Greetings, Toast! If you read just one thing we posted this week it ought to be Mallory’s chat with Mey Rude, Gabby Bellot, Brook Shelley, and Frances Lee about transmisogyny within the queer community, disc golfing, dating, and a host of other things. Seriously: read every word.
I thoroughly enjoyed Teresa Mathew’s profile of the San Jose Raging Grannies, as someone who hopes to have a long life and whose typical breakfast consists of two cups of coffee + rage:
Age is a serious factor in the Grannies’ form of protest. They can show up for an hour or so, sing, and leave. Revolution isn’t necessarily a young person’s game, but prolonged protest marches might be.
Singing can’t solve everything, and it can’t completely dissolve Julia’s frustration. Even as she admits the toll her anger takes on her, it is something she cannot easily ignore. If anything, her ire has only grown more potent with age, stacking up alongside the years she has lived. “I’m more angry than when I was younger,” Julia says. “Everything is money, money, money.”
shut up
everybody shut up
I SAID SHUT UP I GOTTA HARP SOMETHING
“Does anyone else find it odd that we use the word ‘supertaster’ as if you are somehow better at tasting than the rest of us, when what it really means is that you cannot enjoy flavorful lettuces?”
Ren Jender talked with director Deniz Gamze Ergüven about Mustang, her feminist fairy tale film:
RJ: I see a lot of parallels in the uncle’s treatment of the girls to how fundamentalist Christians treat girls in the families here in the US, based on our own traditions. Were you thinking of the girls’ position in the family in a larger context of women elsewhere?
DGE: Women from very different cultures with no intersection culturally or geographically with Turkey could completely relate to the story of the girls. And it’s very strongly anchored in all the big religions. I showed the film in a women’s prison in France and there were women from the four corners of the world, from Africa to Eastern Europe who said they had the exact same treatment.
Mindy Hung wrote so beautifully about her father, her religious upbringing, and her present atheism:
I was desperate to be a good, Christian kid. I never thought that I had the luxury of misbehaving. There weren’t a lot of East Asian people in our neighborhood and at my school at the time. I was visible. I knew I would never get away with anything and my wish to be accepted went hand in hand with my desire to be invisible.
At church summer camp—I may have been ten?—we watched a short movie. The dialogue was in English, but all of the actors were of Asian descent. A man befriended a woman and a boy and tried to introduce them to Christianity. There was some sexual tension—or maybe I just want to imagine charged-yet-somehow-pure banter about salvation. After much walking and talking, the kid triggered a rock slide and the man leaped to shelter the child with his body. In a long sequence, they both went tumbling down a hill, white boulders and rocks crashing over them. At the hospital, the man was pronounced dead, having sacrificed himself for the boy. The kid and woman hugged and the woman decided to convert to Christianity so that the man’s death would not be in vain.
The. Fucking. End.
The teacher handed out blank paper and told us to write down what we thought of the movie.
I wrote nothing.
“You think blackmail is such an ugly word” and other Signs You’re About To Be in a Sinister Homoerotic Subplot in a Midcentury Drama
A week later, responses to this piece continue to show up in my inbox and in pending comments. I have resolved not to share any more after this week, but it should be noted that a lot of the notes are truly kind and empathetic and wonderful to read! Then there’s this one. The key word here is “begins” — also “analysis,” and probably also “nothing”:
(…He goes on.)
tfw you’re reading along and nodding, like, okay, and then hmm:
I love you, Toasties. Have the greatest weekend.
Confession:
I really wished the transmisogyny thing had more disc golf.
I found the other stuff interesting TOO, don’t get me wrong. It was all interesting and important, and I want more of that, yes.
But, the title promised disc golf, and i didn’t feel like i got enough disc golf.
I mean, it still had more disc golf than most of our other pieces
That is undeniably true.
BUT.
I think I probably want more disc golf from most of the other pieces too.
For example, your wonderful essay from last week? I think that if you’d interjected with about three paragraphs worth of disc golf strategy, it really just would have taken it to a DIFFERENT LEVEL. ; )
What Goes Through Your Mind: Disc Golf, Mostly.
I’m glad you’re posting comments from that essay since I didn’t see it until now. It’s the most amazing thing, I sent it to everyone I knew.
