#most of them middle class or wealthier

[lem0nademouth]

i don’t know where every Leftist™️ got the idea that Israel is the Capitol to Palestine’s District 12 (something I have heard an actual person say), but please remember that these are real people. Every single one. They are not action figures you get to play with until dinner. They are not characters in a story created for your entertainment. I really thought the era of THG comparisons was over, but I was wrong! I was so fucking naive! So please: stop comparing Israel & Palestine to literal works of fiction.

And if you are insistent on using this analogy, please consider that maybe, just maybe: you are the Capitol. The wealthy, industrialized west is the Capitol. Because right now you get to play Monday morning quarterback to a war in a country you’ll never set foot in while I pray every night my childhood friends make it home to see their baby brother graduate high school next year. You are not the victim of this dystopia, you are the spectator.

edit: I’ve now seen ATLA comparisons in which Israel is the Fire Nation, to which I say shut the fuck up shut all the fucking way up

[charincharge]

I Don't Want To Wait, sixty-eight

rowaelin high school bff au masterlist

AN: I said I was back, and I meant it! Anyway, if you haven't read the last update, this is the second update this week. That's right. New Chapters 67 and 68. NSFW-ish warning.

Aelin was exactly seven minutes early to her interview. She’d spent the last week emptying her closet and putting together the perfect outfit – a sweater dress, tights, and boots that were just the right level of put together – and mapping out exactly how long it would take to get to Xavier’s house, so she could feel the most prepared walking in. She would not be late to the most important meeting of her life. No way.

She slid out of the jeep and waved goodbye to Rowan, who promised to be waiting at the closest coffee shop until she was ready to be picked up. She assumed it’d be around thirty minutes, but she honestly had no idea how long this interview would take. It wasn’t like she had any experience. Looking around, Aelin took a deep breath and took her first step down the long driveway and toward her future. She gained confidence with each step, feeling her stride lengthen and solidify as her chunky boot heel crunched the gravel beneath it.

They were definitely in the wealthier part of Orynth, closer to where Lysandra’s family lived. Sprawling lawns and expertly manicured greenery dotted her winding path. It felt so different than her own tiny street with closely stacked duplexes and shared family homes that she felt a small tug of insecurity before reminding herself that she was prepared for this. Both her dad and Rowan would attest to that. She’d put them through their paces, going over the “best answers” to potential questions that ranged from her favorite book (The Secret Garden — to lead into her thoughts on why lack of autonomy within the disabled communities is a problem) to what she planned to study (an interest in biology and pre-med with flexibility to also take liberal arts classes) all the way to challenges she’d had to overcome and how she’d  personally be an excellent addition to the Wendlyn community. Those were too complicated to boil down into small snippets. But she had the bullet pointed lists laid out in her head, ready to be explained and fully ready for engagement. Honestly, as nervewracking as this whole situation was, she felt prepared. She reassured herself one more time, scrolling through her list of answers over and over, until she reached the oversized front door. In the middle of it all was a door-knocker so large and cumbersome she hoped she could lift it.

Another deep breath. She could do this. No matter how rich and fancy this person was. Whatever laid on the other side of that door, she was ready and prepared for.

She inhaled, filling up her lungs with extra reassurance, but as she lifted her hand to raise what was surely a heavily weighted solid brass knocker, the wind was completely knocked from her chest. Of all the things she had prepared herself for, she had not anticipated this one single thing that could fully derail her.

Before Aelin knew what was even happening, she could feel herself shrinking at the sight before her. She’d know that perfectly coiffed hair and polite smile anywhere.

“Mom?”

“Aelin,” Evalin said, leaning in to kiss her on both her cheeks, surely leaving behind smudges of her burgundy lipstick on Aelin’s pale cheek.

