bethanyactually

[bethanyactually]

1. holstein 2. jersey

3. brahman 4. highland

6. texas longhorn 7. black angus

8. brown swiss 9. guernsey

10. watusi 11. hanwoo

#highland sweep #cows #poll

[bethanyactually]

Add your culture/region in the tags if you want to! Anon is slavic and never knocks.

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

#at my parents' house or my brother's I'll knock and open the door usually #poll

[bethanyactually]

Posting due to an emergency- please share widely if you're local to Chicagoland.

If anyone in the Chicagoland area sees this, a friend's service dog prospect is in need of immediate boarding from tomorrow until May 6. Winnie is about 40 pounds and is not dog-reactive at all, but the person caring for her was hospitalized and so my buddy is looking for a short term emergency foster!

I'm available to help with any transportation (you wouldn't need to drive her anywhere!) and compensation+coverage for food/medical/etc. would be involved. You wouldn't need to pay for her stuff, just make sure she has a place to stay and walk her and call me if she needs to go to the vet.

If this is something you or someone you know could help with, please let me know. It's an emergency situation, so for the first time in... well over a year, I am opening my inbox in case this is something you can help with. Please DM me if you or anyone you know can help.

[bethanyactually]

‘the point of fiction is to build the world we want to see!’ respectfully. No It Is Not.

#YEAH kelsey -> #the point of LIVING is to build the world we want to see #the point of fiction is tp put some made up guys in imaginary situations #stories are important #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

this this this

#thanks i hate it #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

NANCY DREW 4.01  The Dilemma of the Lover’s Curse

#his hannnnd his fucking hand in that first gif #did I just watch that gif 17 times in a row? yes. might watch it another 17 times before I’m done writing these tags #the LONGING is so palpable in this scene #nancy x ace #the dilemma of the lover’s curse #nancy drew cw #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

The Golden Girls - 2.11 - ‘Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas

#the video is entirely delightful #golden girls #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

I’ve been thinking about something at my job—not difficult, honestly, my job leaves lots of thinking time—and I have something I want to share with the folks who object to the label “culturally Christian.” I hope it may help you make more sense of the label and, perhaps, not be so angry about it, if you’ll indulge me for just two minutes.

I was born as a white gentile. While I later found out this wasn’t entirely true—I have Jewish ancestry and there is a small-but-non-zero chance I’m partly Black through my great-grandmother, which is a story too long to get into here—I am, for all visual intents and purposes, white, and count myself as such.

And the first time I heard myself included in the phrase “white supremacy,” I WAS SO FUCKING UNCOMFORTABLE. Couldn’t we call it anything else? Why are you including me in this? I didn’t ask to be born white. I don’t run around in a pointy hood burning crosses. I’m not even racist. Black people can do anything white people can do! I am NOT a white supremacist!

….except. I kinda am. And it is not a choice I made, it is a choice that was made for me 400 and 160 and 120 and 80 and 50 and 35 years ago. Slavery and deliberately-botched emancipation and “separate but equal” and killing of Black leaders and the simple fact both my parents were white. Textbooks that hold up Eli Whitney as a hero and promote the lie of The Great Empty Wilderness and never ask us to wrestle with what it means when the majority of a population is counted as only three-fifths of a human being. Redlining and even the fucking freeway system—I didn’t design any of this, but I live in the world where it exists.

G-d willing, I will not be a white supremacist until the day I die: G-d willing, the systems we are struggling against will have been replaced with better, kinder, more equitable systems. But I don’t get to opt out by saying “I’m not racist!” Yes, I’ve put in a ton of work to unlearn harmful racist behaviors and attitudes. But as long as a Black woman in my position with my experience makes less money than me, I’m benefiting from white supremacy. As long as I get the job, the car, the loan, the opportunity because someone else had locs and I “looked professional,” I’m benefiting from white supremacy. And yes—as long as people aren’t deliberately stupid about my name because they associate it with white cultures, I’m benefiting from white supremacy. The fact I’m white is morally neutral. What I choose to do with that fact is what matters.

And so: we come back to cultural Christianity.

The law of probability says if you’re on this site, you’re probably from a culture with a Christian hegemony. That’s going to cover the Americas, Europe, and to a lesser extent, portions of central and south Africa (both the creatively-named country and the continent). Even if your country mostly considers itself secular, if your answer to “what year is it” is automatically “2024” without having to ask “on which calendar,” you’re probably from a country with a Christian background.

THIS IS A MORALLY NEUTRAL THING. You do not choose which country you’re born in or what its centuries-old culture is. And that’s fine! And it doesn’t mean anything about your personal beliefs. You can be an atheist born to atheists, you can be Buddhist, it is literally whatever.

