heyilan - Tumblr blog

[heyilan]

literally how is driving not incredibly scary for everybody. how is it so normalized. girl you are going to DIE out there

[heyilan]

*benoit blanc voice* now that is just amazing, mister kira, but you seem to be a lot less bright then i musta thought... we're only broadcasting this program to the kanto region of japan.

[heyilan]

you are 16. you are talking with a gay man in his 50s or 60s, a friend, huge and gentle with a scarf and short fluffy curls of gray hair, who has directed you in two plays staged in your mid-size artsy town. (he has not yet asked you to be in his production of The Laramie Project which will change your life. this conversation will also change your life.)

he is talking about theatre. he is talking about theatre when he was younger. he says, "of course, it was AIDS then." in the pause, you ask him. clumsy and quiet and 16 and "straight," you ask him. what was it like.

he takes a moment in which his face is not like a person's face. "there was a time," he says, "i'm not sure how long, years. when i went to a funeral every weekend." he tells you about two funerals in a day, and choosing between friends when you couldn't make it to both. he does not look at you, he looks at them. his wet grey gaze is so clear that you start to see ghosts. it will be years before you understand why it feels like your grief too. why the ghosts call you family.

[heyilan]

A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.

Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.

Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.

And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.

[heyilan]

ive been reading a book that basically explains how so-called “brain differences” between the genders is the result of gendered socialization and not the cause of it. i honestly expected the book to be very cis-centric but its actually the opposite, the author stresses that testimony from trans ppl is actually indispensable because we’ve, in a sense, “lived both experiences”

more cis feminists should have this mindset

[heyilan]

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

[heyilan]

[heyilan]

in case you haven't thought about switching to firefox yet, here's an extension that will...

Notify you if a website you're on has employees that are on strike

Bypass paywalls for major news outlets like the New York Times

Change the browser theme based on the time of day

Directly install third party non-extension scripts

Save individual browser sessions to be reopened at any time

Use the TV format of YouTube in-browser

Make all chrome extensions compatible with Firefox

Turn YouTube dislikes back on

Fix Twitter and make it way less fucked up

Automatically remove trackers from URLs

And many more!

Feel free to add any other firefox extensions you think are slept on.

[heyilan]

art/patrick + old childhood best friends motif

[heyilan]

Grief and rage — you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you— may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors. They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

— Anne Carson, “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form,” (Foreword to) Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

[heyilan]

Ah yes of course, like the all you can eat shrimp was simply too generous sounded like a fucking dumb explanation

[heyilan]

screencap redraw

[heyilan]

[heyilan]

[heyilan]

just wanna say as someone who's Aboriginal that I think First Nations peoples have every right to be a little angry at white leftists (NOT Palestinians, people blaming Palestinians stfu) who ignored our anti-colonial movements for years but are now supporting the Free Palestine movement. If you, someone living in the US, Canada or Australia or Aotearoa, are serious about the liberation of Palestine then you NEED to be just as serious about justice and liberation for the First Nations peoples' who's stolen and colonised land YOU live on. If you're not serious about where YOU fit in the paradigm of anti-colonial work, fix it. Here's a good place to start: if you're a person living on occupied Indigenous lands, learn who's land it really is, and how you can help them as an ally.

[heyilan]

obviously sokka is like, the platonic ideal of an Older Brother. and katara and azula are both suuuch Little Sisters. and it’s clear that toph and aang are both Only Children. but zuko.... does not have older brother energy. at all. so I think that means that lu ten, at some point, must’ve been around a lot, and was the older brother figure that both zuko and azula looked up to. and that’s why zuko is, in fact, the ultimate Middle Child.

[heyilan]

I audition for the role of Ophelia.

Ophelia might be 18. She might be 25. We don’t know. We know she’s young and pretty. I’m 27 and fairly pretty. I’m not young.

The director says he won’t cast someone who “looks” older than 25. I know this means he won’t cast someone who looks older than he thinks 25-year-olds look like.

The truth is, your face when you’re 27 is the same face as when you’re 25. The truth is, your face when you’re 25 is usually the same as when you’re 23. It changes sometime in the night when you’re 21.

Your face when you’re 20 is your face when you’re 18 is usually very close to your face when you’re 16. But when you audition for a 16-year-old when you’re 16, you lose the role to someone who’s 25.

You realize that all of those teenagers you watched in movies growing up were adults. They needed to be beautiful. They needed to be desired. Not awkward, growing, acne, baby fat cheeks.

That’s why you never looked like them. You wanted so badly to look like them.

Now 27 is too old for 25 and you spent your life waiting to look old enough to look young until you’re too old to look your age.

I lie. He can’t tell whether I’m 23-25-27 or whatever age at which a woman is disqualified.

I get the role. I meet the actor playing Hamlet. He’s 45. I meet the actress playing Hamlet’s mother, and she’s 30.

God forbid a woman looks like she was born before she gave birth.

Imagine if she looked like a mother.

Would Ophelia like to be a mother?

Would she have to look like one? With stretch marks and tired eyes from late nights nursing her baby?

Would she have to grow up?

Luckily for Ophelia, she drowns before she gets the chance.

Luckily for me, I still look young enough for the audience to care.

Ophelia and I leave behind a perfect corpse. And happily, because who leaves flowers at a grave with crows feet and smiles lines?

The play is a tragedy, so we don’t smile much, anyway. Luckily.

The people will cry because I’m worthy enough to die,

and happy Ophelia will never become too old to play herself.

—

Ophelia— a somewhat lazy poem I recently found buried in my notes app.