idk

things I’d like to flesh out but need to think on more



https://twitter.com/rdotspoon/status/1581775397955391488?s=46&t=SatA4c6gu99FkL9oCjqWXA


Saw this and I got to thinking if there is also something here beyond both fetish content && attempting to go viral via hate/horror views (have you seen that TikToker who worked at buzzfeed years ago making the weird cooking hack videos who now deconstructs them?). But I also wonder if there is this Americanized/Amazon/Walmart version of Miyazaki food porn. This deep need//desire for comfort and being fed. But like within a lot of (especially white, suburban) American culture there is such a separation from culture of any kind and so there is no nostalgia besides name brands to fall back upon. So you just add Philadelphia cream cheese to Tyson chicken nuggets in a pillsbury pie crust, and maybe if you layer enough canned veggies in it will somehow become home, become comfort, become belonging, satiation, and nutrition.


———-




I used to think it was so cheesy the way some people talked about imagination/hope. But I have truly realized as I learn more like anti-car shit that imagination is powerful? Like in that you have no meaningful way to organize with others if they don’t understand a better world is possible. (This applies to so much of capitalism, of healthcare, of policing) I think so many people understand the world to be static (& I think a lot of pop media and American history reinforces that) and so never imagine that the world could or should be different and if you can’t see that you’ll never work for it.

Semi relatedly I was also struck today by the ways in which consumers are divorced from the sources of their items. I know this is not a new thought, I’ve just been thinking a lot about going vegetarian again, and ruminating on a tweet I saw a while ago about how this person believed that American food culture with meat has to do with Americans having no relationship to the animals they’re eating. It’s easy to throw out something and buy a new one when you don’t think about how many raw materials had to be permanently purged from our earth to make them.

Lmao anyway haha capitalism sucks, d*ath to america, etc


———


A performance art piece that mimics the actions//vibes of feet washing ceremonies I did as evangelical but with a bunch of queers and buffing the leather of each other’s doc martins


——


There’s a lot of bad things about my ex gf who abused me but I think one I find most regularly frustrating is they way she co-opted progressive language & intentionally played that against my compassion & ignorance. Since I grew up in such a sheltered, middle class, white, Christian, homophobic place, it made it seem like she was the authority on so many things. She’d been out to her gay mom since middle school, transitioning, part of the DSA, knew all the cool gay culture things like tarot & astrology. I didn’t even come out until I started dating her at 25 & didn’t realize I was gay until I was 24 (or trans until 28). So when she wanted things, she could use language that seemed reasonable/tracked with the things I’d been reading online since I was 20 (but had never been able to be a part of irl), & the weight of her experience as credibility. She used being a trans woman A LOT. For example, she had a bad day and was mean, unavailable, shirked responsibilities? “I’m PMS-ing and if you point out that I said that the last 3 weeks in a row, you’re denying that trans women have pms & it works differently for us so i am, and that’s really gross of you to even think that, why are you never supportive of me? Why aren’t you ever nice to me?” (I had a bad day & was actually PMS-ing? “You can’t just use that as an excuse, you’re an adult, why are you still acting like this?”)

So now, it’s hard to be in online spaces with trans women, or see people talking about trans womens issues online. Because like this example, I see trans women talking about PMS & have to correct myself before I doubt them, before I think they’re exaggerating like she did to get power or an excuse for bad behavior. I am constantly having to correct my own thoughts, remind myself that what someone is saying is ok, and just because someone used those same words and phrases to abuse me, that that was contextual and the person in front of me now is right & knows her own experience/body and deserves support.

Its just exhausting to constantly be arguing about some terf talking point, because it was used against me :/ (&&& also really hard to talk about because it seems like criticizing a trans woman is like assumed to be about//because of transphobia - & like when I’m defensive, I worry there might be things I say that are wrong and transphobic and idk!!!!!!)


———

So many tv shows set in/about kids in high school. Couple factors:

- allows a show to abide by prudish hayes code type standards with an air of plausible denial ability

- writers can’t figure out what other kinds of communities people who are in conflict with each other might be forced to continue to stay in contact - (most shows are built around a work or school community because that is how American culture understands community to be formed)

- weird Hollywood pedophilia & getting access to people who are vulnerable due to age.



————————


One part of leaving a cult (American evangelicalism) that sucks is that I now have all these social/cultural guidebooks (& memes & jokes & references) that are now all out of date.

Anyway it would be funny to do a tweet about killing the Martha in your head

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010%3A38-42&version=NIV

This passage always upset me as a kid. I was the Martha & I was the prodigal sons oft forgotten older brother. I did all the right things by the book exactly how everyone said I should. Oh god I think I wrote some terrible poetry at 13 wondering if the older brothers successes had ever been celebrated as much as the youngest failures. Iirc not saying the younger brother shouldn’t get a party, but like why couldn’t they both get one.

I think i also feel like the story of Mary & Martha could be written & given by a pastor who’d still expect there to be meals at a potluck & children taken care of but has never once considered whose labor makes that possible. We all deserve rest & to have good lives, but to have both it’s gotta be spread out more. Like maybe instead of two women using their entire days to feed the disciples, 12 disciples and 2 women use small parts of their days to feed them all. Like !!! This seems the most logical solution my friends!!!!!!!


how much of the way that the question of "why does god allow bad things to happen to good people" being a pervasive them within media go back to or fall on or is because of people in power/people who beneficiaries/upholders of the systemic issues that altho less obviously, directly led to to the "bad thing"


----


Classifications of mental illness and queerness rely on these very rigid ideas of disease and they’re not!!! It’s like defining color? When does red become orange ?? There’s so many colors that ride the line and attempting to define every red/orange or orange/red as it’s own distinct color is only helpful so far. Like I think there is so much esotericism that we’ve forgotten the point of these definitions is to affect the material conditions. Like I like the mental health diagnosis I have because it allows me to access care and communities in which I find solidarity. Same with queer definitions. But micro definitions and triangulating every aspect of my identity don’t help in that way

https://twitter.com/the_tweedy/status/1568340654069272577?s=21&t=fkQqTtS65YldLactWfWG3w


This is part of what inspired this train of thought, or rather the most recent thing go saw that did.



----


Suburban vs urban space


I think a reason people who are from the suburbs have a difficult time in urban spaces is they don’t under Or have experience with shared or community spaces. You don’t go to the park (or the pool & we all know the very intentional historical context for that) you go to your own private backyard. There is a feeling of privateness. And because so much of suburban culture is peer surveillance and petty cultural policing this kind of individual use of space feels necessary to be able to enjoy space. It took a long time for me to be able to go to and enjoy being at a park without feeling like I was being watched/surveilled/judged.







/thoughts/