.  The fact is, even if Germany had killed all of the disabled, they would have lost the war anyways, its not like the disabled were using up oil and bullets that would have otherwise gone to the front, nor would it have fixed Germany’s manpower shortage or prevented the US from entering the war.  The conspiracy, like most conspiracy theories, came about because German soldiers didn’t want to face an uncomfortable truth.  That they had suffered, sacrificed, and fought heroically in a war they never had much chance of winning and all of their pain was in vain. The Useless Eater’s theory was just wrong, it was actively incorrect. 

   Now how does that relate to Thanos?  See I am not calling Thanos a Nazi, unlike Hitler or Malthus, Thanos isn’t targeting any one group, he isn’t saying “We need to kill the Irish, Catholics, Jews or disabled to survive” he is applying that same sort of Life Boat morality in a way real life advocates of it never do, because he is including his own empire and family within the category of “those who can be disposed of”  Thanos is looking at a whole vein of right wing thinking which has always existed as a cover for their real policies and taking it at face value and applying it to its own logical extreme, and there could be value in a character like that but...why is Thanos like this?  Why is he mindlessly accepting stupid theories he really should be smart enough to just dismiss this nonsense.  

And that lead to my larger issue with Infinity Wars, that I don’t think Disney realizes that Malthus was just morally wrong, but was factually wrong.  The conflict is presented as if Thanos’ ideas have merit, and so Thanos is presented as a smart guy who lacks empathy, while the actual problem is that he is incorrect.  And it fits the sort of “Status Que” feel of the MCU, where the Super Heroes are mostly preventing a worse future rather than building their own (Black Panther is the exception to this) 

(cough)

*That number is actually really disputed, there are some that put the number as low as 300,000 so don’t take that as the final word.  I tend to assume higher numbers because I don’t want to underscore the death of civilians, but this is not uncontested.  

#Fatal Flaw #Thanos #Diecast Thoughts #avengers endgame #MCU #Marvel #Expanded Universe #Tony Stark #Disney #Superhero Movies #Malthusian Theory #Thomas Malthus #irish potato famine #Utilitarianism #avengers infinity war #Infinity Wars #Endgame #Eugenics #IQ #Pseudo Science #social darwinism #Marvel Studios #Lebensunwertes Leben #Useless Eaters #Useless Mouths #Life unworthy of life

[manicpixiedreamjew]

ok i rewrote and revised my letter! let me know what you think

2/9/19

Rabbi Randy,                                              

As our Into class comes to an end, a lot has been on my mind. My spirituality, my values; how my perception of the world has changed as I solidify my Jewish identity, especially as a young woman. I spent a few hours poring over journal entries dating back all the way to 2016 this Shabbat, and a consistent theme stood out in all of them: an overwhelming, genuine urge to live an authentic Jewish life. I read, thrown back into the innocent curiosity, the puppy love, the childlike fascination with Jews and Judaism that began with a book. The Chosen, the very first Jewish book I read, and I’m sure I’ve told you this story before; I’ll spare the details.

Anyway, those first inklings of interest, say, early 2016, were academic. I was a vehement atheist born to a family of atheists. Then again, who has a nuanced understanding of religion and people-hood at sixteen? My atheism was an obstinate, cynical world view triggered by traumatic experiences with Christianity. When I picked up The Chosen, though...I was slapped right across the face. Judaism was the first thing that challenged my philosophies; it forced me into an entirely foreign universe I never thought I’d know, need or understand. It taught me empathy foremost, in those early days...studying Judaism exhorted me to bear the burden of others, to feed the hungry (a MAZON seminar comes to mind), comfort the weary. Looking at my journal, an entry dated 3/3/17 elaborates on the effects of antisemitism in America, and next to that a newspaper cut out of a Magen David. It wasn’t quite personal then, but it was something I wouldn’t have looked twice at a few years earlier. It disturbed me deeply.

Then, mid-late 2017. The journal entries shifted, as you’d expect; I’d been exhaustively involved in reading and researching by then. I see a lovingly inscribed entry detailing, religiously, my first Kabbalat Shabbat at CRC. 7/1/17. The smells, the melodies, my friends, the birthday celebration of two elderly men who loved baseball. “A deep, riveting admiration for something ancient and pulsing with life.” That puppy-love stage was in full effect, my love of Judaism and its personal implications blossomed over the springtime, although its fragrance wasn’t entirely sweet: I was forced to confront my identity and ask myself that looming question. Do I want to become a Jew?