She leaned back and looked Aelin up and down, her crystal eyes pausing and practically flinching at the tiny snag in Aelin’s tights. She’d only had that one pair and even went over it with clear nail polish to make sure it wouldn’t pull or run more, fully assured that Xavier wouldn’t be looking at the side of her shin where her boot met the tights. But she hadn’t anticipated Evalin’s eagle eyes pulling apart every slight detail, searching for anything out of place to berate her for. “Don’t you look lovely,” Evalin continued, though the downturn of her lips as she touched Aelin’s sweater dress gave her real feelings away. Evalin chuckled as she stepped aside, letting Aelin enter into the large dark foyer. 

“Why don’t you take off your coat, darling?” Evalin said, reaching her hand out.

Aelin cleared her throat, trying not to let the slight choking feeling overtake her and draw in a steady breath as she finally got out a soft, “Mom, what are you doing here?”  

If Evalin was fazed in the slightest, she didn’t show it at all. But Aelin had never felt so small. She had worked so hard to put together this outfit, and now that her mom was looking at it, she knew it was all wrong. The sweater dress had been put through the wash one too many times, tiny pills forming in its most worn spots. Evalin would have shaved them off. Or bought Aelin a new dress. She’d make sure that Aelin had a fresh haircut, none of her desperately-in need-of-trimming dead ends left unevenly past her shoulders. She tugged at the sleeve of her sweater dress as her coat disappeared from her shoulders, suddenly feeling naked without it. There was a tiny thread coming undone from the hem of the sleeve, and she knew that without a doubt Evalin would clock it. The woman missed nothing. She should have tugged it and tried to remove it immediately, but all she could feel was shock and horror. Needing something to do, she untucked her hair from behind her ear, letting it tumble forward, but of course that was the wrong thing to do. Aelin could never do the right thing. Be the right way. Be good enough to keep her mom happy. To keep her around, even. 

She swallowed the thick lump in her throat as Evalin frowned and straightened her shoulders back, warning Aelin silently to do the same. As she retucked the thick gold wave behind Aelin’s ear, her furrowed brow melted away, replaced by a smile only reserved for others. 

“Xavier, please meet my beautiful daughter, Aelin,” she said with a sweep of her hand. It took everything in Aelin not to flinch as the hand gestured toward her. Instead, she donned her most polite smile — ruing the way it felt like an Evalin reproduction — and bowed her head and curtsied, instinctively.

Xavier chuckled. “Oh, my. Look at that,” he said as his elbow nudged into the air by Evalin’s side. “Impeccable manners, of course. I would expect nothing less from an Ashryver,” he continued, his tone light as he ushered Aelin further into the cavernous foyer.

Xavier was everything she should have expected but was somehow unprepared for. He was Evalin in male form. His thick blonde hair was perfectly coiffed, swooping gently over his forehead in a way that told Aelin is had taken hours of work and product to get it to look so natural. He was tall but reedy, like someone who spent a lot of time mixing up green smoothies, per his personal trainer’s request. His navy suit was clean and pressed, sharp with creases that told the world he was someone with something important to say. Shiny cufflinks glinted in the mid-afternoon sun, and Aelin knew if she looked close enough they’d be monogrammed with a flourished script.

“But no need for formalities,” he continued, oblivious to Aelin’s turmoil. “Your mother and I go way back. In fact, our parents’ parents go way back. Evie and I were friends long before our time together at Wendlyn.”

Aelin nearly choked at the use of the nickname for her mother. She’d never heard anyone address her as anything other as her full name, and it took Aelin aback that this man was not only allowed to use this familiarity but received a smile in return for it.

“We were bred in the same kennel, as my father used to say,” Xavier said scratching at his too clean-shaven chin. It was red and shiny and Aelin wished she could stop staring at it and listen to him again. “I can’t remember a holiday I didn’t spend with the Ashryvers,” he droned on.  But Aelin’s mouth was faster than her filter. 

“But I’m not an Ashryver. I’m a Galathynius,” she said. Two pairs of eyes widened but melted quickly back into an amused gaze. 

“Hi, ho. A spitfire, just like her mom. That’s the Ashryver spark for sure,” Xavier said, ignoring Aelin’s growing discomfort.

