nightlament

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Alex Dimitrov, Poem Written in a Cab

#alex dimitrov #poetry #quotes #typography #poem #poet #text #poets #autumn #poems #spring #light #x #lit #literature #contemporary poetry #growing #healing

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The A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, located in Philadelphia, is hosting its second annual Summer Research Program; our program aims to provide undergraduate students the opportunity to immerse in rich and innovative mentored research experiences focused on autism.  The Autism Institute is the first research organization to focus on a public health science approach to understanding and addressing the challenges of autism. Our program is seeking talented undergraduate students from diverse ethnic, cultural, socio-economic, and neurodiverse backgrounds who seek to immerse themselves in research and public health community impact programs. Research activities may include opportunities to learn skills at multiple points in the research cycle:

Developing a research idea or hypothesis

Study set-up and implementation

Study recruitment and data collection

Data management and analysis

Results reporting, presenting, and communicating

Research funding efforts

Applications are due by March 15, 2022 Visit this document to learn more.

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hello letterboxd user. in the last year you have reviewed atleast five movies with the phrase "be gay do crime" including gregg araki's 1992 film The Living End. on your left you will find a composition notebook and ballpoint pen, you have one minute to use your critical thinking skills and write one original thought about a film or I will simply run you over with my car

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i don’t feel like negativity is some kind of massive societal issue. on the contrary i feel like false positivity is constantly enforced as a social norm. and that discussing upsetting or traumatic subjects and experiences is regarded as extremely socially taboo. like, i think we could all afford to complain a little bit more and be a bit more comfortable talking about certain subjects :))

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still can’t believe he’s gone: this christmas will be our 140th without dostoyevsky

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Edmonton Journal, Alberta, December 21, 1937

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the thing is also that rich people cannot understand how many of those small moments of appreciation for life poor people have to miss out on. the difference between a poor person and a rich person who work the exact same hours is that the rich person has free time. even with the same hours!

i spent a lot of time at my best friend’s place during my senior year of high school. his mom is an exec at a company literally all of you have heard of. she worked hard! and for long hours, longer than many of her coworkers and some of her subordinates (she was overworked, technically, because the company had made her absorb the job of a second person.)

still, on the off occasion that we got to talking in the realm of workers’ rights, there was still some barely-perceptible catch in her view of work that i felt ultimately disallowed her from viewing working lifestyles as something influenced by the systematic and not merely the personal. and when i think about it, this might be why:

when my best friend’s mom came home from work, in the late evening or at night, she would take off her heels at the door before padding across the persian rug and collapsing onto what is probably my favorite couch, a huge sectional with seats as wide as mattresses. the walls intersecting behind it were glass, so as she caught her breath she could see a number of things: always the shimmering lights of manhattan; if it were still evening, and fall, the autumn leaves of the entire length of central park; if it were summer, a whole dome of sunset and, on rare occasions, fireworks that burst right in front of the balcony, at eye-level from a spot on the 25th floor.

on days when she came home late, she never had to cook. my friend’s father, a househusband, may have cooked something already, or we might have ordered sushi, or gone to one of the hundreds of restaurants within walking distance. if she didnt want much there was always cheese in the fridge, or wine in the cupboard, or espresso, or something novel: maybe i had brought them cake, maybe someone else had.

there was a lot of difficulty in raising her kids, but none of it came from their educational environments, which is more than most can say. both of her sons were in top public schools. the one i went to with her older son let us dual-enroll at columbia. if i had known her sons earlier, they would both have been enrolled at new york’s lycee francais. her younger son was disabled, that’s difficult no matter who you are. his speech now is slow, but clear. i imagine speech therapy costs money. i imagine it’s more stressful to have a child who can’t speak when you know you can’t afford to raise them into a teenager who can. but now, when she sits on the couch and asks her sons about their days, they complain about the too-fast pace of columbia calculus or the annoyance of not being able to pronounce a particular diphthong in french. real complaints. complaints that could be worse.

there are other things too, like how the apartment (save for the boys’ room) was always clean even when i visited impromptu . (once, i came completely unannounced to surprise the younger one with a slice of birthday cake, but there was only a cleaning lady— i’m guessing the apartment complex sent cleaners every two weeks or so.) celebration was easy, fun was easy—when she heard i’d received my first college acceptance, she immediately took us all out for dinner, and then back in for a nightcap. i had chartreuse for the first time. when something good happens there is champagne, there is caviar. they do not have to worry about safety, on the 25th floor of a complex with a front desk who calls to announce visitors and packages. beyond these there are surely a hundred other privileges that i cannot imagine because i’ve grown up with the same ones.

and all of this happens outside of work, which is why i reiterate: respite makes all the difference. and if you are rich i believe it is difficult to see that even while you work the same (or longer!) hours or “as hard as” the working poor, the passive respite that comes from your wealth— the persian rug and the fluffy couch and the city lights and the sunset and the well-learned children and clean kitchen and leftover camembert— is giving you so much more life than the surroundings of any poorer person when they get home. the plain relaxation of the worker only seems egregious when you do not realize that their time at home is not ever relaxation, and yours is.