That question threw me for a loop. It was an emotionally intense time. I confided to my closest friend that, although it may sound absurd, converting to Judaism was something I was interested in. I remember crying myself to sleep some nights because the decision was so massive, so heavy, so entirely suffocating for someone with no background in religion, no sense of community or family. Eventually, though, my fate did not seem so dire, and I came to my senses: I loved Judaism. I loved it, I love it. One of the first things that stood out to me and comforted me was the Jewish emphasis on family, something I never experienced. I clung to it: how someone’s always there for you;  how you’re adopted into world-wide support network called the Tribe. How no matter where you travel, anywhere in the world, someone will enthusiastically invite you over for Shabbat lunch. How, because you are Jewish, you will never suffer alone.

That, then, began my serious resolve to be Jewish, do Jewish and live Jewish.

Ever since I met with you on 11/21/17 (I have an entry for that, too!), my life has been a foray into Jewishness. You told me to start observing Shabbat and Yom Tov, and I did so with vigor: I bought a chanukiah, acquired the shiniest candlesticks I could, and read every book the local library had regarding proper observances. I look back on my first few holidays and laugh now, playfully admonishing myself for my mistakes and mishaps. But that’s the fun, right? If I learned anything from this week’s Parsha (Terumah), it’s that the means are more much important than the end, the intention more meaningful than the actualization. Late 2017 to early 2018 was all that: learning, doing, experiencing, interacting, existing with a fat dose of humility. Organizing a basic Jewish vocabulary, and through Shabbat services and working with the community, pinning down what it means to live a Jewish life.

Enter 2018! This was, perhaps, the most frustrated and chaotic year on my Journey to Jewish. To start, it was my last semester of high-school. Everything, and I mean Everything, was dependent on my graduation—most saliently my own happiness and sanity. My synagogue attendance was dwindling, my ambition and motivation was all but absent. I’ve always suffered from depression and severe anxiety, but its clutch tightened horribly those first few months. I managed to attend a Kol Nidre service in early September—and, it remains one of my most beautiful and cherished memories to date. December, I know, was the hardest. Between my Catholic father making crusade jokes and my Jesus-obsessed mother spewing casual antisemitism, between unending loads of coursework and no free time, I felt my spirit literally withering. This never weakened my resolve to live Jewishly, but some days I just couldn’t bring myself to enact the values I knew I held in my heart. Some days Judaism felt like a beloved friend, and others Judaism felt like a stranger. Nevertheless I continued to live as Jewish a life I could, but even kindling the Chanukah candles felt joyless. I was like Tevye standing in the middle of the woods, anguished, as his horse refused to budge. Through all of it, though—the sadness, numbness, friction—I was never, ever, once deterred. That’s how life is sometimes. But to be a Jew, as our own Reb Tevye zealously insisted, you must have hope.

And I did. This is when Judaism became real to me, when I realized it was a part of my life and etched into my very being. If I could live Jewishly, study, be a part of my community and find solace while also dealing with these hardships, this was clearly meant to be. I’ve been using “us” and “we” pronouns for a few months now, referring to myself as Jewish even though I’ve yet to immerse in a mikveh. When our class visited the Holocaust museum, the loss and heartache I felt was profoundly intimate...a personal loss, the loss of family I never had the opportunity to know and love. I had never experienced anything like that before, and it continues to haunt me. I’ve been the target of hateful and ignorant remarks. People have glowered at my Magen David; they’ve called me names and insulted me. “Christ killer, money hoarder, dirty Jew.”

But, and I’m a bit weepy remembering this, living Jewishly (and loudly at that) is a blessing. Maybe two summers ago I catered to an older family for their son’s graduation party. An uncle approached me, blinked at my Magen David and muttered “bless you.” I was visibly shaken; I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Later in the evening the grandmother touched my shoulder and asked, “are you Jewish?” I told her I was a conversion student. She embraced me, dug out dreidels from her kitchen drawer, and told me that she was separated from her Judaism during childhood. That it was too dangerous for her to practice, that she wanted to go back to synagogue now that she was safe. I encouraged her daughter to finally have her bar mitzvah. My heart was full. Another memory I’m fond of: wishing a stranger chag Pesach sameach and Shabbat Shalom on the street. He was wearing a kippah. The smile on that man’s face was unforgettable.

