Tall dog.
Profiles of the Orlando victims (being updated as we know more):
On his way to the Pulse nightclub, Stanley Almodovar III laughed and sang, posting to Snapchat while a friend drove.
“I wish I had that to remember him forever,” said his mother Rosalie Ramos, 51.
She expected he would come home hungry. She had whipped up some tomato and cheese dip and left it in the refrigerator for him.
Dave Cullen is a great, great journalist (his Columbine book is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read) and this one is personal:
If you think that’s just a club that happens to be gay, you may well have been in one, but it’s highly unlikely you’ve come out in one. This is the place, for most of us gay guys, where we go to quit pretending. God, what a weight off that was. In high school they were always counseling us to “be yourself”—how the hell were we supposed to know what that was? Gay bars are the place we got to try ourselves out.
But we’re sitting ducks in there. We advertise where to find us now, all rounded up together in a remarkably vulnerable space. Most big clubs have several rooms, often several floors, and hundreds of people or more packed into tight little spaces on Saturday night, elbow to elbow, where it can take five minutes to squeeze your way to the bathrooms or the bar 30 feet away. The music is often so loud that you have to put your mouth right up to a buddy’s ear to say something, and partygoers often resort to bits of improvised bar sign language. If someone were shooting on the next level or next room, how would anyone even know?
Matthew Vines is excellent, always:
It might seem odd to some to describe a nightclub as a sanctuary, but gay clubs have long provided a unique place of refuge, comfort and solidarity for LGBT people. That’s part of what made the news so appalling to wake up to on Sunday morning. One of the very few places carved out for us to feel safe had been violated in the worst way. And as we’re learning today, most of those who died were queer people of color, who have even fewer places of safety than white LGBT people.
It didn’t help that we were faced with the news of the slaughter on a Sunday, a day that already serves as a reminder of how unwelcome we are in most traditional sanctuaries. For the nearly 50% of LGBT Americans who are Christians, as I am, it only compounded the pain to have our faith leaders either ignore the massacre, qualify their condolences in ways they never would for other victims, or simply omit the fact that LGBT people were targeted for death because of who they are.
Randy Potts on searching for his gay uncle:
I remember him the way you might remember the way the sky was lit on a great day 20 years ago: brightly yet faintly. In my sole memory of him, he was sitting in my grandmother’s den, but to my chagrin he wasn’t smoking. I asked him, “Uncle Ronnie, why aren’t you smoking?” I was only five years old, maybe six. He laughed: “It’s bad enough I walk into your Munna’s house with this beard, kid. I’m not going to smoke in Munna’s house, too.”
That’s all I have: one memory of a man who was dead by the time I was seven.
I blocked Twitter from my desktop for 72 hours because post-tragedy-social-media is a nightmare, so now roughly every twenty minutes I try to go to Twitter and see “SHOULDN’T YOU BE WORKING?” Then I realized it still works if I open an incognito window.
I also deleted my Facebook which I have been meaning to do since 2004 and finally did. I have no regrets about that one.
Ahmed Ali Akbar on prayer:
So much of my life feels meaningless and random — the time and place I was born, the privilege I inherited when others did not, the people I love who have died. Prayer helps me connect to something outside of all the things I did not choose.
On my best days, I empty my mind and try to focus on the fact that I am just human and will not be here forever. That life is beyond my control and one day I will die. That generations before me and after me made these same movements, and they too died. And that maybe, when that happens to me, I’ll go into some ungraspable beyond and know that someone or something was receiving my desperate missives. I feel terrified of losing this habit, of growing arrogant and entitled. But that’s why it’s a ritual — so that I reiterate it until the meaning inhabits itself.
I always tell myself, One day. One day you’ll pray five times a day. When I’m an adult, is the conceit — but of course, I’m nearly in my thirties, and all I’ve accomplished is walking to 29th Street to pray once a week. For now, it’s enough.
Music and Lyrics was on TV yesterday morning and I knew it was Music and Lyrics within a SINGLE FRAME and then I watched the rest of it, bc I kind of love it and it made me feel better.
Kendra James on watching Shuffle Along with white people and black people and what discomfort reveals:
From the 1840s through the height of vaudeville, black performers performing in blackface was fairly standard practice, and often the only way they were allowed to appear onstage in front of white audiences. Lowbrow, self-parodying buffoonery was expected of black performers. In fact, it was so expected that, in 1903, African-American actors Bert Williams and George Walker were scolded by white critics for no longer being “black enough” when they suggested that their audiences should read a book for historical context before coming to see their show In Dahomey. Expectations of black actors were so affected by the damaging stereotypes blackface promoted that, to this day, Hollywood has yet to fully recover.
The cultural aftershocks of blackface performance could certainly still be felt in my ‘90s childhood. Boxes of Aunt Jemima pancake mix lined (and continue to line) supermarket shelves, as if her name and image weren’t derived from a black mammy character often played by white men in blackface on the minstrel circuit. I watched Looney Tunes on TNT, where occasionally I’d catch an unedited cartoon like Fresh Hare,which featured Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd singing in blackface in its original ending. I loved old musicals, and the Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson movies on TCM played on the same stereotypes that blackface acts helped to popularize. Even Disney movies like The Jungle Book, Dumbo, and Fantasia were rife with big-lipped, subservient, and marble-mouthed representations of black people.
How DARE YOU, sir:
During a comedy set last week, Ilana Glazer shared a story about a friend of a friend who went out with a guy claiming to be a Broad City writer. The con was so elaborate that the guy (whom Glazer calls out by name) sent her a photo of himself with Abbi and Ilana that he had taken at a comedy show back in 2014, as well as a photo purportedly taken on set that day. He also told her “writing in the room this season was weak,” which probably should have been a red flag.
“No men work on Broad City,” Glazer warns. “Don’t fuck a dude cause you think he works on Broad City.” Words to live by!
Zebrafish are good for science:
Another major benefit of studying zebrafish is the very low marginal cost: With many other research animals, housing ever-more specimens would lead to greater and greater costs. Not so with zebrafish: Adding an additional zebrafish doesn’t significantly increase the total cost of caring for them all. “Once you have a certain infrastructure, having the aquaculture set up and having the fish manually fed twice a day, there’s a very good scaling factor,” Sirotkin says. “The cost of maintaining 1,000 fish is not much less than having 20,000 fish, whereas with rodents every cage requires considerably more work and expense.”
Today in (Feminist) History [Archive]
On this day in 1904 was the birth of Margaret Bourke-White, an American photographer known for being the first American female war photojournalist, the first foreign photographer allowed to take pictures of Soviet industry, and the first female photographer for “Life” Magazine, where she took the picture for the first cover. Though Margaret was interested in photography as a young woman thanks to her father’s interest in cameras, she studied herpetology at Columbia University before leaving after the death of her father. After attending several different colleges, as well as getting married and then divorcing two years later, she eventually graduated from Cornell University in 1927, then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she started a commercial photography studio.
Some of Margaret’s first work began at Otis Steel Company, where she first met barriers due to her gender, among other things. In part their hesitancy to allow her to photograph was because steel-making was a defense industry involved in national security, but mostly it was because she was a woman, and people in the industry wondered if she and her cameras could stand up to the conditions of the hot, dirty, dangerous steel mill. Despite that, Margaret not only got permission, she pushed boundaries by bringing along a new style of flash (magnesium flare) which allowed her to take some of the best steel factory photographs of the era.
Eventually Margaret moved on, becoming an associate editor and staff photographer at Fortune magazine until 1935; it was during this time that she became the first Western photographer who was allowed to photograph Soviet industry. In 1936 she was hired by Henry Luce for Life magazine as their first female photographer; her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam construction site became the magazine’s first cover in November of 1936. She stayed on and off at the magazine until she retired in 1969, and during her career there she was also known for photographing victims of the Dust Bowl. One of her most famous photographs was taken of black flood victims standing in front of a sign which declared “World’s Highest Standard of Living”; a sign featuring a white family. The photograph was published in Life in 1937, and went on to be the basis for the artwork of Curtis Mayfield’s 1975 album, There’s No Place Like America Today.
Margaret also traveled to Europe before and during World War II, where she took a rare photograph of Joseph Staloin smiling, along with portraits of his mother and great-aunt. She became the first female war correspondent during WW2, as well as the first woman allowed to work in combat zones. When German forces invaded Moscow, Margaret was the only foreign photographer present, and she took refuge in the U.S. Embassy while photographing and capturing the attack on camera. She eventually became attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, and then the U.S. Army first in Italy (where she came under fire numerous times) and Germany. Referring to an incident where an troopship she was on crashed in the Mediterranean, an article once said, “The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.’”
After WW2, during which she also photographed a concentration camp following the collapse of the German army, Margaret produced a book titled Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, which was an attempt to help her come to terms with everything she had seen. Not that she stopped there, of course; she is also well-known in India and Parkistan for chronicling the violence that followed the independence and separation of the two countries, as well as her photographs of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, and also Mohandas K. Gandhi… who she interviewed and photographed just hours before his assassination in 1948.
In 1953, Margaret developed Parkinson’s disease and began to slow down her career. Despite her previous fame as a photographer, towards the end of her life she could no longer cover her health-care costs, in part because she tended towards personal generosity in giving away her money. She died from the disease in 1971 at the age of 67, but her photographs can still be scene today in the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), and in the collection at the Library of Congress.
Y’all, just look at this total badass of a woman.
I can never see that picture of her emerging from the eagle-head on the Chrysler Building without simultaneously feeling envy at her having that access and also having my latent acrophobia kicked into overdrive.
Thank you for posting about Margaret Bourke-White! She was an inspiration to me when I was considering going into photojournalism myself (alas, I was repulsed by what I saw as inexcusably shoddy editorial standards in my university’s school of journalism despite it supposedly having a stellar reputation). She was amazing.
Music and Lyrics is such a cute movie.