BUT, to an extent, the place you grew up will absolutely have an impact on your thoughts and morals, because it’s all you’ve ever known. Because the choice to be culturally Christian is not one you made—it was made for you 2000 and 1800 and 1700 and 1200 and 1000 and 800 and 400 and 200 and 50 years ago. Taboos, laws, unspoken rules you’ve never thought twice about, this is not stuff you pick. It’s baked into the world around you. And if you want to unlearn that, you can’t just say “well I’m not Christian so I don’t have Christian morals or values!” and leave it at that. It’d be a beautiful thing if we could, but that’s not the way brains work.

Which means—even if you’re satisfied with what you believe—you should ASK YOURSELF why you believe it, and HOW. One of the biggest things I hear mentioned by other Jews in relation to cultural Christianity is people being black-and-white absolutists. This is true, so that is a lie. That is wrong, so this is right. There is no space given to the idea that maybe everyone is telling the truth as they see it, or that something is right for some times/people/places but wrong for others. And this gets into the harmful territory of “it’s true so I believe it and because I believe it, it’s true.”

So ask yourself why. Start deconstructing your beliefs and learning about new things—and yes, make world religions part of those new things, because religions are major cultural shapers, and also you’d be stunned how many of us 1) do not proselytize and 2) encourage actual study and questioning over blind faith and obedience (hint: it’s most of us. These two things that are taken as universal constants by a lot of atheists ARE EXPLICITLY CHRISTIAN), and there is no harm in learning about our cultures. (You know who’d say there is? Say it with me, kids: evangelical Christians.)

I’m still uncomfortable with being referred to in the context of white supremacy. But part of unlearning racism and, yes, white supremacy, was learning to recognize that is not a discussion I get to steer, because it’s not about me. It’s about people of color explaining, quantifying, and discussing their experiences. So I will be uncomfortable if need be, because that’s a me problem, for me to work on. That is part of what being a good ally and a good neighbor means.

Please give Jews that same grace. Yes, it can be uncomfortable to realize that yeah, you WERE affected by this thing you want to separate yourself from, especially if you have religious trauma. (Side note: if you do, I genuinely and strongly encourage you to seek therapy for it. As an evangelical cult escapee I can tell you it’s helped me a lot.) But you owe it to yourself, and if you genuinely want to dismantle that hegemony, you also owe it to others. While you’re yelling about how you don’t like the words we have created to describe our experiences, we’re working to fix the hegemony you claim to hate.

So: stop focusing on the word. Your discomfort with it is a you problem. Focus on WHAT IT’S TALKING ABOUT, because truly coming to a level playing ground and rebuilding will require you to have allies—not burned bridges all around.

#white supremacy #cultural christianity #examining biases #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

#our cat cinna loves getting rides on top of things #he doesn't like being in bags or boxes but if he can see clearly and is able to jump off if he chooses he loves being carted around #we used to have a small cat tree in front of a big window and to open the window we had to move the cat tree #and cinna would hear me unlocking the window and come RUNNING and jump onto the cat tree so he could be on it when I carried it back #he does it with a cardboard cat scratcher we have in this house too #we open the kitchen door and put the scratcher there for him so he can watch the birds and squirrels by the birdfeeder #and when he hears us opening the door he appears out of nowhere and jumps on the scratcher so we can carry him to the door #video #the internet was made for cats #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

i think that sometimes the best thing that you can do is remind yourself that there are beaches. lakes, rivers, and ponds. there are forests. little woods and meadows. there are canyons. gullies and mountain cliffs. there are rainy days. dry spells and scorching blue skies. that the world turns. changes as much as it repeats. that feeling slow today won't stop tomorrow's high tide. won't make july's blackberries any less ripe

#hang in there everybody #good things #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

Get it together, Drew. You don’t believe in ghosts. Right?

#nancy drew #the secret of the old morgue #nancy drew cw #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

#lol prev -> #just like in lion king #the internet was made for cats

[bethanyactually]

#democracy requires participation #don't trust anyone who tells you not to participate #us politics #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

Reblog for larger sample size. Feel free to indicate in the comments your generation, approximate region of residence, your length of experience with fan fiction, or when/where you first encountered these terms.

#how explicit the smut is #fanfic #poll

[bethanyactually]

Endlessly diabolical how you can't say words like rape and suicide uncensored without either being criticised by idiots or punished by conglomerates.

#censorship hurts everyone #queue of themyscira

[bethanyactually]

#amazing

[bethanyactually]

MISS CONGENIALITY 2000 — dir. Donald Petrie

#happy perfect date to all who celebrate #miss congeniality #april 25th