Those moments, to me, were godly. Actions are a conduit of holiness; I’ve learned that over the years. To act with intent and sanctify the mundane is second nature to us. A bracha, a kind word, charity, song...everything is a vessel for godliness.

Fast forward a bit: 2019. As I grew into my adult identity, so did I into my Jewish identity. I had my 18th birthday, graduated, passed my driving test. I began to wrap my hair on Shabbat, meditate on the Sh’ma swathed in a tallit, give tzedakah. Often times I sat in the little CRC classroom and pondered on the application of my learning: how it translated into my everyday life, how it reconciled with my values as a progressive woman in today’s society...but mostly, I think, I thought about how at home I felt. I walk into CRC and immediately feel at peace; a part of a family, the member of a loving household. I walk into the sanctuary and about a dozen people are ready to greet me with big, heartfelt smiles. It melts me every single time.

Alright, I’ll quit boring you with all this schmaltz.

I’m not sure that there was one definite moment when I knew, for sure, that being Jewish was the right choice for me. In fact, to assume all that soul searching could fit into one tiny, fleeting, ephemeral moment is ridiculous...as you know from the absurd length of this letter, which is only a minute fraction of my story. Seriously, I could go on, and on, and on; but I digress. Sitting at our Sukkot celebration and dancing with all the other people, looking up through the sukkah and marveling at the hanging plants and leaves. Baking challah on Friday morning and realizing that somewhere, other Jewish women are doing the exact same thing. Feeling warm summer wind on my face, seeing fireflies flicker through the bushes and knowing that HaShem is there. Touching my siddur to the Torah for the first time and bristling, feeling as though something breathed new life into me. Group Aliyah, a guiding hand on my shoulder as we chant the brachot in clumsy unison…

Each moment (and many more, and yet more to come) reaffirmed the fact that Judaism is my home. Ruth said it more succinctly and eloquently than I ever could: Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God.

Randy, I never thought I’d be doing this. Ever. Looking back at the learning and growing I’ve done, reading those journals and reminiscing on my journey, I can firmly say, if you agree, I’m ready to enter this Covenant officially.

Thank you for everything, as always,

Zoë

#oops its 5 pages #save

[19possums-blog]

On tianshan relationship and their fandom, i guess ?

hello there @nightfayre !! Im the 5asks anon lol (the one abt the last chapter of tianshan). I wanted to thank you for your answer and continue to rant in your askbox but i figured it was so long that mb it would crash ur box lmao, so I... kind of created a blog..... hm. well theres no bad reasons to create an account is there lol ?? (also is there no way to send a long ask ?? why is it so limited :(( )

So once again thank you for anwser, and what an answer ! You raised many points i didnt think about and that was very interesting. I knew i would be glad to hear your thoughts ! the rest under a read more coz i think its going to be looong lol

(( To do a sort of disclaimer : I despise fandom discourse and im more of the mentality “let ppl enjoy what they want as long as it dont hurt real life ppl”, and “dont like dont interact”. So everything im going to say is not an attack against anyone, but just a way of prolonging a manhwa that i like. Most of all, i want to emphasize that at the end of the day, its just a manhwa : it doesnt justify being mean or aggressive towards other real life ppl. If you find yourself raging while reading fandom wank, just stop reading, block, and go outside a little. My way of enjoying the manhwa is to be analytical, to criticize (positively and negatively) and to look at the material source as well as the fandom in itself ; if its (understandably lol) not your definition of fun, this post may not be for you !))

Ur totally right in saying that the hardest thing is separate morality, reality and fiction. I hope my asks didn't come across as a 'u shouldnt like tianshan bc its not morally good'. There is a lot of puritan push back on tumblr lately, and im totally against it. Everyone is free to like/ship what they want ; reading only ‘morally good’ literature wont prevent you to become a nasty person - i would argue itd be the exact opposite, as your spirit wont be trained to think critically or to evaluate a situation (and every situations is always grey) by your own means. Also, its important to separate fantasies/what you like to read and who you are/what you do. To be embarrassingly honest, and like many people, one of my sexual fantasy is rape ; but in my real life, im in a queer anarchist collective that actively fights against rape culture and defends rape victims. That is why i dont have a problem with SheLI/Mo shippers (or even HeCheng/SheLi shippers) even if its not my cup of tea, but i would have a problem if in real life (irl) ppl would say to irl Mo that irl SL is good for him (or if they wouldnt find it wrong that a irl 30yo Cheng is involved wt an irl 15yo Li). I digress.