It’s friggin’ adorable. I have the soundtrack on my ipod and am not ashamed. I’ve also watched the Pop! Goes My Heart video way too many times.
Me too! Still trying to convince my +1 that Not All RomComs… (he’d love it. I know it. But he’s got endearing feminist hang-ups)
I paid to see that in the theater, even, and have no regrets. NONE.
“I want to show you the roof. It’s upstairs!”
DITTO. “Don’t write me off just yet” is just THE sweetest.
There’s a beautiful write-up of it on Wonk-o-Mance (here’s hoping I remember how to link), and I wish I could love the movie as much as I love reading about it. Although “Pop goes my heart” is gonna be in my head today and it might be what I need.
And the music is so great on its own too! I sing Entering Bootytown literally all the time.
Isn’t it, though? I mean, I am notoriously weak for rom coms, but it’s still one of my faves, and the soundtrack is stellar.
1. I didn’t even watch the video and now Pop Goes My Heart is in my head.
2. I saw Hugh Grant interviewed when this movie was being promoted, and he said, “Well, it’s a romantic comedy, which is a new thing for me.”
This is a beautiful link roundup, but I also want to draw some attention to this weirdly delightful article about the burial of Henry I: http://nyti.ms/1S2H5fl.
Everything is kind of awful right now, but reading about how these two historians are searching for the body of a despotic king under a prison parking lot is just kind of…delightful.
Oh this is terrific. First they find Richard III under a car park (as mentioned in the article), now this. Perhaps we can make something Shakespearean about this: beneath the car parks of this sceptred isle…….
Dead monarchs lie dreaming…
It’s kinda ludicrous how many kings are under carparks. I mean, we have a lot of them, but it seems… unproportional?
clearly there is some deeper magic at work, possibly to do with the conjunction of ley lines or something
I especially like that the historian in the article suggests that Henry I would have liked being buried under a car park, but would have preferred it be a church car park.
I appreciate the note that he died “after eating lampreys”. Not of eating lampreys, just… after. We can’t draw any conclusions here, don’t want to unfairly place blame on the lampreys.
Right, it could have been anything. It could have been another person who killed him. It could have been a heart attack. It could have been ennui. It doesn’t have to be lampreys!
🙂
Their tombstone will not read “post hoc ergo propter hoc”!
I’ve always heard it described as “a surfeit of lampreys”. People back then were always dying of surfeits.
I fully intend to die of a surfeit of something, but I haven’t decided what yet… (Runners-up include frozen custard and Bakewell tarts).
I think the general feeling was, “Let’s just plant this dead despot* in an empty field which will never be disturbed because England is a green and pleasant land.” They didn’t foresee the horseless carriages’ relentless hunger for real estate.
*don’t really know if Henry I was a despot.
…aaand now that I read the article, it’s obvious both that he was buried on the grounds of an abbey, and that he was something of a tyrant (he had the tips of the noses of his granddaughters cut off? WTF?).
For me, Henry I and his granddaughters (he also had their eyes put out) is one of those places where the distance/spectacle of history flies out the window and I just. . .can’t. Even when it is “justified” by the hostage explanation.
I’m amazed it hasn’t shown up in GoT yet, though. (er. . .has it?)
Apparently Gansey and Blue should have been ripping up the asphalt outside Monmouth Manufacturing instead of stomping around the forest.
If you were a devoted watcher of Time Team, you would know that everything interesting is buried either a) in a very large field in the middle of nowhere, where you have to schlep in all the excavators and equipment; b) in someone’s back garden (or even better, under several adjacent back gardens, and you have to get permission from all the owners to dig); c) under the car park (usually of a pub).
I quite liked this line from the person whose garden they’re digging up: “He’s there all right, resting quietly, and when they find him we’ll be looking for great things from the football team”. Since the success of Leicester City, everyone’s looking for a handy dead king to improve the chances of their local team. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/13/a…
We need to get Lin-Manuel and Oscar Isaac on a set together so they can just stare at each other with those ridiculous, beautiful eyes they both have. I would pay All The Money to watch that movie.
Oh god, I would actually die. But it would be such a beautiful way to go.
They could make that the default channel on hotel tv sets, instead of that silly “guide” channel.
God damn it. Just…ngngnngnggggnnnn.
DUE SOUTH GIF! Perfect gif usage (oh I love that weird show).
New Ray! I loved him even more than Old Ray!
I love both Rays but I ship Fraser/RayK. I put up a whole collection of them on my Tumblr today, if you wanna check it out.
Agreed, much more sexual tension with Kowalski. Also, you make the universe a better place with your gifs.
THANK YOU KINDLY.
Oh thank goodness I am not the only one who loves Music and Lyrics. I catch myself singing the songs waaaay more often than I can admit. Even Buddha’s Delight.
“Pop- goes my heart!”
When I first saw the interview between Lin-Manuel and Emma Watson, I thought, “Is he kind of flirting with her?” but then I realized, no, that’s just his FACE.
Alternate theory: he’s flirting with everyone.
THIS. ^^
I accept this.
I thought that face was just for ME! :O (Seriously, my crush on him is now explained.)
Thank you to everyone who responded to my breakdown yesterday; you are all amazing and kind. I couldn’t reply to you all in my state, but I read every single one multiple times.
I’m still not 100% and any strong emotion = crying right now; but I drank a bottle of wine last night, started smoking cigarettes again after 3 years and had a good phone call with one of my best friends from home and then had a pretty good sleep so I’m feeling better. I also went and collected my ADD medication this morning so that’s something off the list.
However I then took the first pill mid morning and now I’m a bit stoned in the office and quite nauseous, even thoough I chugged a load of milk with it (Strattera binds to protein). I knew this would happen after 6 weeks off them and I really should have waited until the weekend when I’d have two days to lie in bed and clutch my stomach and be high and a kite, but I really didn’t want another day like yesterday. So yeah, gonna attempt to power through this afternoon, but may well end up claiming food poisoning and going home.
Also discovered that Atomoxatine has been classed as a controlled substance by the NHS/UK government, despite it specifically being a non-stimulant ADD medication, which explains why I’ve had so much trouble getting a hold of it. Not because its ‘unlicensed’ in my borough like the first doctor told me (Same doctor who told me to stop taking it because I’ve been on it so long, no other reason. LOOK HOW WELL THAT WENT LADY.). So I currently only have 1 month of my 2 month prescription while my pharmacist calls the drug company and makes a special order and sends them my script because they’re limited to ordering one box a month (What happens if they have more than one patient on it? Drug policies that make no sense, right here. Seriously, I’ve given strattera to people who don’t have ADD, because I was young and stupid, and it doesn’t do shit to them, no one is taking this recreationaly trust me.)
TL;DR Thank you Toast, this is an amazing community and I’m going to be a bit lost without you all.
I missed your comment, so I’ll give you a hug today. I hope you get through today okay and keep on keeping on back to 100% (or as close as you can).
I’m glad you’re feeling better today. I’d send you a happy .gif if I knew how to, so please imagine one of your choice here.
Thank you, I can help with the gif thing tho!
Put this code in the comment: <*img src=”url of GIF goes here”*> and remove the *
(I just take gifs from tumblr or giphy, you only need the URL you don’t have to save them or upload them anywhere.)
ok let’s see:
OH MY GOD I DID IT
OMG. It’s all “hey buddy, right here, gimme some love,” and then they just glomp each other.
I am SO glad to hear you are taking care of yourself. And you did the hard work of going to pick up the Rx — sometimes for me that can be an insurmountable task (that has to be done, funny how that works.) Prescriptions are the worst and I hate how we have to jump through these hoops to get what we need to function. Lots of internet hugs your way!
(You should totally plead food poisoning.)
The only reason I went off my meds was all the hoops I have to go through; it wasn’t deliberate I just ran out and then its taken me 6 weeks to get a new prescription. And joy of joys, because its a ‘controlled drug’ I can’t get a repeat script, instead i have to call the doctors office, speak to a doctor and then collect my prescription every time I need a refill. Which is every month. For the rest of my life.
Seriously, ADHD + The amount of work and organisation it takes to get ADHD medication = a clusterfuck.
I’m actually feeling better, still a bit nauseous, but I don’t feel like i’m about to puke constantly, and I’m not as stoned as I was at lunch. I hope this passes in a few days though, when I first went on this medication (at about 16), I was high for like a week.
ADHD + The amount of work and organisation it takes to get ADHD medication = a clusterfuck.
I feel the same way about my anti-anxiety / anti-depression medication! Why does it have to be such an anxiety provoking process?
Good luck with the side effects – glad you’re feeling better.
you are a good person. the amount of effort it takes to be a person with adhd is beyond the understanding of other people, sometimes, i think. when i am uncharitable and not willing to be empathetic.
adhd sucks, with and without meds. the process of getting and maintaining meds sucks. there is always a count-down clock once the prescription gets filled, until the next doctor visit, until the next prescription.
And every time it sucks. It is expensive. It is a pain. It is a process. It is paperwork. And for a person with ADHD, it is never easier once you have done it. it sucks every time. every time.
So happy you went through all the dumb hoops to get your meds back!
OT: I was just hit by a car, as a pedestrian, for the third time in my life (first time: in high school, I was running with my cross-country team; second time: idiot driver blew past a stop sign and totaled my bike, which I was riding), also the third time it was not my fault. These have all been low speed incidents, and I’ve never been hurt beyond bruises but . . . the stupidity! This morning, the dude had pulled up over the zebra crossing at a stoplight and was stopped. I had the right of way, but he was blocking the crossing, so I followed the pedestrian in front of me by crossing behind him. So HE REVERSED INTO ME.
Just set the car on fire. There’s a neat solution for you.
I am so sorry, and also I would like to set this person’s car on fire. (This is why I am an angry pedestrian).
