kat | 29 | infj I put my spacesuit on one leg at a time
blog
multifandom | personal
bias
tireless defender of world-weary matriarchs, ice queens, broken birds, and femmes fatales
emotionally compromised by found families, blood ties, and fire-forged friends
This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
“I think there’s a huge mythology that Native people here were simpletons, they were primitive, half-naked nomads running around the forest, eating hand to mouth whatever they could find,” she said. “That’s how Europe portrays us. And it’s portrayed us that way for so many centuries that even we start to believe that that’s who we were.
“The reality is, Indigenous nations on this Turtle Island were highly organized. They densely populated the land, and they managed the land extensively. And this has a lot to do with food because a large motivation to prune the land, to burn the land, to reseed the land, and to sculpt the land was about feeding our nations. Not only our nations, but other animal nations, as well.”
what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”
That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?
I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.
(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and
Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)
if you’re a westerner and for some godforsaken reason youre coming to the czech rep please remember that we do not treat “how are you” as a rhetorical question. if you ask we WILL answer and we WILL aswer truthfully. we will tell you in excruciating detail how we are. do not ask “how are you” unless you legitimately want to know whats up
Westie, a fool: how ya doin fren!
Czech mate, opening their diary with their deepest sorrows: I think it started when I was 9 years old…
Slavic&Baltic countries + Hungary are the same, I think Estonia is, too, at least people acted similarly when I was there, and as far as I know it’s the same in Germany and Italy, which might mean answering “fine” is just an English - perhaps Scandinavian, too? I’m not sure - custom.
Westie: hello, how are you today?
Pole: how am I to be, first thing after I woke up it turned out there was no warm water and of course the administration couldn’t inform us about it ahead, it’s not like they ever did, I remember 10 years ago (a long and tiresome story of the appartment’s administrational shortcomings, going all the way back to the soviet era and somehow proving why veganism is wrong)
Wait, wait, wait, that was supposed to be a joke? That’s… totally normal template of what you’d get in response. First, what’s wrong happened since you last had seen the person asking - check. Then, how this little wrong is tied to the greater and more universal wrongs in your life - check. Then, how it’s tied with the actual great and universal human/regional problems, so the person asking could chime in with their own anecdatas, opinions etc. about them, because it’d be impolite otherwise and seem like you force your problems on them without letting them vent in return - check.
It’s actually quite logical system, from the POV of diagrams and… anthropology. You must put things in the wider context, so the person could interact with them and get their own share of talking, and to balance social exchange. ;)
“In Jewish thought, a sin is not an offense against God, an act of disobedience. A sin is a missed opportunity to act humanly. The verb to sin in Hebrew is also used in the sense of ‘missing the target.’ When God created us free to choose between good and bad, He also gave us the capacity to know when we had chosen wrongly”
— Harold Kushner, To Life!: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking
a lot of reviews i’ve seen of rafiki have given it a 3/5 and critics are calling it a sweet, simple, almost bubblegum-ish movie…. but like that’s the whole point of it? it’s meant to be a drama at its core, but bursting with joy, music and love.
we often take advantage in the west of the fact that we can portray the sexual, political and complicated aspects of lgbt life without it being censored, but in a country with militant homophobia and anti-gay laws, a portrayal of a lesbian romance in the modern day between two teenagers as sweet, and innocent is an incredibly brave stance to take.
rafiki is not as complex or heartbreaking or visceral as brokeback mountain, but it’s a powerful statement in and of itself to make a movie about lesbians that’s actually happy in tone for once. it’s something that larger studios here are still too scared to make lmao
[image desc: 5 images of me, a nonbinary indian wheelchair user wearing a flower headdress, claw necklace, and black dress surrounded by flowers, skulls, and fruits. (1) me sitting in my wheelchair looking off into the distance (2) me laying down surrounded by moss, flowers, bones and fruit (3) me holding a pomegranate looking at the camera (4) me sitting on the floor with my arm resting on a draped stool (5) me in my wheelchair holding a skull and pomegranate]
Detail of William Wetmore Story’s TheLibyan Sibyl, dated to 1860-1861. Marble. Currently located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From the source:
“The Libyan Sibyl,” which Story described as “my anti-slavery sermon in stone,” was inspired by events leading up to the Civil War. Oracle in hand, the Libyan Sibyl, eldest of the legendary prophetesses of antiquity, foresees the terrible fate of the African people. This premonition is suggested by the heroic figure’s state of brooding cogitation. Her costume includes an ammonite-shell (so named for the Egyptian god Amun) headdress, its crest decorated with the tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew consonants that denote the Supreme Being. The seal of Solomon, with its interlocking triangles indicating the interrelationship of the natural and spiritual worlds, hangs from her beaded necklace.