But then again this confusion about fiction/reality/morality is at the core of the tianshan fandom -and many fandoms. I dont know about you, but i grossly see 3 types of ‘trends’ depending on how ppl interact with the source material  :

1.The ones who think you cant like something while being critical of it. I love 19 days but I think there are flaws in it, beyond tianshan dynamic (like how OX handles the transition between funny and dramatic moments –I think its badly done). It doesn’t mean I personally hate OX and wish harm to their family oc. Worse than this, the ones who, because they dont like certain things in 19 days, feel free to harass OX on their social media.  Here its a confusion between fiction and reality and a lack of critical thinking.

2. the ones that loves Tianshan because they think it fits the trope “Dark, handsome, tortured violent boy who is violent towards fragile, sweet, pure cute boy because he loves him” and the typically associated trope “the pure boy will change the violent boy by the pureness of his heart”. Aka the most common yaoi trope. Again, if it pleases people to see Tianshan like this, good for them and i hope they have a nice time reading 19 days. Lets face it, I love really bad yaoi and books. Its just not how i see tianshan at all, but to each their own. I just have a problem when these ppl insist that its an ok behavior to have in real life and say things like “possessiveness is a proof of love” uncritically (hint : it isnt). For me, its the difference between enjoying fast food (thats okay), and wanting to force everyone to eat fast food and to find it pleasurable (not okay).

3. the ones that think what you like in literature defines who you are, and so in order to be a “good person” you have to only like “morally good litterature” -there are the ones I personally find the more interesting bc they can ask good questions. But alas, in most cases its just puritanism badly disguised and currently they are in all fandoms. Lets not delve into the issue of this statement : what is ‘morally good’ ? who are in the authority to proclaim what is good ? how can you recognize what is ‘morally good’ if you dont see what is ‘morally not good’ ? is it literature’s responsibility to educate its audience ? do literature have to point out “watch out audience what just happened is not okay” as if we were brainless children ? whats more important : what you like reading or what you do irl ? .... Okay i totally delve into this lmao. Here its a confusion between fiction and morality and a rejection of critical thinking : we could say its like when the Catholics prohibited women from reading bc it would pervert them and think of the children).

Returning to the specifics of what we've been talking about  : so in this last case, you (generic ‘you’) think that you are a good person ; so you have to read morally good literature. So in this case, fandom isnt just a harmless hobby, but a proof of how you are morally good, imagine the stakes ! But alas, you happen to like 19 days and most specifically tianshan. You said (@nightfayre​ ) that you judge Tianshan unhealthy as they are now, and i wholeheartedly agree with you, so im not going to discuss why since you already explained it so well. So, what happens when you like a morally not good ship, but you think liking morally dubious things makes you a bad person ? You bent over backwards to explain that, in fact, this ship is morally good, to protect your integrity. And thats why, in 19days fandom since the last chapter (and its the same thing with every chapter where flaws of HT are revealed!), there are many posts going around “hm, in fact, what He Tian did is good ! i know it can seems like hes a violent asshole who dont respect MGS because he punches him, threatens him, and dont listen to him, but hm.... in fact its because he’s nice...” and then they do mental gymnastics to justify what is, obviously, not morally justifiable. And i find its a pity because, my guy, my buddy, nobody is going to throw you tomatoes if you like a morally dubious character, and also bc nothin is morally good ! everybody does what they think is the best in ‘problematic situations’ ! and thats what make life interesting ! and so, 19 days interesting ! The flaws of HT (and MGS) are what drawn ppl to his character, bc it makes him real, its makes him contradictory, we can project ourselves in him, and we can see a complicated character with awesome latent potential. And yes, treating someone like a territory bc you care about them is a flaw lol. (on this subject : i saw ppl saying that its protectiveness and not possession : if you protect someone like you would protect a territory, then its not a healthy protection. you deal with a human whose agency you must respect, contrary to a territory).