Besides actually getting hit by a car this morning, I was almost RUN OVER. I was on the corner at a different intersection and had the right of way (not ambiguously–the little white person indicating right of way was on), and a truck made a right-hand turn OVER THE SIDEWALK, about 2 feet away from me. I saw it coming and had the feeling that this guy wasn’t going to yield, so thank goodness I had stopped. But come on! There are 4 intersections between my house and my office, and I was hit/nearly hit at half of them.
Holy cow 🙁 I’m glad you are not badly hurt!!
I amend my previous statement, I would like to set most, if not all, cars on fire.
Max Mad: Firey Road
Oh my god! Was it a work truck with a company name on it? If you could, email them and tell them how crappy their employees are!
ow ow ow! That’s terrible.
Glad you’re okay! I’m a pedestrian and I swear i have a very hard-working angel by me somedays. Girlfriend has split-second timing.
I also tend to get very aggressive with stupid drivers who plow through red lights when I’ve got the walk signal, which might make her a bit less inclined to be helpful in the future. Whatever. It might have been kids crossing! Use your damn brains!
Oh gah, I HATE people who insistently push through or turn on red while I’m trying to cross. And bonus hate points for the ones who yell at you/give you the finger for daring to be on the street at all.
Oh my god, what an absolute numbnut. I’m glad you’re okay, and I hope that you at least put a decent dent in the dude’s car.
A) That is terrible, and I hope you’re feeling okay physically.
B) Zebra crossing…?
Crosswalks, elsewhere.
Oh! Gotcha. But I’m slightly disappointed it doesn’t mean there are zebras walking around…
I’m in the US, where I think zebra crossing isn’t used that much. I probably would have written “crosswalk,” except that the references to zebrafish above put zebras in my head.
I think zebra crossings aren’t as common in the U.S. as they are elsewhere – in my city, at least, they’re only used to mark crossings that aren’t part of an intersection. So, say, in the middle of a city blocl to indicate that waiting pedestrians get the right of way even though there aren’t any streetlights.
I may have used the term incorrectly, then–it was a white striped crossing at an intersection with a light. The guy had a red light and was in the left-hand lane (so it wasn’t like he had pulled up in order to make a right turn on red). I had the “walk” signal (little white person).
In the UK, zebra crossings don’t even have/need lights; if a pedestrian is on them, drivers must stop. (But, of course, some drivers are still terrible and you need to dodge them.)
(Watching the camera feed of the Abbey Road zebra crossing always makes me so frustrated, because it is constantly inundated by fans who do not seem to know much about UK traffic rules. So you have people standing on the pavement poised to step onto the crossing for a picture, but they hang back and wait for cars to pass before moving out onto it. Car drivers see pedestrians about to walk onto a zebra crossing, and so they stop for them, as that is what is expected of them. It means both groups end up remaining stationary, waiting for the other to move, until the line of cars gets too long and people start honking angrily.)
Apropos of nothing, I’ve spent the past two days delighting in the fact that the zebra crossings in Zootopia are painted in actual zebra stripe patterns. More importantly, though, I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt by that guy. What a jerk.
THE FUCK
Ugh, that sucks. I had a near miss like that a few weeks ago at an intersection. I noticed in time and dodged the car (barely) and the kid stopped, apologized, and told me he hadn’t seen me. It was a day of full sun and he was like only a few feet from me! People need to pay more attention when they are driving!
(on the plus side, someone saw the whole thing and told me I was like spiderman)
*sigh* drivers. I hope your ok!
I am retroactively less mad about the guy who failed to look both ways while making a right turn and nearly hit me while I was walking in a marked crosswalk with stop signs this morning!
Oh no, I’m sorry but am glad you’re ok. I was almost hit by a car recently while running– it grazed my side– and I was shaky about it for days, so I can only imagine how you’re feeling.
Big hugs. I’ve also been hit twice by cars while on foot. Both times left me with nasty bruises. Cars are the worst.
I’ve only been hit once by a car as a pedestrian (also running with my high-school cross country team) and I was paranoid about parking lots for the next few years. What is it like for you? I have to imagine crossing streets is a little terrifying now. It was for me, anyways
I am glad that you are ok!
I am amazed that I have never been rear-ended by an idiot because I drive to a busy urban university every day (with a CNA school and a specialized high school in the same block), and other drivers don’t seem to be aware that teenagers will be fucking sprinting across a main arterial every single morning.
If there was a James-Bond-car-hack that would enable me to push a button on the dash and huge steel walls would spring out of the sides of my car so I could protect pedestrians, I would buy that SO FAST.
I live near a high school and yes, they do seem to want to play real-life Frogger, don’t they?
Teens! Stop jaywalking! Drivers! Stop hitting pedestrians!
When I’m back in the suburb where I grew up it’s freaking terrifying, especially because we have so few street lights AND they’re all texting/wearing headphones. (Yes, I sound like an old lady.)
And they wear dark pants and black hoodies and walk in the fog before sunrise. I don’t want to hit you kids! I really don’t, but I need you to work with me here!
I have a rather dumpy, little, uncared-for car with dents in some of the bumpers I don’t have the money to repair. My dream is to have a really, really big, really REALLY loud horn that will pop out of my trunk and BLARE in the face of the car behind me that honks at me when I’m waiting to make a turn because there is an actual human being in the crosswalk.
EVERYONE BE CAREFUL! Cars are driven by monsters, as far as pedestrians/bikers are concerned. When we were in 6th grade, my BF’s little brother was biking across a crosswalk on his way to elementary school, and was hit by someone not stopping at the stop sign, and died, and I have since regarded all drivers (even me) with great suspicion. Drivers don’t care about laws and right of way and humanity, not as a collective, because one bad one can destroy the bunch quite easily. I curse them all for endangering you!
I regard me with great suspicion when I’m driving on a street with bikers and walkers (especially bikers since walkers often have their own sidewalk space). The possibility of hitting someone while driving seriously gives me anxiety.
Drivers who don’t follow the rules or pay attention are the worst. I hate it when I’m trying to cross the road and there is a car blocking the crossing; if you’ve stopped your car in such a stupid place, though, at least have the sense NOT TO REVERSE WHERE PEOPLE ARE LIKELY TO BE CROSSING. Ugh. Glad you’re okay.
What an interesting article, that zebrafish one. I didn’t realize they had a lifespan of four years! that’s kind of incredible. I think the cost comparisons to rodents are a little unfair, though– although I’ve never worked in an animal lab myself, from friends I understand that rodents do sort of optimize utility vs. cost. Zebrafish are vertebrates, sure, but rodents are mammals, and much closer analogs to humans. Plus, I can’t imagine zebrafish would be particularly useful for any sort of behavioral trial. Some studies are not made more efficient by just adding more cheap animals.
You are right that behavior trials that eventually want to make conclusions about humans are not really a zebrafish type of project. However, they have a huge amount of analogous genes and are easy to make transgenic lines with which allow a huge amount of studies about gene knockouts, cancer development, development in general, etc etc. Rodents are still super ubiquitous (and will likely be for a while), but they are used so commonly for so many studies that they don’t necessarily need to be (for a host of complicated reasons). They’re somewhat falling out of favor from a research standpoint since there’s a good amount of variability and from an animal welfare perspective…did you see the article a year or so ago about lab mice reacting different to male vs. female researchers? Super interesting, but sometimes the mammal thing can be a draw back too…
Shit, that was an extremely rambling response, sorry! I get excited when I see research stuff on the toast. 🙂
I remember seeing the male/ female researchers study and thinking they’d have figured it out a lot sooner if they’d had more women scientists earlier (and it’s so fascinating that it happens at all). My aunt researches gender differences in neurobiology, and I still remember going into her lab and seeing a lab rat merrily running around with wires coming out of its head…
My grandfather (who did PhDs in the ’60s on neuropsychology and linguistics) used to take his research rats home as pets because he couldn’t bear to kill them. My mom said they made great pets.
Well no, but mostly they were talking about drug trial screening and also genetic stuff like CRISPR. I did think the zebra science guy was very good being all “obviously you have to move on to rats eventually but this is a good intermediate.” 10/10 for not dissing other model organisms. I guess it’s good to know you can use fish and save money, if you’re doing a massive candidate therapeutic screen.
My old professors would definitely be cross about the dismissal of nematode worms though! My experience of labs, having done both rats and worms is that everyone thinks their model is the best and will fight you about it, when really it depends on the studies you’ve done/are doing and what your needs are.
“No men work on Broad City”
This just made my day.
But is it true? I thought Paul Downs (who also plays Trey) wrote for the show. And IMDB does show him with writing credit on several episodes. (But I assume the guy who pulled this scam was not Paul Downs.)
I thought it was sort of a rhetorical comedic device?
Yep, I thought it was more like “No men [who would use “I work on Broad City” as a way to get dates] work on Broad City”.
And their writing seems very feminine, which is perhaps the greatest praise of all (?)
She said “there are only four of us, and Abbi and I are two” so maybe there are four main writers and Paul Downs contributes. I also imagine that with their background he improvises some of his scenes, so perhaps they give him writing credit after the fact like singers get writing credit if they ad-lib an “oh yeah!” in the middle of a song.
Comparing his writing and acting credits, it looks like he only sometimes appears in the episodes that he writes, so I don’t think he’s just being credited as a writer for improvising his own lines.
And it looks like as of last year, there were 9 people in the writer’s room, with 2 men: http://jezebel.com/broad-city-is-the-best-because…
So maybe something’s changed since then, and she’s talking about the group that’s writing season 4.
Interesting!
I loved Ahmed Ali Akbar’s piece, even though I am not what anyone would call a big fan of prayer. I am a fan of meditation and solitary reflection, though, and I love seeing how he and I are drawn to do similar things while coming from completely opposite sides of the spectrum. Akbar says “On my best days, I empty my mind and try to focus on the fact that I am just human and will not be here forever,” and that is what I do on my worst days. On my worst days I need to remind myself that this is temporary, my experience here is relatively short and meaningless on a grand scale and personally I find that quite comforting. How wonderful and fascinating that we both (as vastly different as we are) seek comfort in the quiet contemplation of impermanence. Thank you for including that article in the Link Roundup.