I often worry that someone will interpret my wordless horror/confusion/mortification with agreement, especially since I’m usually not vigilantly looking out for racist language when I’m talking to friends—and why should I?—so the moment slips by. It also feels impossible to articulate my feelings at the spur of the moment in a way that doesn’t boomerang back to hurt me. Remembering some of the times I’ve spoken up doesn’t cause me to hyperventilate because I was scared of confronting racism, but because of how neatly other mutual friends can just avoid, avoid, dodge the issue. Like your husband at the dinner, it somehow hurts even more when a friend will vocally defend me from a stranger who approaches me to talk about every single chinese person he’s ever known, but when a very close friend of hers says something about how an asian girl “plays dumb for male attention” and I’m upset, she just has absolutely nothing to say to me.
I wish I could always be like “yeah! fuck racists!” in every situation. The reality is that I’m afraid to really test the boundaries of my friendships and friend groups like that. Is it fair that if we don’t, the blame for it falls on us for not speaking up?
The above mention made me return to the comments section of Nikki’s original post, just to see if new people were still chiming in. I hit this comment by Karen:
“I want to thank you both for the incredible post and for the amazing comments section. This whole thing has spurred a big and necessary conversation between myself and my husband, mostly talking about being interrupters and how and when and why. What a conversation, what incredible people you’ve brought together here. Thank you.”
And I just want to say, Yes, yes, you behind The Toast have made a truly remarkable community. Doubtless you all know this, but I am still very new here and I have to agree it is a beautiful thing.
The Toast is the greatest, I agree! Community comments on my piece were all wonderful and I treasured them all. We only really had issues with trolls from outside. I love that we can just count on that, no matter what we post; disagreement will be respectful, arguments will be thoughtful, Toasties will support one another.
Cross-racial identification is a problem for all of us.
Well, he’s right, it is. Cross-racial identification is a problem because PEOPLE KEEP TRYING TO IDENTIFY ME, AND I’M SICK OF IT.
Apparently it’s MLK Day here in the states.
Fucking stealth holidays.
ah. Here is the answer I was searching for! I am not in the US so I was saddened to find no link round up to start my day/work week with today.
Fucking stealth holidays indeed.
Perhaps we can all just loiter about here today.
I will be loitering here, seeking amusement and/or enlightenment. Non-Sansa dog pictures? Edifying links? Anything but Children’s Stories Made Horrific, please.
It was probably posted back when it was first written but here is an excellent take down/shitting on of Walden and Thoreau that I wound up reading last week.
It feels like people aren’t actually trying very hard to get into the spirit of the term “holiday” based on how often I find myself sitting at my desk during them.
(Also, you know you’re working in Idaho when: you get Good Friday off but not MLK Jr. Day.)
I’m off because they cut our hours at Target during the first quarter and/or I’ve had Mondays off for about a month now. Otherwise absolutely no mention of MLK day was made. Now I’m kind of annoyed, I think I might be missing out on time and a half.
I worked retail for many many years. Generally it’s just MAJOR holidays that give you time and a half. 4th of July, Christmas, sometimes New Year’s Day, maybe Labor or Memorial days. You can go ahead and forget about the ‘office’ holidays. Of course, I now work in an office and I am sitting at work earning my normal wage. So what is the point of calling it a holiday.
At least daycare is closed! That’s how you celebrate, going to work and still having to find someplace to stash you toddler.
I’m in Seattle, where the county’s logo (King County) is a picture of MLK’s face, and I’m still at work, as is almost everyone I know. So it isn’t just Idaho. I assumed it was because I don’t work for the government or a bank. The world of business apparently doesn’t believe in holidays they can’t monetize.
There is a tiny community close to where I grew up where the school doesn’t take MLK day off, but takes off the Friday before and calls it “Rodeo Day”.
When I lived in Virginia, I learned that Jackson-Lee day is observed in many places rather than MLK day (usually falling around the same time, I think also the Friday before). So you can choose to celebrate Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee’s birthdays instead, if you still believe the South should have won the Civil War.
… and I was wondering why it was so quiet here. Huh.
It was probably posted back when it was first written but here is an excellent take down/shitting on of Walden and Thoreau that I wound up reading last week.
I was, sadly, ill all weekend, but it gave me the opportunity to just sit on my couch and catch up on a bunch of movies from the library. Nothing related to awards season, but things that have been on my list for a while.
I sure would like to be able to breathe again, though. Sinuses were so blocked last night I couldn’t get to sleep until well past 1am.
"…he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it."
Burrrrrrrn!