MGS and HT are the product of what happen to them in their early childhood and then their adolescence. Like you said, they grow up in a violent, twisted world, where being emotionally distant is the norm. I would even say that they are expected to conform to the standards of (toxic) masculinity : channel all your emotions into anger, caring is being weak and feminine, prove your worth by your physical strength, be in control in all ur relationship, etc. I would say thats why Mo is so hostile towards HT : HT challenges his masculinity, by seducing him (everyone know that the biggest fear of macho men like HT and Mo is being considered gay -_-) and being stronger than him. Lets face it, Mo has kind of a homophobic issue, like all the boys. Between JY who tells HT its disgusting being told hes handsome by a man (at the beginning of the manhwa, i hope by now he had grown out of it), or Mo who tells HT he isnt happy that a guy is on his bed or who desperately wants to prove his heterosexuality by saying he likes all cute girls to his baldy friend... HT is more nuanced, but at the end, when he ‘seduces’ Mo, its always predatory. He doesnt let himself being vulnerable and he aggressively touches Mo even without his consent. For me, its a way of proving his domination, not his interest (and when i say that, i dont mean that HT is not genuinely interested in Mo -just that his actions dont translate this). ZZX is the only one who seems to have a healthy relationship with his masculinity lol, but then hes the healthy one in all aspects (thats why i dont like his character and am not invested in zhanyi, even if irl i would love to be his friend).

With all that being said, oc HT wont know how to adequately express genuine concern and interest in Mo ! This sort of social interactions is not something you just know, its smth you learn. And in HT and Mo’s cases, nobody was there to teach them -we could even say that ppl in their life made them unlearn caring behaviors. So HT does what he does best : he fights and forces, and is surprised when Mo thinks (obviously) HT is evil. And also, like you said, Mo will never be (at least how he is now) a driving force in their relationships bc he will always run away from bonding with ppl. So here we are, HT being the only driving force in their relationship, the same HT who only knows violence. No wonder that their relationship is like this...

As it is, i feel like tianshan is kind of in an impasse right now. One or the other is going to have to evolve if we want to see their relationships changing. Either HT learns how to care without being violent (seems complicated if Mo doesnt challenges him, bc HT isnt going to realize this without feedback since its how he has always functioned), or, more likely, Mo is going to be honest with him and tell him that his behavior is hurting him. Though more probable, I dont see it happening anytime soon : for one, Mo isnt capable of seeing when he is hurting emotionally and what is hurting him ; and also, bc Mo doesnt know any other language than violence, not unlike HT. I think its smth most of the fandom ignore, how violence is smth that HT and MGS both have in common, and how if HT wasnt violent, MGS certainly wouldnt consider him at all.

Anw im excited to see where OX is going with all this ! Like you said, the forced kiss was pivotal to their relationship, so im kind of hoping it would be the same here ! I just hope they wont... do like usual and just put a funny chapter and ignore this latest development.....

OMG i wrote soo much and there is so much i still want to say.... i think im going to do a second post... sorry about the spam lmao

( @nightfayre : i dont know how this site works yet, is @ you alright ? will it show you my post in your notif or should i send an ask ?  bc i want you to see my answer, but i dont want you to feel pressurized to respond or interact or anything !! above all dont feel pressurized, i was sad last night when you wrote ‘im sorry to not answer more quicly’ bc you should answer at your own rhythm or not answer ! your blog is a hobby, not an obligation, so dont feel bad to not do more when yo already do much !! )

#19days #19 days #tianshan

[septembersung]

The year wanes. We approach Advent, a penitential season, and “the birthday of the Unconquered Light,” as Pope Benedict XVI called it. In the midst of the spiritual war we wage every day against sin and “principalities and powers,” the Church struggles in the mire of a second “long Lent,” this ongoing crisis of abuse and scandalous bishops. (Scandal not as in “being shocked,” but in the theological sense, of leading the faithful into error and sin.)

In this context, consider: humility and pride. The noblest virtue and the oldest vice. And both have been co-opted by modernism, that is, by our atheistic, relativistic, self-serving culture.

Humility is self-forgetfulness. False humility is self-referential; it is pride with a mask on. False humility is the creeping poison corrupting our souls and even how we understand and live faith.

So much of what we hear in “social justice” discourse relies on false humility. How often do we hear, for all kinds of situations or issues, accusations like, “Your situation doesn’t apply to everyone!”;“Not everyone has your circumstances!”; “You’re not me so you can’t judge my actions!”; “You’re not X so you can’t say anything about X!”

Like most successful false arguments, there’s a grain of truth there: each person and each person’s circumstances are a little bit different, and when forming judgments about situations and actions, it’s essential to make sure we have all the facts, or qualify our judgment accordingly.

But when it comes to human experience, the truth really is usually somewhere in the middle. Some advice I’ve held onto since elementary school: if you have a question in class and are afraid to ask, there’s probably other people who have the same question, and are also afraid to ask. That has never not been proven true. The point is: Everyone’s experiences are a little bit different, but no experience is completely unique. “I’m the only one who didn’t get it” and “I’m the only one who could get it” are both statements of pride; the former is pride in the guise of false humility.