Yes, i agree about meditating on how temporary our lives are. Just a little blip.
Pale blue dot!
I find that comforting on bad days as well – when things feel terrible, it is a relief to remind myself that one day it will all be long past and I will no longer exist.
I have this taped to my monitor at work and most people see it as bleak humor, but no, I actually find it quite comforting.
When I think about global warming, in particular, I feel immense relief that I will die one day and might be able to escape everything going completely to shit.
I have so many complicated feelings about the Guardian piece. I understand why Randy Potts felt the need to tell the world about his uncle and why it would be awful to see his identity erased from family history, but I wonder how his uncle himself would react given that he chose not to come out during his life time.
idk, I feel like I’d err on the side of outing a dead person vs. parroting a lie that actively harmed him and others. It is complicated and I don’t mean to sound harsh, but this article wasn’t necessarily just for his uncle, y’know?
man, I’m just mad as hell and want everyone to be as queer as they can be
I guess everyone has their own approach to how we ought to speak about closeted relatives after they die, but I still think that unless the relative in question was a Roy Cohn type, we ought to not publish articles outing them unless they voiced their approval for that plan before they died. I can empathize with both Potts and his cousin but I am leaning toward thinking that maybe this wasn’t his story to tell. I have multiple closeted gay relatives who have died and I tend to be careful about how and when I share a story they chose not to share with others.
The author makes it explicitly clear that his cousin asked him not to write an article about her dad. If the uncle himself had requested that Potts publicize his story, it would trump the wishes of his surviving family, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Potts could also choose to share his uncle`s story with family and friends without publishing an article to be viewed by thousands of people. It’s not as if his only two options were complete secrecy and a public declaration.
I, personally, am very take their organs and out them about dead people, because they are dead and have no rights and it is good for the living to take their organs and out them, but I can see feeling otherwise.
Seconded. (Hi, Nicole, I’m going to miss you in a few weeks.)
My attitude about my organs once I am dead is “just let medical science strip me for parts”. I once had a very impassioned argument about it with a classmate who was all “yeah, I can see that it’s important, but I just feel weird about it”. YOU WILL BE DEAD, NOBODY CARES HOW YOU FEEL. (I feel different about sharing private stuff and outing people, weirdly, and am trying to work out why.)
But the idea that dead people shouldn’t be outed is rooted in the notion that being gay is something shameful, something to be kept secret. And that to do otherwise is airing dirty laundry. Or speaking ‘ill’ of the dead.
I believe the living have the right to choose their own level of privacy. But Ronnie Roberts isn’t alive any more. This can’t hurt him. The author didn’t even write anything negative about the man.
You know what certainly did hurt him, though? The lie he had to live under, and the one his family made sure stayed in place. It may even have killed him. But if the author doesn’t own that story than neither do they. Sunlight is a disinfectant. I say let it in.
I totally get the impulse to share this information, I guess part of my issue is that an article in the Guardian is a far cry from telling friends and family. Would Ronnie want this to come up when his name is googled? And what about his daughter, who may walk in to work tomorrow greeted by questions and comments from people with whom she may not have wanted to discuss a very painful part of her own childhood?
I realize that I may come off as prudish in my viewpoint, but I am the gay child of a closeted gay man who is dead, and who I cared for. I am open about my family’s experience to friends and family. When I have bumped into my dad’s homophobic former coworkers, I have a strong urge to tell them how awful they are because I saw him pay the cost of their homophobia, and I paid it myself. But my own political needs aren’t as important to me as my dead father’s wishes, if that makes any sense. Maybe I’m wrong. I certainly hope I haven’t offended anyone here; I guess I was just gutted when I read the cousin’s comments and thought of how sad my dad would have been if I’d written a piece like this.
The other layer to this story is that the author HIMSELF is gay, and that he’s afraid that his family will erase him as well. If I found out that my family was keeping another family member’s life a secret, and that family member had something that big in common with me? I’d feel pretty betrayed too.
And yet the daughter and her mother were the people who lived with the major consequences of the painful decisions the uncle made and the daughter (who could also be gay for all we know) may be acting out of respect for her father’s wishes. She asked her cousin not to share her story (and the story of her realization about her dad is HER story to tell) and yet he did. That feels like a pretty big betrayal to me.
As a queer person I totally get the fear of erasure, but I also don’t think GLBT people are simply entitled to out our queer relatives or speak for them when they haven’t asked us to.
I definitely see where you’re coming from, but we’ll never know what his uncle wished, so to me it’s kind of a moot point. He’s dead and gone, and it’s awful and tragic and just so, so sad. But his nephew is publicly grieving for so many things, not just that his uncle died closeted. I think he has a right to do that, however he chooses to, regardless of the other family member’s wishes. I don’t think anyone can dictate how someone else grieves (unless it’s harming others, obvs).
To be fair, my opinions are very influenced by my lack of belief in an afterlife and also my queerness, but I am v pro outing-after-death, as long as it’s done tactfully
If it turns out that the uncle requested that someone write about his sexuality in the newspaper, I’ll retract everything I’m saying here. Knowing that he wasn’t open about it in life leads me to infer that he didn’t want his secret published in the Guardian.
And that’s what this comes down to for me; telling the Guardian isn’t the same as telling friends and family. This secret also impacted his still very much alive aunt and cousin (who are also grieving) in ways it did not impact him, and yet he shared the story in a newspaper on his terms against the cousin’s wishes.
Yes, he is a gay person, who like so many of us, grew up without role models, and I can see why he would want to publicly discuss the way his uncle’s story affected him. His cousin, on the other hand, was conceived because homophobia pushed her parents onto the same path, and that’s not a picnic. She will always live with the knowledge that her existence is the consequence of a marriage that had to have been painful for both of them. The emotional labour and complicated feelings resulting from her parents’ marriage ought to take precedence over the needs of her cousin, even if he is gay (and we don’t know that she isn’t queer herself). She did not consent to have Potts share her story. Why do his needs trump those of his uncle’s own daughter and widow?
I think that, like you said, this is very complicated and everyone has a different approach. I think that it was just as much his story as the daughter’s and the wife’s. But we may just have to agree to disagree, and that’s okay!
Zebra fish! I’m glad they’re doing so well in the science world, we’ve already figured out how to make them freakish colors: https://www.glofish.com/
Man I wish the EU didn’t ban the sale of GM fish because glofish are so cool! If I was in charge of biology at universities, I’d definitely let the first years watch a GFP-type cloning experiment and then give them all glofish to take home…
Oh, awww man! I was mentally imagining Lionfish this whole time (I haven’t gotten to the article yet) and now I’m kinda bummed that there aren’t a) science tanks full of frondy majestic fishies and 2) that there aren’t day-glo frondy majestic fishies. Nerts.
Maybe they’ll modify some lionfish next! We gotta find something to do with all the ones destroying the Caribbean.
Those fish are very cool, but also make me feel a bit like I’m in Oryx and Crake.
Ummm… Is there a person now missing from your house, Nicole? That’s some Big Bad Wolf Eating Granny stuff right there. Maybe a head count?
Alternatively, a series of children’s books about Wolf Dad.
Too big. I think Sansa has officially gotten too big. Time to trade him in.
Never! House ponies are the best!
God bless Music and Lyrics. Even though the age difference between the leads is gross it’s still so delightful and if I’m being perfectly honest I always cry during the song Hugh Grant sings to Drew Barrymore at the big concert.
I always carry on about that. Andie McDowell to Sandra Bullock to Drew Barrymore. It makes me cranky.
But Marc Lawrence movies are (almost) always fun and the supporting cast is a hoot.
I’m giving it something of a pass because I like the movie, but it sort of makes sense in context – he’s a washed-up ’80s star, she grew up listening to his music and is a bridge between him and Cora Corman. The part that makes it gross for me is that stupid subplot with her jackass professor – I have to skip that scene in the restaurant every time, it’s the wooooorst – because it makes her seem like a dummy who always falls for emotionally unavailable Daddy-figures.
(Plus Andie MacDowell is older than Grant, and Sandra Bullock is only a few years younger, so…not that bad a track record?)
Oh, I just meant the older he gets, the younger his co-stars get…but that’s also not a problem limited to Hugh Grant movies alone. I also support any movie with Kristen Johnston. She’s fucking hilarious.
This is a bit of a long shot, but are there any Toasties near Shanghai who would be interested in going to ShanghaiPRIDE events this weekend? (The website: http://www.shpride.com/pride2016/?lang=en )
It’s kind of awful to think that, around this time last year, I felt compelled to attend Pride to share in the immense joy on the heel of Obergefell v. Hodges, and this year, I feel a similarly strong desire but in order to, I don’t know, contribute to a demonstration of irrepressibility after a tragedy? Show solidarity from an ocean away? In any case, I’ve never been to ShanghaiPRIDE and I’d love company.
I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday and was fasting until 3 p.m., so I did not have the mental or physical energy to view much info about Orlando, but I finally watched the video of Anderson Cooper reading the victims’ names last night, and it broke me. I teared up a teeny bit, but it wasn’t 100% sadness–it was mostly rage and frustration at that point.
I mean, one woman had 11 kids, survived cancer twice and was at the club with her son. Another guy was in the military. After all that, this is what got them. I’m really pissed at the universe right now.
That video of Anderson reading their names was so important.
And oh man, that middle-aged mom dancing with her gay son. It’s something to smile about, despite the tragedy. Can you just imagine? You come out to your mom, and she’s thrilled at the chance to go WITH YOU TO THE GAY BAR to dance until the early hours of the morning. I’m sure her son found it super embarrassing at some point, but what an awesome mom.
That is a good mom.