Because she wasn’t an Ashryver. She was a Galathynius. 

“Who, me?” Evalin batted her lashes and giggled, feigning innocence. Flirting. Aelin’s mom was flirting with this man. This alum. Right in front of her. She swallowed again, biting down the ire rising in her throat. She hated it here. She would do anything to send a fire signal to Rowan to come and pick her up immediately, but, no. She had an interview to complete still. An alum to impress. Aelin could feel her heartbeat quickening as she realized that she still had an interview to complete. That her mom would bear witness to this whole thing. She just wanted to get it overwith and be out of her presence as quickly as possible.

“Can we get started?” Aelin cut off the man, who was clearly surprised. 

“Ah yes,” he fumbled with his thumbs and shoved them into his pocket before taking one back out and gesturing down a long dark hallway. “The study is right this way.”

Study. So formal.

She looked down the long hallway and tried her best to grasp at any of the tendrils of her waning confidence, but it was fruitless. Aelin had never felt so out of place, like such a fraud. Here she was, pretending to be Wendlyn material, but that wasn’t her; that was Evalin.

Evalin, who had grown up with this man, knowing that her future held the glowing promise of a Wendlyn future. Evalin walked through this home as if she belonged there, looking completely at home. But as Aelin traversed the dark portrait-lined hallway down to the study, she could feel the sharp stares of the painted faces judging her with every cautious step. You don’t belong here, they seemed to mock, their pinched noses and haughty smirks watching as Aelin’s chunky boot heel step on the delicate mosaic tile beneath her feet. She didn’t want to think about how expensive these fancy floors were, and the fact that her $20 boots were most likely leaving black rubber smudges against them.  

While Lysandra’s family home was fancy, it was nothing like this – whereas her house was bright and wide and open and modern, this expansive home was dark and crowded with ornate moldings and décor that felt like it could close in on Aelin at any second. She managed to keep her feet steady, despite the long walk down the seemingly never-ending hallway. She could hear Xavier maintaining casual conversation with Evalin, but Aelin stayed quiet, fully focusing on maintaining her stride and praying that she wouldn’t stumble and fall or accidentally break something. Foreboding crept up Aelin’s spine as Evalin fell into pace beside her and smoothed out the fabric of her sweater dress against her back. She could feel her picking off an imaginary piece of lint from the shoulder just so she could dig her fingers into her bicep and pull her close. 

“Behave, please,” Evalin whispered through clenched teeth, causing Aelin to stumble, just as she’d feared she would. “Careful, darling,” Evalin drawled in a much lighter tone. “These floors are priceless.”

“You break it, you bought it,” her mother and Xavier said in unison as he pushed open the door to his study. They both laughed as it was something hilarious from their youth, but all Aelin heard was – You’re not one of us. Again and again and again.

Aelin blinked at the harsh expanse of daylight that filtered through the floor to ceiling windows lining the wall of the study. Thick burgundy drapes were pulled back to allowing a shock of grey-white sky to cast its milky pallor over the dark wood room, somehow leeching it of any warmth, despite the burgundy and mahogany color scheme. 

“Ah yes, it’s quite the view, isn’t it?” Xavier chuckled as he gestured to the frost-laden yard that seemed to go on for miles and miles. “You can see the mountains in the distance on a clear day. When we first bought this place, the neighbors behind us were trying to plant trees in our view, which turned into a bit of a legal battle. But it ended up alright. We bought them out, and now we have a perfect view.” His voice was haughty with pride at the notion of buying someone out of their home. Aelin’s stomach curled at the notion that one person could be so selfish. But still, she put on her best smile and nodded politely. Evelyn would tolerate no less.

Still smiling smugly, Xavier waved Aelin over to the large leather loveseat where Evalin was already perched. But Aelin didn’t want to sit next to Evelyn. She couldn’t think with her hovering so close — all her well-prepared answers had floated to the recesses of her memories, blocked by the constant perusal of her mother’s perfectly controlled facial expressions. But as Xavier slid into the arm chair across from them, Aelin was at a loss. There was nowhere else to sit. She’d have to sit next to her mother.

