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God can you imagine if Donald Trump became president? There’d be like a new bubonic plague and he’d be like “idk drink bleach about it”

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Interesting to me that lmao is thriving but rofl is critically endangered, perhaps even extinct in the wild

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how this movie even possibly got made was beyond nuts

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list of mundane things that feel like ancient human rituals

cleaning or wipe your bare feet

breaking off a piece of bread and handing it to someone

putting the weight of a basket on your hip or head

eating nuts or berries while hunched over close to the ground

seeing something startling just out of your line of sight and very quickly stepping or leaping on to a larger object to get a better view

cupping your hands into running water to wash your face

the unanimous protection of a baby or child in a public space where women are present

when an elderly woman laughs and grips your forearm tightly

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Starting to think I greatly overestimated the size of my jar

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me: the only good romance tropes are the ones where they’re friends first

me, demiromantic: wait

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there is no medical component to a trans kid transitioning

if a little trans boy comes out to his parents & is like 4 all youd do for his transition is cut his hair, buy a new wardrobe, & switch pronouns & possibly change names

no one is gonna put a little 4 year old on testosterone OR puberty blockers until theyre actually about to start puberty & then they give them a few years to really decide if they want to start hormones

a trans kid existing isnt “child abuse.” child abuse is refusing to let your kid live their lives as they truly are & forcing them to present as a gender they arent

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Waiting patiently for the day I can fill out the rest of my “what horse medicine do you take” political compass

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Something needs to be done about teachers who hate kids tbh

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In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

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Listening to Leonard Cohen as a gay Jew is like having your nose broken by a falling bolt of costly velvet

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You know. I spend a lot of time thinking about how 9/11 was utilized to perpetrate incredibly toxic patriotism. And I think a lot about the performance of grief a lot. And how that performance of grief has been used to cause so many atrocities. So I grew up in Texas. I was in second grade when the attacks happened. And on that day the fear was real. Anyone in this country knows that there was something in the air the fear was so palpable. No one knew what was going to happen next and I vividly remember the adults barely attempting to perform for us that things were ok. And I remember on the first anniversary of the attack it was very solemn but was a genuine gathering of people remembering the first time our country was attacked since Pearl Harbor (I would like to point out how lucky we are to say that). And marking the collective experience. Like sure. That makes sense to me. I felt it too on that anniversary even despite the fact I was so young.

But then.

Came the second and third and fourth anniversaries. My school, as far away from NYC as you could imagine, began throwing themselves so deeply into the 9/11 remembrance that it felt more ritualistic than authentic. Keep in mind I was so young that I wasn't fully connecting the dots to the war on terror quite yet. I knew that 9/11 was a catalyst but it hadn't occurred to me how it was politically maneuvered. All I knew was that these... ceremonies at my school were weirding me out. One year we all held hands in a circle around the playground and said a prayer. As I grew older and connected the dots these rituals became weirder and weirder and 9/11 just became a brazen display of false grief to me. No one in my town knew anyone who died in those attacks. While the feeling of terror that day felt real and was a collective experience, and there's no denying there is a trauma there, the way it got marked felt so beyond what had actually happened to my fellow Texans.

Then, I moved to NYC. I went to this staged reading series in a bar downtown. I was the sole person in the room not from the city natively speaking. The audience was full of parents and most of the people performing were in college, some high school. One of the staged readings dealt with 9/11. The room got hushed as soon as the room realized what the reading was going to be about. People were reaching for hands. A woman started crying. The collective pain of the room was so real. My friend, who lived mere blocks from the World Trade Center when the attacks happened, needed support.

And that's when I felt it. Actual grief about the attacks. Everyone in this room suffered. They lost someone. They had their air cloaked in smog. They couldn't feel comfortable in their home because a historic terrorist attack happened mere blocks from them. This pain was REAL and PALPABLE. And being in the room with them was overwhelming in the sense that I felt I had stumbled into a very intimate moment I wasn't supposed to be in the room for. And watching them console each other in their grief really made me realize just the sheer amount of PERFORMATIVE grief we see about 9/11. Because now I had seen the real thing. There is so much actual trauma from the attacks. And so many people think they have this pain that they just don't. And that fucked up thinking has caused an entire war that we are seeing the effects of right this second. I hate these wars. I hate seeing a tragedy weaponized. I hate this.

My thoughts go out to the victims of 9/11 and the thousands more who fell victim to its political maneuvering

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God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.

Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.

Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.

The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.

Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.

A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.

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I just keep thinking, like…I have so much trouble feeling connected with people, and the people I do feel connected with (to the point of wanting to date them aren’t available). It’s a bind I don’t know the way out of. I wish I were able to just do whatever, date very casually, meet a lot of people, but every new person is another round of small talk to make, another draw on my already limited social energy. And I’ve gloated and felt superior to other people who I see being in love because…of nothing. Because I need to feel that way. Because if there’s no difference between them and me, I’m just failing and I can’t see how to do things right. And worst of all, I imagine my need and my loneliness are perceptible—they come off me like stench off a corpse, warning people away. No one wants desperation. I don’t know what to do. I’m tired and I’m lonely and everyone around me is in love and I’ve just turned 27 and I’ve screwed it all up.