I lost it yesterday reading about the people who, when the shooting began, were on the phone with their mothers to say “I love you.”
i just feel very strongly that at the end of a person’s life, someone should be there to say, “whatever we have been through up until now, you are awesome and lovely, and I hate to see you go.”
My mom was supportive to me when I was coming out, as was my brother. That had a huge effect on how close I’ve been to them in adulthood. And they are probably the people I would be on the phone with, if it was clear that some violent shithead had decided my time was up.
Your comment is making me cry. Thank you for writing it.
“I wanted her to be supportive, but not THIS supportive so I can’t get my grind on with a hot dude without knowing that my MOM is dancing right behind me”
And that there were three couples who died together. So their families/friends are doubly bereft.
Although they’ve made me cry at work, here are some beautiful pictures of memorials from all over the world in honor of the Orlando victims: http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/06/worldwid…
Lin-Manuel Miranda is the whole world’s boyfriend. <3
But mostly mine, step off.
Not mine – not with that manbun, anyway.
D:
I am generally not a man bun fan but I am making an exception here. Plus it’s for the role.
I want Lin to be my best friend and come over for dinner and be goofy and wonderful.
I want to do dirty things with Renee and Daveed.
The “If Lin-Manuel Miranda Were Your Boyfriend” article is just a collage of photos of him looking at people.
I’ve lurked here for so long (and am so sad about the toast closing!), but had to comment to say thank you for posting the zebrafish article! So many people don’t even know that zebrafish are common in research, let alone such a great and reasonable tool. For a lot of genetic and development studies, mice are somewhat falling out of favor given the cost, animal welfare concerns, and ease of large scale studies with things like fish and frogs.
Hope everyone has a better day than yesterday and Sunday (which for obvious reasons seemed quite rough for so many people)!
It’s a beautiful sad comfort, in these End Days, to see someone delurking because of seeing their love of zebrafish reflected in a link roundup. How have they known the thousand strange facts/enthusiasms of each of us, all this time?
Yesterday I avoided social media, went to two vigils, got a milkshake with my cousin, and then curled up in bed to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m on S6, where she’s beating the shit out of Jonathon and dealing with depression, so it was good to watch her take down the patriarchy while still grieving. Perfect antidote for a horrible day.
Hugs to anyone else who’s still reeling, especially if you aren’t out. Sending lots of love.
Just a friendly BTVS tip – I only recently watched S6 and and 7 after watching the whole series when they aired (and then stopping when I moved abroad). Did you know there are BTVS comics that follow canon and now go up to S10?! I’m eagerly awaiting the next issue due in a few weeks.
On Sunday I watched Scarlett Johannson kick butt in Winter Soldier, also while grieving. It worked.
Hugs to you too.
Buffy dealing with depression and managing to get to a point where she’s being hopeful and moving forward is very comforting. (As is watching her beat up Warren. I feel bad for Jonathan, but Warren is a monster.)
Ilana Glazer, I love you, please never let me down.
Hello, hi, “Pop! Goes My Heart” is on every mix I ever make. I love it so much. I want there to be some kind of round up of songs that only exist in romcoms, like this one and “Sheets of Egyptian Cotton” from Uptown Girls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uIP2s9XMeY
Adam Schlesinger is an undercredited pop genius – Fountains of Wayne, like every written-for-this-movie song ever (“That Thing You Do!”), and the musical director for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Emmy and Grammy winner, Oscar/Tony/Golden Globe nominee.
(that’s good raw data, turn it over to Grizz for analysis.)
This is SO USEFUL. SUCH USEFUL INFORMATION. Hang on while I tell everyone I know.
And Josie and the Pussycats!
I went to the DC vigil for Orlando last night. I’ll be posting some pics, but they’ll be beneath the cut, so if you’re still having to keep away from the news you can skip them. Self care is important, y’all! <3
This is a great shot.
Thank you! 🙂
These are beautiful. Thank you. I went to the vigil in Chicago and I’m really glad I went but it wasn’t as interactive and I really wanted candles.
Honestly almost all the candles you’re seeing in the last shot were brought by me and a friend. 😛 It was a “candlelight vigil”, but most people didn’t bring any.
Apparently they did do a candle lighting at the vigil I went to but we missed it because we were a little late and stuck behind a news truck – they did light 103 candles for the victims.
“they did light 103 candles for the victims”: this is good <3
Thank you for posting these. (We didn’t have candles in Boston yesterday, but we also had 30+mph wind gusts, so that’s probably for the best.)
You guys, my sister’s father-in-law and sister-in-law have both posted memes on Facebook about the guns they carry and it’s really freaking me out. My nieces love their grandpa and their aunt and they stay over at their houses all the time. I just can’t stand the thought of an accident happening to one of these sweet babies because they were around guns. I don’t feel like it’s my place to say anything to either of them, because we don’t know each other all that well, and I’m not sure how to bring up the subject with my sister without making her feel attacked over her parenting. Does anyone have any advice? Am I just overreacting?
If they are responsible gun owners who keep their guns locked up and out of reach of children then yes, I think you are overreacting. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt to ask your sister if they’ve gone over gun safety with the kids.
Edit because I’m just really afraid of this coming off as judgey, but yeah, your feelings are totally justified even if they are probably an overreaction (and if the aunt and grandpa AREN’T responsible gun owners following proper storage methods then it isn’t an overreaction). But as someone who supports stricter gun control laws and a ban on assault weapons, I think discomfort around guns in private homes doesn’t really help anyone. But I could also be projecting because I had friend’s who weren’t allowed to come over to my house to play because their parents knew my dad went hunting with rifles.
I feel discomfort around long and pointy kitchen knives! I think it’s reasonable, not an overreaction, to feel discomfort over instruments of swift death that are very easily misused if not locked up tight. (My step-dad is a former police officer and had guns locked up tight while I lived with him as a teenager, and I still felt discomfort at times despite knowing how they were locked and out of sight — he never told me where they were.) It is entirely reasonable for the presence of firearms to make us uneasy.
So yeah, I agree with you that it’s appropriate to ask what kind of gun safety the sister has done with her kids.
My dad is also a multiple gun owner, and every now and again I gently remind him that I am more likely to be shot by him, a male relative, than to have any other bad thing happen to me.
He still has his guns, and I still gently remind him every now and again. I don’t think his approach is likely to change soon, but then, neither is mine.
I think you could bring it up to your sister in a relatively neutral way. “Man, your FIL and SIL are posting a lot about their guns. Are they good about storing them safely when the kids are around?” Unless your relationship is super-touchy for some reason, that shouldn’t come off as attacking.
My parents keep guns and I sure as heck told them those things had better be locked up when we visit. Luckily they are basically normal humans, so the conversation was as simple as “You have the guns locked up, right?” and “Oh yes, of course, they’re kept in X safe location.”
To me, you want to approach it with your sister as less about the fact that the family members have guns and more that their weird militaristic social media memes are making them seem like they might not be safe. In my experience, the nuttier someone is about broadcasting their weaponry, the less likely they are to actually be a “responsible gun owner.”
Jumping on the wagon to say that as long as the guns are stored safely (and safely=ammo and weapons stored separately and both locked with access only for the owner!) the kids should be fine. Who knows what protection exists to protect kids against the sort of mindset that inspires you to post images of firearms shortly after the biggest mass shooting in the US.
I unfollow anyone that has a profile pic posing with guns. But my real live terror was swimming pools when my kid was small.
http://askingsaveskids.org/
Ask them if they have unlocked guns in the house, and don’t be afraid to refuse to let your children spend time in a house with unlocked weapons.
Columbine was one of those life-changing books for me. I devoured it with this sense of awe and horror and sorrow and fascination. So well written, so well organized, so eye-opening, so emotional. I maaay go hunt down my copy and reread a bit of it. I can’t handle more than a bit in one sitting anymore but God, I hate that it had to be written, but that was an incredible book.
Yes! It was incredibly emotionally draining to read but I still cannot get it out of my head years later.
Same! Columbine happened shortly before I went to high school and it influenced so much of those four years for me. I was astounded at how much I knew about the incident turned out to be wrong.
That book answered a lot of outstanding questions I had about the massacre. I was 14 and 12 miles away when it happened. I was at the big rally. I am glad Cullen was able to put some of the ghosts to rest.
(edited for GIANT FOTO)
This is everything I need today.
Yes, pretty much.
Yesterday, I only went to hyper-specific parts of the Internet, in order to avoid terrible takes on tragic news. I came across this fascinating article about a woman-owned sportswear company and its struggle against Nike’s dominance of running sports. http://www.outsideonline.com/2088316/watch-birdie
OISELLE IS MY JAM I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.
Thanks for posting! I’m a runner and a fan of Oiselle, but I never really knew the backstory or the struggle the brand faces against larger brands like Nike.
Thank you for sharing this! That was a super interesting read, and I’d never heard of Oiselle (but am always in search of comfortable running gear).
Look at the pretty birdie in her picture! (thanks for the link!)
I absolutely hate running (although Mr. Delperro is a marathoner). It was the photo of the peregrine + taking on nike that attracted me to the article.
I don’t run either! I walk though and all I want in life is running pants that come to the bottom of my knee and have pockets. I love her concept of “roga” gear. That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m thinking.
This was such a cool story, but this part “How big should their largest size be? (They opted for 12.)” is so frustrating. There are an awful lot of athletic women out here who can’t fit in a size 12.
Word. Not to mention how intimidating that can be for larger folks who are trying to get in shape.
Thanks for all who were supportive of my FUCK EVERYTHING editorial draft yesterday. I did come up with something which sounded must less hate-y, eventually. I am happy, though, because our (small, conservative) newspaper published it as a featured editorial instead of a letter to the editor, and they didn’t cut it down. I haven’t gone to look at the comments because I know it will be a shit-show and I can’t handle that right now. Anyway, thanks, Toasties. <3 you all.
If you feel comfortable posting the link here, I’m sure some toasties could swoop into the comment section like avenging angels for you.
