this is mean and terrible but it exhausts me to be around people who haven’t finished going through their pretentious asshole phase like okay holden caulfield I know we’re all helplessly suckling at the teat of modern media but can you shut up and play some goddamn mario kart for like five minutes
you know I once googled how very organized housewives kept their homes super clean. And one thing they suggested was, if a task can be done in less than 2 minutes, do it right away.
And I have to think about this very often when depression tells me to delay doing things, if it tells me something is too much work right now etc.
If I can do it in less than 2 minutes I can do it no matter how exhausting it seems.
That’s what I tell myself. And it works!
I get more done and after 2 minutes I usually realize the pain doing this thing is not so horrible as my brain suggested. And then I keep going and expand the task and get real work done, holy shit
That’s…. actually brilliant. Two minutes is so short, it’s relatively an easy amount of time to FORCE yourself to work on something, even when you’re just completely deflated.
What works really really well for me is to compound annoying tasks that don’t require much thought with something actually pleasant. It took a long time to find the actual pleasant thing, but with audiobooks I can actually end up looking for chores to do because I want to continue listening to the book, and it doesn’t combine well with anything except the most mindless work.
That’s how I cleaned my bathroom top to bottom two weeks ago, after barely being able to pick up empty loo rolls from the floor for…well, months.
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
Mateo is in one of my facebook groups and posted this about what happened (reposted with permission):
“Hello!
My name is Mateo. I am a bisexual, indigenous Latino Paraguayan
immigrant, disabled, Jewish, autistic, transgender man. On Monday
October 29,2018 I stood up to Jeff Sessions in Boston, MA and the media
didn’t cover it. I am going to spread the word to the transgender
community through social media platforms that they were defended on
Monday. Would you please share this photo or the video from my profile? I would greatly appreciate it!
I am physically disabled in a wheelchair. When the police escorted me
out, he yanked me out by the neck collar and refused to let me use my
wheelchair. I asked for it and said I’d peacefully leave and he said
“one of the officers will get it.” They brought it to me in the hall.
The officer pushed me further than I can normally walk. The pain was
still throbbing hours later so I went to the ER. Confirmed sprain in
left ankle, neck and right shoulder. My tendons and muscles are already
weak and more fragile due to my medical condition, Fluoroquinolone
Toxicity. (Cipro Poisoning Associated Disability) I can’t walk more than
250 ft without support. And Jeff Sessions smirked and the Trumpsters
clapped…“
I genuinely didn’t know he was Jewish! Thank you so much for posting added information and a link to his Facebook profile. This is horrifying and I wish him a refuah shlema, a fast and full recovery.
I would have included him in the Mi Shebeirach this morning had I known.
This is also true of marginalized/traumatized students in classrooms. Their acting out and, to be honest, sometimes intentionally setting out to “break” their teachers is a desperate attempt to feel some sort of power/control when they don’t have it in their lives as a whole.
We (teachers) are still human beings, though. Understanding motivation doesn’t make actions “ok”. It just makes them understandable and hopefully gives an insight into how to approach redirecting that impulse.
QueerGalaxies 