What the self-doubt/false humility argument does is enforce relativism: because of x and y differences, no individual can make judgments about others’ actions.

The “enforcer” in the argument is perpetuated self-doubt, which creates false humility. “I can’t possibly be right in any judgment I make because I’m me” means inevitably, “No absolute applies,” “No one has the right to apply an absolute.”

False humility cements the relativistic inversion of morality: to prioritize the individual over absolute truth. False humility is “doubting” ourselves so much we’re more certain of our self-doubt than objective truths and evidence which can correct us.

False humility is the enemy of making a good confession. False humility prevents us from calling a sin and sin and holding ourselves accountable for it. “Am I really to blame? With all these extenuating circumstances was it really a sin? I try so hard to be a good Catholic, and I don’t feel super sinful. Am I evaluating my life and actions correctly? What if I’m being scrupulous?” We doubt ourselves so much we cannot accuse our consciences with conviction. We’re too “smart” to fall for “be a sinner and sin boldly,” but we’re not smart enough to step outside this sin-subverting agnosticism.

Pride is the original sin: Adam and Eve made themselves, their own understanding and desires, the standard of judgment, rather than God. Pride is the root of the unforgivable sin: the refusal to ask for forgiveness. Or, with this cringing false humility, the learned inability to see the sin to ask forgiveness for.

Pride destroyed paradise, mortally wounded human nature, nailed Christ to the cross. Pride cast Lucifer into hell. So it will do to us.

Yet we live in a society so eaten up with the rot of pride we can hardly identify it when we see it.

Even Christians too often use “invincible ignorance” and “full knowledge” as an excuse to avoid examining their own consciences too closely, or asking others to examine theirs. That is, “I couldn’t possibly have known, therefore I won’t be held accountable,” and “I didn’t have full knowledge, so it wasn’t a mortal sin.”

Invincible ignorance is real, yes, but we are held accountable for not pursuing truth.

It’s true we are not culpable for a mortal sin we did not know was a mortal sin, but we can be culpable for not seeking the full truth, and, culpable or not, if an objectively mortally sinful act is committed - that requires reparation.

The year is waning. We will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King tomorrow, the last Sunday in October (in the traditional calendar.) In the final weeks of the liturgical year we will praise the glorious saints in heaven and beg their intercession that we may join them one day. We will pray for the Poor Souls enduring the final purification before they are united with Christ. We will look to our own death, feel our own mortality, contemplate with holy dread and awe the Four Last Things. As the year is reborn, we will remember Christ’s first coming with joy and prepare with supplication and confidence for His Second Coming.

But can Christ be king in a heart so self-referential that He and His Truth are not the first standard of judgment for all we see and do and think? Can we take the reality of Hell seriously if we cannot take our own sin seriously, if we can’t even see and identify our sin? Can our confidence, our faith, in our own salvation be real and just if it is not joined to genuine sorrow for sin?

Can we hope to withstand the accusations of the Just Judge if we cannot stand to accuse ourselves?

God is infinitely merciful, but He is also infinitely just. It is a sin, the sin of presumption, to assume that His merciful nature means we will not be held accountable for failing to examine our consciences in detail, for failing to fully repent and reform our lives.

The day is coming when we will be judged, each and every one of us, for all that we did and did not do - including what we did and did not do interiorly, in forming and examining our consciences, in seeking truth, in accusing our conscience, in holding ourselves accountable. On that day, when we meet the Just Judge face to face, there will be no more excuses, no more illusions, no more pretense. No more hope. Hope will be fulfilled, and presumption will be denied. We will see what we are in naked truth.

We can change what we will see that day. Right now, right this very minute, in many and varied ways God is giving us what theologians call actual graces: invitations and desires to repent, to know and love Him, to seek salvation, to do good, to make reparation, to pray - to throw ourselves on His Mercy. When we accept those graces and act on them, we can find, identify, and denounce our pride, every last sneaking tendril of it bound around our hearts.

The year is waning. Our Judge and Sovereign King is coming. He is on His way to deliver unmitigated justice. And whether we want to or not, our mortal frames are running to meet Him. The day of justice comes swiftly. The day of mercy is now.

Now is the only time we will ever be given to “prepare the way of the Lord, make straight His paths.”

"Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Phil 2:12-13

#my catholic thoughts #catholic #edited for clarity