It has been (as of noon, when I last checked) pretty nice! But here’s a link. Just, uh, maybe don’t say “HEY APPLE PI IS THE BEST” because I like the Toast as the place where I can curse and bitch and moan and make fun of people, which ministers are maybe not supposed to do? So much? So I don’t want my RL name to collide too much with my online name. (OTOH if you just love it and then you find me on FB, feel free to friend, because yadda yadda yadda. ALSO I am contradictorily afraid I will lose touch with Toasties after July 1 and that would be awful.)
http://www.wacotrib.com/opinion/columns/guest_col…
That was so beautiful.
Thank you! *ducks head, kicks pebbles*
Nicole, THANK YOU for linking to that Matthew Vines piece. My evangelical aunt, who is coming to my (lesbian) wedding on June 25, almost a year to the day after marriage equality was made law nationally, posted a stupidly homophobic article entitled “Chik Fil A did WHAT After Gay Club Shooting? Why Isn’t This Viral?” I won’t detail the specific homophobic tropes for fellow Toasts, but you can imagine. (For those who are crushingly curious and don’t want to read: an Orlando Chik Fil A distributed sandwiches and sweet tea on Sunday to those waiting in line to give blood, with a coupon for a free frosted lemonade when they opened on Monday.)
After my own original 500 word, carefully considered explanation of why the article was fucked up (promise, I was impeccably civil!), she wrote an ok response, and I followed up one last time thanking her for reconsidering, and added a link to Matthew Vines’ article, and I think she really got it!! I REALLY hope that her facebook friends who liked the article and her initial response (which ended fine, but started out with the defense that media is portraying all Christians as homophobic and that she wanted to show that wasn’t the case) are tempted to click that link.
Do you mind sharing here what you wrote in response? I had a viscerally negative response to that same post on my feed but really can’t articulate why exactly it bothers me.
Sure… I’ll post both parts. (First is too soft-pedaled – wish I’d just gone for something more like the second, but I’ll be honest here.)
Part 1, my initial response:
Good for them – it’s certainly a very decent thing of their employees to do – but I don’t really like seeing a few hundred dollars worth of sandwiches plus staff time (and were they paid?) portrayed as total redemption for the 2 million dollars they spent in efforts to deny people rights at a cost much higher than a sandwich. Again, that particular franchise is apparently made of great people, but that article (especially the title) is a bit tone-deaf [sic: UGH SO OFFENSIVE]. The reason news outlets aren’t covering it is because they are focused on the victims and not Chik Fil A’s reputation, and rightfully so. I don’t think that national headlines are necessary for the givers of this particular good deed to be rewarded, and if that’s what they were hoping for, I think it stops being quite such a wonderful act…Sorry, I just wanted to share my perspective.
SECOND BETTER PART TO FOLLOW:
OMG I love your response. I would have LOVED to see the “Huh?” look come across people’s faces as they slowly realized you weren’t agreeing with them.
Haha, thanks. This aunt knows me, so she wouldn’t have been surprised, but I can dream that there were a few huhs??
And, after she said she posted it in response to articles wrongly lumping all Christians together as homophobes, didn’t think that the Chik Fil A was looking for redemption/headlines, and tried to convince me with a USA Today article <a href=”http://(http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/04/07/chick-fil-a-fast-food-dan-cathy/7250871/)” target=”_blank”>(http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/04/07/chick-fil-a-fast-food-dan-cathy/7250871/) that Chik Fil A is not actually homophobic anymore by pulling the quote about Dan Cathy having a gay friend when the whole article is clear that they are walking back blatant homophobia in hopes of improving business as they expand out of the South. (At least she was apologetic, but this was full of enough unintentional crap that I had to explain further. I include this context because most of my second response refers to it. Hope this helps you in some way! ETA: She acknowleged that I had probably suffered from homophobia as well. [Snark response: um, ya think? Not snark: sigh, at least she’s trying/more open to change than a bunch of people who are probably posting this.]
PART TWO (looong response to that response):
Yes, I’m way luckier than most, but homophobia still very much affects me. I am very aware and glad that not all Christians are homophobes – when someone goes to Pride anywhere, there are many denominations that set up booths and march in the parades just as many more set up encampments nearby with hateful signs and bullhorns.
I did not mean that particular restaurant and its staff was looking for redemption/accolades, but look at the DC Gazette’s headline: “Chik Fil A Did WHAT After Gay Club Shooting? Why Isn’t This Viral?,” which certainly means that outside observers think that it should have made national headlines. It also implies that this is some shocking thing to do because of their history of what the Gazette calls “supposed slipups” (and I call stoking homophobia and donating millions to antigay causes). The way the Gazette words this is telling: “Turns out, that while the founders definitely don’t approve of that choice of lifestyle, they believe in compassion.” Because Chik Fil A is a franchise, I think the actions of the Orlando Chik Fil A reflect well on THAT Chik Fil A who took on this charitable expense, not the national leadership that finally pulled back on financially backing discrimination while still not walking back their homophobia enough to disabuse the Gazette and other fans of the enterprise as a whole that my “lifestyle choice” is a more defining sin than breaking the 10 Commandments (and for what it’s worth, I don’t believe it’s a sin at all). Despite becoming friends with a gay man, you’ll notice that Cathy is just promising to leave it to politicians and “others” (and that he’s wiser and cares, which I admit to being cynical about – I bet he hasn’t donated millions to counteract the homophobia he used to explicitly spread. Maybe he could donate to orgs helping LGBT teens made homeless by homophobic parents, but I bet some pretty un-Christian Christians would object to him “supporting” gay people.). I’m also going to pull a quote: “While Cathy’s comments didn’t hurt short-term business — and even helped it — Chick-fil-A executives recognize that the comments may have done longer-term damage to the brand’s image at the very time it was eyeing major growth outside its friendly Southern market.” The whole article is about trying to appeal to urban populations, especially Millennials (hi, haha). I’m not going to dig deep into Christian theology, but I’ll just say that while it would be great if all homophobic Christians were to stop giving money to make laws so people are unsafe at work, school, in public bathrooms, etc, even holding those opinions without the financial clout backing them up is harmful. As you know, there is certainly plenty of room in Christianity to choose NOT to be trans/homophobic, so it really grates to see people beg for respect for their “opinion” that has led to so much violence and hurt when they could choose a better way: embracing Jesus’ teachings over a few Old Testament verses, most notably Leviticus, that loads of exegesis has been done on (that is to say, they are controversial). If Jesus really wanted to make homophobia a priority, I think he would have made that clear… (Preaching to the choir on that one I guess. 🙂 ) I just wanted you to know how articles like this one come off. Nowhere in that article do they express any sorrow at the tragedy; they are simply using it as a “gotcha!” moment to insist that homophobic attitudes (e.g., calling gayness a “lifestyle” while allowing divorce and remarriage – a real choice — outside of the few Biblically endorsed scenarios) are basically harmless if a single franchise does a good deed when an utter NIGHTMARE of a tragedy (perpetuated by extreme homophobia) occurs. A homophobic Christian is far more likely to listen to you than me about these things, which is why I just unloaded this wall of text. I appreciate you listening to my perspective – hope it’s helpful to you and possibly others. 🙂
Oh, and I did link the Vines piece in another reply as an afterthought to this one, framing it like this: “Also, this is a wonderful piece by Matthew Vines, a gay Christian you may have heard of. He says in part, “To insist on saying that you “disagree” with same-sex marriage as part of your statement about murdered LGBT people is dehumanizing. It communicates that, even in our deaths, we are still an issue to be debated rather than people of inviolable dignity and worth.” Not that you were doing that, but the article’s pointing out that the founders “disagree” falls under this category. Anyway, I’ll leave it there!” [Vine’s quote is so great.]
I have a christiany aunt who posted that dumb chikfila thing. Unfollowed…
Ugh, don’t blame you. This took SO much energy to deal with, but since I have a long memory and will be getting married next week, I felt like I had to clear the air and I’m glad I did. I’d definitely unfollow her if she didn’t actually appear to learn from these sorts of conversations (round 1: Affordable Care Act, haha), but I’m lucky this doesn’t come up too much with her.
Someone I know posted that meme, but I responded that it was the third time that I saw someone on my feed post about Chik-fil-a’s response (the other ones weren’t as so judgy), so clearly it is going viral.
God, Facebook…YEARS ago, I had an account, hated it, deleted it. Fast forward more years, I found myself acting as secretary for a non-profit horsey club. I suggested opening a FB account because most of our members were on it, and it was more convenient to post announcements, notices, etc. than sending out mass emails.
Now I got three damn pages: the one I can’t seem to delete from years back, the second for family (I caved) and the third for promoting my artwork. To be fair, though, I don’t mind it as much because I got me some privacy settings, I’m picky about who knocks on my FB door and my friends and family are, for the most part, liberal and kind-hearted, so very little drama.
But I still hate FB in a “Big Brother is watching you because He wants to sell you stuff” way.
I hate Facebook but am nosy. So I kept my account but deleted everything off it (my profile pic is a nature pic). I know they still have whatever I posted years ago, somewhere, so I’m probably screwed when this country turns into (more of a) Big Brother state in the future, but it was a reasonable compromise that lets me spy on old friends without putting my own info out there.
i’ve had little experience with FB and it’s all been bad. In 2007 my sister-in-law was pregnant with her third and said all the baby pics would be on FB to make it easier to reach everyone. I opened up a FB account JUST to get the pics, sent a friend request to my SIL, and she never friended me, hah. So my account was active but nothing was going on.
Fast forward three years, a fitness instructor I like was posting updates on FB on her new workout series. I figured I’d get an update every few days, so I logged back on to FB to follow her and was INUNDATED daily with pages of crap: outfits, music, acres of pictures, rambling nonsense. Un-followed, account back to inactive.