As she slid onto the stiff couch, the skirt of her dress rode up slightly, catching on the leather. But before she could even it out, Evalin was there, doing it for her. Always hovering. Always watching. Aelin didn’t even realize that Xavier had asked her a question, until she heard her mother’s sharp whisper. “Don’t be rude, Aelin. Answer.”

“Hm?” Aelin’s head whipped up, watching Xavier face lips tug downward into a slight frown.

“Xavier was just asking what you’re interested in studying?” Evalin repeated, her blue-grey eyes staring a hole into Aelin. 

Aelin knew she had an answer for this. She’d talked about the phrasing with Rowan over and over about why it was actually a benefit that she wasn’t completely sure what she wanted to study yet. That it allowed for… curiousity? Flexibility? No, that wasn’t what she’d wanted to say. The words were completely mixed up in her head, and she couldn’t make heads or tales of them. With every flash of her mom’s eyes, Aelin’s rehearsed answers disappeared further and further until all that was left was a gaping black hole of confusion in her anxiety-addled brain. What was she supposed to say? She had no idea. Literally none. She couldn’t do this. Oh god. She couldn’t do this.

Aelin swallowed back the threat of tears as she croaked out a quiet, “I don’t know.”

“Aelin has many interests,” Evalin jumped in, placing her perfectly polished nails on Aelin’s knee. “She’s trained in ballet and is extremely creative.”

She should have said something about how she had just joined Orynth’s Dance Company. About her time spent teaching last fall, how dancing was for fun and she wasn’t sure she’d want to pursue it professionally but she loved that Wendlyn had recreational dance teams she could participate in. That was the answer she’d rehearsed. It was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t seem to make her mouth and brain work together.

“Ah, so perhaps a performing arts major?” Xavier asked. “I myself studied the bard and was in a play or two back in my day. Wendlyn has a thriving theater department. We even have quite a few celebrity alums,” he continued, oblivious to Aelin’s complete mental shutdown.

“No,” Aelin said. Apparently she couldn’t even explain more than that. She could see the corners of Xavier’s eyes tightening uncomfortably as he watched Evalin’s hand grasp Aelin’s knee – the edges of her dark red gel tips sinking into Aelin’s tights, as the conversation plummeted into a dead silence.

“Right,” Xavier cleared his throat, clearly at a loss. Aelin could feel her stress welling as he continued, hopeful, knowing that her next answer was sure to be another disappointment. Just like her entire being. “Well... perhaps you’d like to tell me about why you’re interested in Wendlyn?” he asked.

And though Aelin knew she had a full essay response for that exact question, she simply shrugged and let him continue his list of questions, each one said with less curiosity as Xavier realized what Aelin had feared: she wasn’t Wendlyn material. And with each question and answer, Aelin knew her chances of getting into college with Rowan were quickly disappearing.

. . .

Aelin had been in a mood in the days following her interview with Xavier and she who shall not be named. But, she was trying her very hardest to keep a smile on her face and pretend like she was totally fine. Mostly because today was Rowan’s first lacrosse game of the season, and he needed her in the stands cheering him on, not sulking about her botched interview. It wasn’tthat she wasn’t a fully supportive girlfriend, but she wasn’t feeling particularly into lacrosse — the sport that was fully responsible for handing Rowan a future that she so clearly wasn’t going to be a part of. She wanted him to do well, but an uncomfortable feeling of panic was pressing against her chest, and it was taking everything in her to put a smile on her face. And Aelin was a lot of things, but a spectacular actress was not one of them.