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actually 2 build on that post i just rb’d, making my own bc i dont want to derail but there is nothing radical feminism as a movement has done or said that other feminisms havent done or said better and with more nuance. there is a reason why 2nd wave feminism and specifically radical feminism is criticized heavily, not in the least because it was extremely racist and homogenizing.

radfem presupposes “woman” as a distinct, oppressed class, and doesn’t take anything else (such as race, class, ability, age, education, and so on) into account, to the detriment of understanding “womanhood” (whatever that may mean) as a whole, complex, and fluid category. on top of how this then begs the question of what “woman” then means (and in this context it Always means cis, dyadic, white women), “woman” as a class cannot feasibly exist without differing intersections and experiences.

no one woman has the same life as another, and claiming all women are united on the basis of being women erases how white supremacy has always played a leading role in how white women will side with white men, will uphold the brutal systems in place, will choose their whiteness over their supposed solidarity with “women” in general, while women of color have been left behind and been oppressed by the same white women claiming to be their sisters-in-arms.

beyond this, white feminists in general (but especially radfems) are guilty of only seeing themselves as women – that is to say, they are individuals with agency and autonomy – whereas women in the global south and racialized women more generally speaking will be universalized into an object to be saved. they are no more women than they are victims, the difference between a farmer in nigeria and the pampered daughter of an official in vietnam not taken into account. all women in the global south are seen as an ahistorical, universalized monolith suffering under patriarchy above all else, and must therefore be “liberated” by white feminists who know so much better and have their own freedom to help others… or whatever. intra-community tensions, according to them, do not exist. a lower caste woman and an upper caste woman in india are the same in these feminists’ eyes.

radical feminist thought goes hand-in-hand with white supremacy bc of this, and it goes hand-in-hand with terfism (remember, terf stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist) for much the same reason. the definition of “woman” in their view cannot include trans women because they view men to be the ultimate oppressor and being a man the ultimate privilege; in their view, nobody would want to give up the social capital “being a man” would grant, nevermind the fact that trans women arent men and this is not how any of that works.

bioessentialism and the idea of “woman” as a distinct class/“womanhood” as an overarching experience are the foundations upon which radfem is built, and you cannot divorce these ideals frm the source to talk about what you believe to be “good points” in an otherwise bad movement.

radfem rhetoric is terf rhetoric.

if you want to quote feminists n feminist ideas there are dozens of other movements (materialist feminism, womanism, marxist feminism, etc etc) you can call upon instead of one that is historically violent and upholds the interests of whiteness and cis dyadic womanhood above all else.

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someone in the replies of one of jkr's tweets was like "you really can't let us enjoy your books huh" and it's like??? you guys are just transphobes like i really don't know what to say. protecting trans women will always be infinitely more important than a fucking book. grow the fuck up.

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Every time I think about the entry level job paradox my head feels like it’s gonna explode.

Whenever I think about all the people that didn’t hire me to be a busser because I didn’t have any restaurant experience even though it’s the lowest ranking job in the restaurant I feel a dangerous urge to strangle a hiring manager.

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i truly believe that a lot of what gets labeled as "yearning" on here is actually deep & profound & excruciating loneliness & i really think we would have more productive discussions about it if we could just call a spade a spade

like loneliness is an incredibly serious mood state that has major implications for your physical & mental health & the pain it causes is far more intense than simple "yearning." a deep, agonizing longing for human connection is actually a really really big deal

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saw this floating around on twitter thought it could be a fun rb game (source) (source2)

#you think you're top dog but you're really just an indecisive child #holy.....

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Full offense but I’m so fucking sick of those posts that are like “I hate war history and political history, I only want to read about real history like things about culture and food and textile history uwu” because…I’m extremely sorry some shitty men tried to act like weapon history was more important than anything else or laughed at you for being interested in fashion history but the truth of the matter is that if you don’t realize that war and political changes have a direct impact on litterally every single thing in a society, you’re not gonna be able to study any other aspect of history in a relevant way. It’s not like fashion, science and gastronomy develop in their own little bubbles with no impact from the outside world and it’s genuinely silly to act like they do. 

(Also I’m going to scream if I see another person implying that the only reason anyone could study WWII is because they’re creepy violent gun lovers. We live in a world where people’s knowledge of what actually happened during the Shoah is getting worst and worst by the years AND we’re currently facing a fascist uprising so yeah, y'all still need to hear about WWII.)

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pregnancy/miscarriage tw

i could use donations to help cover copays and soften the blow from missed days of work these next few weeks. 

i had what appeared to be a miscarriage at work on wednesday, despite being on an IUD, and there’s concern i am still pregnant. if i am, i will also have to fund an abortion bc i cannot use my parernts’ insurance for it (lest they literally kill me). 

i also have to drive about 80 miles for every test, so help w gas would be nice.

paypal: [email protected]

(ask for venmo/cashapp)

this has all in all been a really stressful / traumatic experience and it’s seemingly neverending, so keep any bullshit to yourself thanks.

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Weird that the fact that it is effectively impossible to redistribute Jeff Bezos's wealth because it's mostly stocks and the moment he gets hit the value of those stocks plummets is used as a rhetorical 'gotcha!' against wealth distribution and not itself a giant flashing sign that our economic system is a ridiculous house of cards built on smoke and mirrors where a few men are given unconscionable levels of power more or less completely arbitrarily

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it is only tuesday.

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