You think I’d learn, but no…spring 2015, family member is pregnant with her first and only, all baby pics to be on FB. I said, FamMem, love you but I’ll wait to see you and the baby, I haven’t had good experiences on FB. NO NO NO, she said, she hated the crap on FB too, was only going to post baby pics and baby-related announcements, PLEASE. So idiot me, I friend her and I swear to God, fifteen minutes later I get “I had a fruit salad for dinner, should I have apple pie for dessert?” Unfriended, tore off my own head, end of FB adventure.
If you’re feeling a bit (or a lot) down like me, Drinking Alone at Jessica Biel’s Hollywood Hangout for Children might help cheer you up! http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/06/drinking-alone-at… (Tried to embed link, lost will to live.)
“While I waited for an Uber, I perused the “marketplace” at the front of the restaurant in a perilous state of slightly sloshy sugar high. It looked like the front of a Cracker Barrel, except instead of oven mitts and Americana pepper shakers, there were tiny bottles of artisan jam ($12) and toothpicks ($9.50).”
Concept restaurant stunt journalism is (thanks to the Toast) rapidly ascending in my list of favorite journalism categories, up there with true crime, sports cheaters, and cruise ships. This was great, I’m glad she was nice about the waiter because it’s not the waiter’s fault, and I commend her for keeping the venom in her tone to the bare minimum. I’m not sure I could manage. A few mommy-blogs I follow (out of habit from before they were mommies) have posted about Au Fudge, but they all neglected to mention that a small grilled cheese is like $15.
That was fantastic.
THERAPY DOGS! “Her work in Orlando marks her ninth major deployment to an area roiled by tragedy. She has been sent to Oklahoma and Illinois after devastating tornadoes, and has visited Newtown, Connecticut, twice in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting.”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/leticiamiranda/a-fleet-o…
GOOD DOG.
I didn’t make it past the headline before I started crying.
Nicole, that’s not a dog, that’s a goddamn direwolf.
Update on FB drama (I am so sorry for the bummer OT-ness, Nicole): I did not post either of my draft messages that I wrote here yesterday. Instead I saw ANOTHER very similar text-image my beloved mentor shared that proclaimed there were four causes to gun violence (none of them, of course, had anything to do with gun access; two of them — “hearts without God” and “homes without discipline” — were extremely ironic considering my brother and I had bruises left on us in the name of fundamentalist Christianity), and I snapped and asked her (quite calmly, without any swearing, mind you) which one of these applied to my brother’s case.
She, rather appropriately, asked for us to take this off FB, as it didn’t feel respectful to my brother’s memory, and I said quite right, but neither did that image she shared.
Anyway. I wrote and sent an email explaining how hurt I was and just asking whether she agreed that neither my brother, nor domestic abusers, nor people on no-fly lists should be allowed to buy guns. We’ll see how it goes.
(Please don’t tell me just to defriend her, block her, or cut her off. That’s not helpful.)
I won’t delete my FB because it’s my only connection to my long-distance friends, which are ALL of my good friends now. And my LGBT activist friends give me life. But I do need to check out how to filter my home page feed to just the people I care about AND who don’t post trash that sends my blood pressure skyrocketing and erodes important relationships without giving me a good recourse for addressing the issues.
(I also had the not-so-great experience on a different post, after a friend said she really wanted a CC license now and I told her, “buy a bulletproof vest, that gun won’t keep you safe” — a friend of hers told me to “go ahead and be a bulletcatcher,” and it took me a minute to realize he wasn’t suggesting I be a super-awesome ninja who catches bullets out of midair. What a pity.)
Oh ((toastiehugs)) by the score – you are being remarkably poised and generous in the face of shards thrown your direction. You’re a super-awesome ninja of internet flak.
Awww, thank you. Toastie hugs to you too.
That sounds like an excellent response – especially your point that her actions might not be the most respectful, either. I know you were concerned about responding to her on Facebook, but I think it can also be important to have a public record that at least one person feels like this is Not Okay (especially if there are other family members who might feel the way you do, but don’t know that others agree with them). Not to say that everyone should call everyone out all the time – you know your relationships best, and are the best person to make calls on how to handle them – just that in some cases, “making” someone feel defensive can be valuable, too.
Yeah, that form of public record is important to me too. We have a lot of mutual friends who also cared about my brother. I want them to know this isn’t okay with me.
What a horrible thing for your friend’s friend to say to you. (I will imagine you as a super-awesome bullet-catching ninja anyway.)
Thank you — it was quite unpleasant once I realized what he meant. I really appreciate the validation on that.
I’ve seriously thought about putting together a guide to FB’s various options and settings since so many people are dealing with crappy people on Facebook right now. Amphora’s suggestion is good but if that doesn’t work for you because of “I only have two weeks to live” posts, here are some other alternatives.
On the sidebar on the main page, there should be a header called “friends”. Click on “more” next to it. This will take you to a section where you can make and use lists. You can then put friends whose updates you always want to see on a list, then check it directly to see only their posts. You can also add people to the “acquaintances” list, which keeps them from showing up in your newsfeed as much. I assume that popular posts like “two weeks to live” announcements would still show up.
I hope this helps, and I’m sorry if it doesn’t. Navigating FB is always so rough, especially if you don’t have somewhere else online to keep up with your friends.
Much belated thanks!!! Thank you so much for writing that all out. I’m not a total newb, but my strong aversion to FB has kept me from being well versed in its ways, so a lot of this is really helpful. The one good thing in FB’s algorithm is that it promotes posts with tons of comments, which “two weeks to live” posts tend to get.
Would like to hear other people’s reasons for deleting FB. Pros and Cons.
Pros, i live alone, it helps me feel connected and up on local events. Cons, people are assholes!
I’m coming up on the one-year mark of deleting it. I used to work a social-media focused job and it was so consuming to spend all day, every day tied to social media, so I left the job and quit FB very shortly after. I do miss out on events for sure, but my friends have just learned to let me know via text or in person if something important is coming up that I might have otherwise missed. The only times it gets sticky is when people use it to organize big events where everyone is contributing to the conversation, like a bachelorette party I recently went to.
I’ve gotten more devoted to newsreader apps to stay current on what’s going on, because FB is certainly a super powerful news aggregator. But then on that same token, I’m not having the urge to light my computer on fire because of stupid things people say. Overall it’s been an incredibly positive experience and I’m so much more cheerful not reading negative things on Facebook all the time, or being continually horrified by what people post on there USING THIER REAL NAMES (though that was always an easy way to know who to unfriend). You can curate what news sources you’re reading and avoid all the rest of the drama, and I feel like my overall quality of life improved. Plus I have some very toxic family members who use it a lot and this was also a great way to get myself away from all of them, too.
Sure, you’re less connected with a lot of people who might occasionally comment on something you post or vice versa, but I don’t feel like I’m losing out on any rich life experience because of it. I just make a point of talking to my closest friends over email, text or phone and have come to terms with the fact that I don’t need to know what Shannon from elementary school named her third son, since I will literally never see her again. Hope you have a lovely Tuesday. 🙂
Glad your quality of life improved. That’s a good endorsement! My Tuesday was great, thanks!
I haven’t deleted, but only because I haven’t needed to – I don’t have the FB app on my phone and don’t have my credentials saved on my laptop; I haven’t checked for new friend requests or messages more frequently than once every 3 months since high school; and I haven’t scrolled down my feed to read any of it since college. So FB for me is only a very slow, inefficient method for me to find out whose birthday I’ve missed and whether I still have time to RSVP to that party invite from the one friend who uses FB invites to arrange get-togethers.
I’ve *wanted* to delete, and at this point the only things stopping me are that friend’s invites and the fact that if I delete, my mother will have 1 fewer person’s wall to post slightly inane and humorous videos onto.
Maybe someday I’ll put my sad, old profile out of its misery.
Yeah, I just. . . don’t use it. I have basically all of the notification e-mails turned off (unless I specifically get a message from someone or birthdays). Occasionally, I’ll sign on to say happy birthday to someone and catch up on the last week or so of other people’s postings. . . but I last posted something on my wall several years ago. I keep it so that people can find me through it if they want to find me, but I just don’t pay attention to it unless someone specifically reaches out to me. (So yes, I sometimes miss out on things people post. But I would miss out on those if I deleted my account, too, so same difference.)
This sounds wise.
Deleted mine at 20 when I moved away from my hometown in 2010. Mostly at that point social media felt like an obligation and a performance, and I was tired of keeping it up. The constant data stream was also overwhelming more often than not. I felt markedly more free after it was gone.
Since it coincided with my move, I lost a lot of casual friends. I did try to keep in touch via calling, emailing, and the like, but for some people that just didn’t take. None of my family was on it in the first place, so those relationships weren’t affected. But I had to let go of the urge to stay in touch with someone just because we used to be close or we had shared experiences, and that was hard. I couldn’t tell you the last time I spoke with some of my dear friends from high school. The thing is, though I was ostensibly still friends with them via Facebook, it’s not like we hung out or talked much. Now I have a very tight circle of friends made entirely without social media, and we connect in person, on the phone, via text and email. I look at other venues online and in my local community to find out about news and events. I might have fewer relationships now, but the ones I have are deeper and more meaningful.
Yes, precisely!
This is my dream.
I deleted it, frankly, after a breakup, because I didn’t want to deal with coming across old pictures of us or him with a new girl or whatever. But it’s been such a relief in terms of comparing myself less to other people. Twitter is really good for keeping up with local events. At least where I am, pretty much everything is crossposted facebook/twitter and it doesn’t have all the triggering photos. I keep in touch with friends via whatsapp and email. The only thing I’ve found facebook to be really good for is keeping up with long-distance family who maybe you aren’t going to text or email or call but you still want to see Aunt Frieda’s photos of her cooking or whatever.
I have group of very close women friends, and none of us live near each other. Facebook is critical to us in staying in touch. Any time people talk about gleefully deleting it and never looking back, I know that I can never do that because I need this lifeline to these women.
