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[benevolent-blackhole]

Well alright final grades are submitted and paperwork filed…I feel so burnt and exhausted :/

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I felt insane about how impossible it is to take care of my hair and skin here and how it seems to get all fixed when I go anywhere else and then it turns out i live in a place with the hardest water in the world and now I feel better.

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Me, wearing the same Goodwill sweaters and hippie skirts to teach in every day because I can’t afford “professional attire”: I’m setting a good example to my students that you can be a successful academic woman and not be pretty or especially feminine

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Read this in “stats & curiosities from HBR”

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I feel so bad for that Columbia PhD candidate who’s name has been thrown all over conservative and centrist media…I mean I would anyway even if she had been dumb because no one deserves that, but she genuinely didn’t say anything wrong or “entitled” there. She’s not saying Columbia has to bring in food, she’s saying they have to let their deliveries go through.

She didn’t say anything about doordash. It very well might be something like pizza, but who gives a shit. Pizza is a good strategy for that many people.

And the “well, in the 60s we always made sure to pack food” isn’t entirely fair in the current age of food delivery tbh. If you think you can bet on deliveries being possible it’s much easier than transporting food.

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I feel 29 is the age where you absolutely least want to hear how old and matronly you’re looking

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Every time I see my brother (a year and a half younger) he says something like oh wow, you have a couple of gray hairs! (Or a wrinkle) You’re looking older and more distinguished! Can’t wait til that’s me soon!!

And I want to strangle him or throw him out the window

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I get so much scammy mail and credit card offers and they both freak me out so I avoid getting the mail for a month and then I start thinking I’ve been called for jury duty but didn’t show up and now I’m going to jail

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Whenever I get stressed or panicky Charlie starts crying at the top of his lungs and getting between me and what I’m doing…

He’s doing his Best

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Me about my best friend in late elementary school who I’m pretty sure got pregnant and married in early high school. Because I’m good at looking up people and she’s been absolutely nowhere to be found for over a decade- and her name was super uncommon too

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I still think all the time about how my freshman year I had this 72 hour take home midterm. Like, we got the exam emailed to us 72 hours in advance of the deadline- very normal humanities exam, 4 questions in 12 pages, 72 hours.

Anyway. And so I started it right away and got a lot done but then had a mental breakdown because of something unrelated and blacked out and woke up having slashed my wrists and arms and got worried I would kill myself and also generally worried about the blacking out and waking up injured situation.

So I told my therapist and she first made me go the health center under threat of reporting me to the dean which got me permanently branded as a unstable sympathy seeker and then I got a lecture about being manipulative. And somewhere in there I said I just wanted to go home and finish my 72 hour exam and I was stressed out.

And I got another lecture about how this was all because I was a terrible procrastinator and if I took school seriously I wouldn’t have this problem and I should have started it more than 2 days ago.

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[x]

[benevolent-blackhole]

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: English covers

source

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some of yall need to understand that "my body, my choice" also applies to:

addicts in active addiction with no intention of quitting

phys disabled people who deny medical treatment

neurodivergent people who deny psychiatric treatment (yes, including schizophrenic people and people with personality disorders)

trans people who want or don't want to medically transition (yes, including trans masc lesbians with top surgery and trans women without bottom surgery, yall are so weird to them wtf)

and if you can't understand that, then you don't get to use the phrase

[benevolent-blackhole]

Nicole Simpson knew someday her husband would kill her. She’d told many people, including her sister, Denise, that he’d kill her and get away with it. In fact, you can take a battered woman’s knowledge of her abuser’s capacity to inflict harm and evade consequences to the bank.

But five days before Nicole Simpson was murdered, she knew, for sure, she would die. How? Why? Something had happened: a confrontation, a threatening phone call, an unwanted visit, an aggressive act from Simpson directed at her. She told no one, because, after seventeen years of torment, she knew there was no one to tell. The police virtually everywhere ignore assault against women by their male intimates, so that any husband can be a brutal cop with tacit state protection; in Los Angeles, the police visited Nicole Simpson’s abuser at home as fans.

Remember the video showing Simpson, after the ballet recital, with the Brown family—introduced by the defense to show Simpson’s pleasant demeanor. Hours later, Nicole Simpson was dead. In the video, she is as far from Simpson, physically, as she can manage. He does not nod or gesture to her. He kisses her mother, embraces and kisses her sister, and bear-hugs her father. They all reciprocate. She must have been the loneliest woman in the world. What would Nicole Simpson have had to do to be safe? Go underground, change her appearance and identity, get cash without leaving a trail, take her children and run—all within days of her call to the shelter. She would have had to end all communication with family and friends, without explanation, for years, as well as leave her home and everything familiar.

With this abuser’s wealth and power, he would have had her hunted down; a dream team of lawyers would have taken her children from her. She would have been the villain—reckless, a slut, reviled for stealing the children of a hero. If his abuse of her is of no consequence now that she’s been murdered, how irrelevant would it have been as she, resourceless, tried to make a court and the public understand that she needed to run for her life?

Nicole Simpson knew she couldn’t prevail, and she didn’t try. Instead of running, she did what the therapists said: be firm, draw a line. So she drew the sort of line they meant: he could come to the recital but not sit with her or go to dinner with her family—a line that was no defense against death. Believing he would kill her, she did what most battered women do: kept up the appearance of normality. There was no equal justice for her, no self-defense she felt entitled to. Society had already left her to die.

On the same day the police who beat Rodney G. King were acquitted in Simi Valley, a white husband who had raped, beaten, and tortured his wife, also white, was acquitted of marital rape in South Carolina. He had kept her tied to a bed for hours, her mouth gagged with adhesive tape. He videotaped a half hour of her ordeal, during which he cut her breasts with a knife. The jury, which saw the videotape, had eight women on it. Asked why they acquitted, they said he needed help. They looked right through the victim— afraid to recognize any part of themselves, shamed by her violation. There were no riots afterward.

The governing reality for women of all races is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory.

While race-hate has been expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare. For this reason, no matter how many women are battered—no matter how many football stadiums battered women could fill on any given day—each one is alone.

Surrounded by family, friends, and a community of affluent acquaintances, Nicole Simpson was alone. Having turned to police, prosecutors, victims aid, therapists, and a women’s shelter, she was still alone. Ronald L. Goldman may have been the only person in seventeen years with the courage to try to intervene physically in an attack on her; and he’s dead, killed by the same hand that killed her, an expensively gloved, extra-large hand.

Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, it’s the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, “by any means necessary”—a principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she can’t be thrown out of, and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the batterer— by law or force—before she’s dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes she’s going to be killed. And a batterer’s repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.

Everybody’s against wife abuse, but who’s prepared to stop it?

Andrea Dworkin, In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson

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When did you guys find out about The Troubles?

My students evidently had no idea until I brought it up last week and still seem a little confused about the idea that anyone in America cares…I can’t remember not knowing. My sense is that if I taught in Massachusetts people would know everyone is so Irish there, but in Indiana there’s less of an Irish presence so…?

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I’ve been meeting with students one on one last week/this week before their final papers are due and quite a few are telling me that they love the class and it’s changed their life 🥺

So there is that.