To Rowan’s credit, he was letting her feel her feelings without pushing. He’d asked how the interview went upon picking her up, and Aelin had simply snapped and said, “Bad.” When he pushed for any more information, she shut him down completely and she could feel a thick wall of armor rising. She’d been furious, practically shaking with anger, but for some reason, hadn’t want to share her mom’s surprise appearance with him. She’d told him that she’d talk when she was ready, and even though she knew he wanted to push, he accepted what she’d asked for. She wasn’t ready to talk about it. She had other things to think about. Like figuring out any other plan for her future that still included Rowan.

Which is why that Friday morning, she donned her green and gold best, tied her long braided pigtails with the #47 ribbons she’d decorated in puffy paints last year, and woke up early to grab a few special treats for her boyfriend on his big day. Before this whole debacle, she’d asked Maeve if she could make a batch of Rowan’s favorite peanut butter cookies, decorated like his jersey, and sure enough, they were waiting on the counter with two coffees when she let herself into their townhouse. She could hear the shower running upstairs, along with a loud blaring bass of one of Rowan’s pump-up playlists, and she forced herself to take a deep breath and push aside any traces of residual insecurity and focus on Rowan. It was his big day, and she knew he was nervous. He always was.

Within minutes, she heard his heavy step skipping every other stairs as he descended into the kitchen where she was waiting, and his smile upon seeing her there temporarily melted away her bad mood entirely. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get over receiving that look from him.

“Happy game day, Captain,” Aelin said, smiling widely.

His arms surrounded her, sliding beneath the hem of her shirt, as he leaned in and pulled her against his chest. He smelled warm from his shower, and she took a moment to inhale the comforting scent of his pine body wash combined with something just innately Rowan.

“Coffee?”

She held out the cup in his direction, but he ignored it in favor of kissing her. Who was she to disagree? She let herself melt into it, letting her anxieties disappear for the moments his mouth was on hers.

“Missed you,” he mumbled, and she couldn’t help but laugh against his lips.

“You saw me less than nine hours ago.”

“Too long.” He pulled her even closer and went back in for another kiss, this time with more fervor. His tongue slid between her lips, and she could feel herself getting slightly carried away as their bodies pressed together even tighter. Her grasp on the coffee cup in her hand was getting dangerously loose when he finally pulled away, resting his head against her forehead and bringing the coffee to his lips.

“Mmmm. Delicious.”

“Me or the coffee?” she asked, eyes twinkling.

“Both.” He leaned in and kissed her one more time. “I wish we had time to go upstairs, but…”

“Someone has a game to kick ass in today, and missing first period is probably a bad way to start that off, huh?”

He nodded sadly, but the mischief didn’t completely leave his green eyes as he looked her up and down. “But maybe during lunch?”

Aelin couldn’t control the burst of laughter that bubbled up her throat. “A pre-game warm up?” she teased.

“Always.” He let his hand fall to the swell of her butt, pinching it lightly and causing Aelin to yelp in surprise.

“Be nice or I’m not giving you your cookies.”

Rowan raised his brow. “You baked?” he asked, rightfully skeptical. After all, he spent most of his time with Aelin and he would have definitely noticed if she’d disappeared to Maeve’s for a few hours without him.

“I had help,” Aelin said, procuring the tray of decorated cookies.

His excitement couldn’t be contained as he leaned back in for yet another kiss, but Aelin knew that if they kept this up they definitely would be late for school.

“Later,” she promised, hoping that would keep her spirits afloat.

But as soon as she waved goodbye to Rowan in the hallway, all her doubts came flooding back. She parsed through every second of her time with Xavier and her mom, wondering if there was any world in which that interview could have been construed as positive, but she knew in her heart the truth. She had bombed. Big time. Not just a minor bomb. That whole afternoon had been a full nuclear wipeout with no survivors left standing. She’d killed her own opportunity, and she’d never forgive herself for it.

By the time lunch came around, Aelin was so deep into her self-pitying wallowing that she felt like she was being suffocated by negativity. She’d hoped that seeing Rowan would brighten her spirits, as it had this morning, but apparently that’d been a fluke. She was just as prickly as ever, barely even smiling when he greeted her with a giant bear hug, spinning her around the hall in an exuberant whirlwind. In fact, her mood was made even worse by the flurry of cheerleaders who giggled in his presence, blushing as they wished him luck in tonight’s game. She practically hissed as one got too close, flashing her canines in feral warning.