I will say, we have a secret Facebook group, and on days right after craziness, big elections, trauma, etc. we tend to stick to the group because we know “genpop” is going to be an utter trainwreck.
Unfollow is also key to my sanity. People who get overly political (REGARDLESS OF THE SIDE OF THE AISLE THEY ARE ON) get unfollowed because I’m just not that interested in your twenty paragraph screeds or shared memes with thousands of comments on them.
I connect with my best girlfriends through a WhatsApp group, so it’s just like texting/chatting back and forth together but off Facebook. I’ve found it to be just as good for us all staying in touch.
I deleted/deactivated my account (can you ever really delete the account?) at least five years ago.
At the time, my reason for deletion was that I had just found out that Facebook was sharing my phone number with all my friends (I think this was Facebook’s first big privacy scandal). When I signed up for Facebook at my college back in ’04-’05, you had to enter your physical address and phone number when creating an account. I had no idea that my phone number would be shared with anyone, and I never wanted it to be. I am incredibly protective of my privacy, and I was enraged that Facebook had been sharing my phone number without my knowledge. Argh, thinking about it now STILL makes me mad! >_<
I quickly found, however, that I felt light-years better when I didn’t have Facebook in my life anymore. I am one of those people who tends to feel depressed when she views social media. I also have very little impulse control when it comes to limiting my computer time. For me, this crippling combination would result in hours-long sessions where I would look through friends’ posts and unwillingly compare their lives to my own.
I’d come away from the computer feeling super sad that I wasn’t on a Costa Rican beach doing yoga and looking banging in a bikini, or that no food I ever made seemed to photograph as well as other peoples’, or that I wasn’t married and/or expecting. Please note: I don’t enjoy wearing bikinis, I’m a dang good cook, I’m leery about the idea of marriage, and I am 99% sure that I don’t want kids. I have a happy, full life filled with friends and puggles and books and Korean dramas and family and happiness. But being on Facebook would put me in this depressive fugue where I would compare myself to everyone I saw and find myself lacking, even though I consciously knew I didn’t want most of the things I was seeing.
Being off Facebook changed all that for me. I eradicated easily the most depressing and negative influence on my mental and emotional health when I left Facebook.
I also steered clear of all other social media after that: I don’t tweet, I don’t have Instagram, tumblr, Snapchat, or hell, even a smartphone. I have come to appreciate my lack of social media presence more and more in an era of constant, unfettered communication. Every time I don’t have to state a position on Twitter or Facebook about the latest outrage du jour, I feel a sharp pang of relief. I am more liberal than most people I know and I feel very passionately about certain topics, but I know that it’s not good for my mental or emotional health to engage with the world through social media on those topics.
I find that I stay connected with people I care about just fine via in-person socializing, phone conversations, and e-mails. My friends know that if they want me to come to an event, they’re gonna have to e-mail or text me. The only downside I have seen lately has been since I’ve joined a Meetup group. Folks in the group do a lot of planning and socializing on the Facebook wall, and I am naturally left out of a lot of that. It really doesn’t bother me, though, and I have now become good enough friends with some folks in the group that I’ll usually get invited along outside of the Facebook invite.
TL;DR
Pros: privacy, better for my mental/emotional health, not having to get involved in Twitter/Facebook rage-storms
Cons: so minuscule as to be negligible
I am glad you were able to cut out something that was adversely affecting your mental health. That’s a hard thing to do in our culture.
My now-ex spewed some awful stuff about me on FB last year, so I took a break. I recommend a long break to anyone thinking about changing their FB use habits.
Deactivated for 6 weeks, came back and cut my friend list from 500 to about 175, changed my name so I couldn’t be easily found, tightest privacy restrictions, etc. This made FB so much better for me – it’s how I keep tabs on family I don’t see often, and my many high school friends who are scattered across the country. Added bonus of using it more for local events and groups as I adjust to a new city (and single life)… it’s OK now. I also don’t have the app on my phone – I only navigate through the website, which I think helps limit my time there.
I personally like FB. I actually enjoy seeing what happening in people’s lives. Even if they aren’t really a current friend. There are people who i used to be somewhat close with, and still have lingering affection for, so I like seeing what they are up to. I like seeing pictures of people’s kids and pets. I also find it useful for inviting people to events. I do like to keep a fairly tight lid on who I either unfriend or unfollow so that helps keep it a pleasant experience for me. I also really like the strategy mentioned in the thread above of hiding/blocking the pages that people share that I don’t want to see, rather than deleting the person if I still want to see their other non political posts (or whatever).
ETA: I also have not had some of the terrible problems that a lot of other people have had with FB so maybe that’s why it’s a bit easier for me to still enjoy Facebook.
I think my main reason for feeling that FB is useless is that I genuinely don’t care for most posts in there, and when/how/if I get notifications for things like events keeps changing so I don’t even bother and just actively look up events and things I want to go to.
My only reason for using it more often these days is that some of my best friends (and some acquaintances whose thoughts I like reading about) now use it as their primary online presence, like a mix of IM and blog. 🙁
I feel like I’m constantly opening the refrigerator to see if there’s some leftover fried chicken or a cheesecake, but its nothing but condiments.
I went to a vigil last night in Chicago. I feel less numb today. I’m glad I went. I wasn’t sure at the time – we were kind of stuck behind a news truck and we couldn’t hear everything. But. It was amazing to look around and see the street filled with people, with mourners, with my community.
I posted a few photos from the vigil to FB, including one of me wearing my new bi pride pin. I was gratified that a few friends shared my post and many liked it. I’m experimenting with being more visibly queer online and in my life.
I’m not on Twitter and I feel really good about that decision. I’m mostly avoiding reading FB, but it’s hard. A few of my well meaning friends have shared misc “how to be good allies” / “shut up white straight cis people” type posts and I don’t know how I feel about them. They don’t feel very helpful. They don’t make me feel very seen. But I guess I’m not the target audience – I’m one of the poor broken queer people needing people to be listened to. (Apparently I do know I feel about them – I feel a bit ragey.)
FWIW – Here’s a video of the vigil – other than the politicians, it was quite moving. It’s long – worth fast forwarding for – Stacyann Chin (Jamaican American queer poet) at around 22 min and Fawzia Mirza (Pakistani American queer actor and writer) at around 41 min.
https://youtu.be/sAyyc7akNPg
“This is a good year to celebrate Pride. Even if you’re so over it. Even if you haven’t done it in years. This is a good year to be out….I dare you to find your brave. I dare you to live loud.” – Stacyann Chin
I was also at this vigil – I was part of the choir that sang at the very end. I took out my phone and dicked around on Facebook while Emanuel was speaking, as my private protest to his presence.
I loved the last song. Thank you for singing it!
I’m trying to figure out how to be more visibly queer (in my life too but especially online, where I don’t want to share my personal life but don’t want people to think I’m a weird straight person) too. You have my sympathy and encouragement.
Friend of The Toast Mara Wilson came out yesterday as bi/queer. (More accurately, went from identifying as Mostly Straight to identifying as Bi/Queer.) Or as a two on the Kinsey Scale.
https://twitter.com/MaraWritesStuff/status/742502…
https://twitter.com/MaraWritesStuff/status/742519…
This is interesting to me because I’d also call myself a Kinesy-scale 2, and claiming the “bi” label always felt appropriative to me, especially because I have a male partner (I’m a woman). I’d love to hear other thoughts about this.
Honestly, I feel the same way … but it doesn’t seem appropriative to me for other people. So, I have no idea what that means. But I think I get where you’re coming from.
“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.” – bisexual activist Robyn Ochs
https://robynochs.com/quotes/
Ultimately, how you define your sexuality is up to you alone, and no one can tell you otherwise. But I offer the above quote because it could be helpful to you. 🙂
1. Pop goes my heart is a masterpiece. I forgot how wonderful the video is.
2. Quitting FB was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.
3. I heart you all so much.
A few people expressed interest in my classical music blog, and I updated this morning with a post that was inspired by events in Orlando. It’s about Tchaikovsky and the erasure of LGBTQ+ composers’ sexuality, so it’s relevant to Toasties: Is Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony a Suicide Note?
Thank you for the link. I know nothing about classical music but I do love a good debunking.
Here is a terrible thing to distract everyone from the more terrible things. Yes it’s what the link text says! Boyfriend gave away her and her mom’s Hamilton tickets.
https://m.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/4o3…
EX-BOYFRIEND.
Exactly.
Let us also celebrate the commenter who prefaced her comment with:
“Can I be real a second? For just a millisecond?”
1- Pop! Goes My Heart is the perfect 80s music video and has sent me on a Wham/Tears for Fears/Duran Duran spotify trip.
2- I realised that part of the reason this 7 months (& counting) away from work has been so good for my brain is the lack of NEWS and general exposure to all the ways that people can and are being hateful to each other.
3- Social media: I’ve had a locked down FB since the start but its been weeks since I looked at or posted to it anything that wasn’t a Twitter xpost. I don’t know if and when I will delete it but I find it interesting how my friends seem to have split and defaulted to primarily using either FB or Twitter in a way that really makes me miss LJ. Those were my best Internet Years. (I LOVE YOU JDRAMAS)
I don't know whether it's online now (I saw part of it live and tried to find but couldn't), but the speech made by the guy from CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) was pretty good. I think it's sad that Muslim groups feel like they have to disclaim attacks by extremists, but he had this whole section that was like, the gay community has always stood up against Islamophobia, it's time for Muslims to stand up against homophobia. The bits I saw of the speech were pretty great.
“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.” – bisexual activist Robyn Ochs
https://robynochs.com/quotes/
Ultimately, how you define your sexuality is up to you alone, and no one can tell you otherwise. But I offer the above quote because it could be helpful to you. 🙂
Agreed, much more sexual tension with Kowalski. Also, you make the universe a better place with your gifs.THANK YOU KINDLY.