man-of-many-words

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im babymonkey :)

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if you’re not into some dumb embarrassing shit you’re not living your truth

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some organizations working on the ground in gaza right now

gaza soup kitchen

the sameer project

salam charity

watermelon relief

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having an iliad summer. doing a ton of brooding. might be blinded by selfishness and/or rage. considering unexpectedly dying to my hubris. hopefully that wont have devastating effects

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trying to live by Charif Shanahan

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on degrees of separation by Ash Perry

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forever grateful i was simply too lazy to let the makeup industrial complex get its hooks in me. I was just like im not doing all of that. in fact. im doing none of that

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screen printing stencil i'm working on. i guess i will never stop thinking about soviet space dogs

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Girls only want one thing and it’s to flip a series of overhead switches and to punch a few glowing buttons to start up the spaceship

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Warning: I DO use dude, man, bruh, and bro as completely gender neutral terms, HOWEVER if I call you one of the above and it bothers you, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me.

This has been a PSA 

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HEEELPPP a six year old just came into the nature center and she had SO many questions. it's pouring rain and nobody else is here but her family so non-stop for an hour she had my full attention. by the end of it i had half my field guides open to various insects and mammals and birds and she just kept going.

she became extremely fixated on bigfoot and asked about the ways people try to prove its existence until I was explaining DNA to her, and she asked such thoughtful questions! she said, "what if someone found a skull they thought might be bigfoot, and there was hair left over. could we use DNA from hair to prove it's bigfoot?" but before i could answer, she said, "but if you don't have a living bigfoot that you KNOW is bigfoot, to take hair from, how could you know this hair from this dead bigfoot is really bigfoot hair?" !!!! what an awesome question!!

so this 6 year old and i started discussing control groups in scientific studies and she was so engaged!!

then the bigfoot talk led to discussions of extinction which led to dinosaurs, and she said, "what I don't understand is why people say dinosaurs are extinct, but they also say that dinosaurs became birds. how could they all be extinct if they became something else?"

she asked questions that really challenged me in that figuring out how to answer them on the fly in a way that's digestible wasn't totally straightforward.

a few minutes ago, the adult with her said it was time to go and get ice cream and she said, "can't you see I have 1,000 more questions to ask? i have to just bloooowwww them all out now so you don't have to answer them later."

I saw my younger self in her so much LOL. They said they're coming back tomorrow and I said, "I won't be here, but my colleague knows even more than I do!" And she said, "Well, I hope so. He's gonna need to."

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not to sound like a weak, morally impure centrist over here, but i think online leftist communities need to be a little more accepting of the concept that most people are just. not that well informed. we live in a society that provides access to an overwhelming amount of information and yet which discourages actually diving into much beyond the surface level. Most of the people you meet out in the world are just not gonna know much about a lot of what you care about, but that's not the same as being against those things, or being unwilling to learn, or being unnamenable to those ideas. Our modern society is an unending cascade of information and misinformation and disinformation and filtering through that shit enough to actually have a solid grasp of a subject, let alone a nuanced antiestablishment political take, is a skill that takes time and effort to develop, time and effort that is in very short supply. It really bothers me when I see leftists talk about how capitalism keeps us down by taking up all our time and energy and making recovery, both physical and emotional, cost what little we can afford, and then turn around and get upset that people are politically uninformed. On some level, you gotta meet some people where they are, and have a little faith in them to be open to new ideas and information. Ignorance is not inherently intentional, and it's not the same as antipathy.

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time to rant about jean moreau cause he’s my favorite aftg character :)

it makes me so unbelievably sad to think about how he never got to be a child and live his life for himself. because before the Nest, he was Elodie’s only protector. a child protecting a child. and then—against his will—he was ripped away from her, left feeling like he failed her, even though he had no choice. he was thrown into a place where he barely knew the language and punished for it. punished for something he couldn’t control.

and then again—for being bi? punished.

for neil not staying? punished.

for not wanting to live? punished.

he was constantly being taught that no matter what he does or doesn’t do—even if it’s completely out of his control—he will be punished. even being taken from the Nest, while it was the best thing that could’ve happened for him (even though he didn’t want it), he was still punished.

for trying to heal.

finally, with the Trojans, he starts to feel safe. he’s healing. he’s trying. but the Ravens and the press come for him again. he gets punished again. and so do the people around him—Cat, Laila, Jeremy—for things the Ravens do. they got disqualified (the ravens), and so Jean,cat, laila, and jermey loose the only place that felt like home to them. and Jean genuinely thought he was going to lose the people he cared about too. because of course he thought they’d blame him. everyone always has.

and that’s why i think he and jeremy work so well together. because jeremy is so similar, even though he hides it better.

He’s punished by his own family just for being who he is. instead of helping him with his drug problem—they ignored it. Instead of listening to him beg them to help his brother—they ignored that too. And he was punished for it. they took exy away from him. they forced him into law school. they punished him for being gay by calling him slurs and literally convincing his boyfriend to leave him.

they’re both such severely hurt characters. and their healing looks so different.

jean is slowly, carefully starting to heal.

jeremy is still trapped.

and idk. that’s just why i love the new trilogy so much. It gives these characters so much depth and complexity—it lets them exist with all their pain and softness and fear.

and i just find jean especially so tragic, because he wants to heal. but he’s scared. so instead, he pushes everything down and endures it, because if it all crumbles again, at least he’ll be ready. at least it won’t catch him off guard.

and god, that just hurts so bad.

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WE NEED TO START TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT BIGENDERISM