“Ease up, Ace,” Rowan chuckled as he led her out to the far side of the parking lot where the jeep was parked.

“Stupid fucking cheerleaders,” she grumbled as she slid into the back seat. She was so in her head that she barely even noticed Rowan driving to their special secluded spot — a nearby parking lot that was midway through some sort of construction when it had been fully abandoned. She was sure the crews would come back one day, but for now, it was perfect for their, uh… needs.

Rowan joined her in the back seat and pulled her onto his lap with skilled ease, as if they’d been doing this for years, rather than merely weeks. But it was good. She was on full autopilot. Aelin’s body knew exactly what to do without being in her brain at all. Her hips rolled against his lap as his fingers tangled in her hair, clashing their teeth together in a harsh mingling of breaths and low groans. She didn’t wait for him as she pulled her top off, and allowed her head to fall back as his mouth trailed down her neck and to the bare expanse of her cleavage. Gods, she loved him so much. What was she ever going to do without this? She tried to imagine a world where she didn’t get to be this close to Rowan, but all she saw was a gaping painful hole in her hear heart. She felt her throat closing slightly and swallowed down the threat of emotion she’d careful kept walled up all week.

“Ace?” Rowan looked up at her with concern, clocking the change in her breathing, but she forged forward. She would not lose any time with him. She’d take advantage of every second they had together. Clothed and unclothed.

“I’m good,” she reassured him,

But she knew he could feel the slight waver in her touch as she reached down to his waist to unbutton his pants. His green eyes flashed in warning, but she ignored it, pulling him into her hand and tightening her grasp exactly as she knew he liked it. Autopilot.

Her hands regained their surety as she continued, lulling Rowan into a state of blissful arousal. She leaned in and bit his exposed throat as he leaned further into the seat, moving his hips into her hand. Her mouth opened and sucked at his skin. Hard. She wanted anyone who saw him to know that he was spoken for. That he was claimed. That he was hers. No matter what. She never wanted anyone else to know him like this, and she could feel her pulse stutter as she even considered the possibility of that. No.

She needed to refocus. Without removing her mouth, she reached for the condom he’d placed beside them on the seat and opened it. She leaned back just barely enough to make room to place it on him, not wanting to give him any space. That was the opposite of what she wanted. She could hear him groan a loud expletive as she slid on top of him and started to move. He fit so perfectly. No one else would ever fit like this. And when it was gone, she’d miss it so, so, so much.

“Oh, Ace.” She thought he was moaning her name in pleasure, but it wasn’t until he said, “Aelin, baby, stop,” that she clocked the tone was actually of concern. His face was blurry, and as she blinked, she felt that her cheeks were fully wet. Unbeknownst to her, silent tears had welled and dripped from the corners of her eyes in full, hot streams. “Baby, stop,” he said again, his hands going to her hips to still her, but her autopilot refused.

“No, it’s okay,” she said thickly. “I’m okay.”

“Aelin, you are not okay. You’re crying.”

She tried to keep her legs in a vice grip around his hips, but he was fully in control as he pulled her off of him and tucked himself back into his pants.

“No, no,” she croaked, her tears pouring out in earnest now. “We can keep going.”

“Ace, we’re not going to have sex while you’re crying.”

“I’m not crying,” she sniffed as his hands came up to her cheeks, wiping his thumbs against them. That seemed to be the thing that cracked her open, a full sob releasing from her mouth as her shoulders shook with the weight of the past few days. Rowan shushed her gently as he pulled her against him, rubbing comforting circles into her back. But she barely felt a thing. All she could feel was the hot sting of embarrassment and shame.

“Do you want to talk about it finally?” Rowan asked, but Aelin shook her head into his shoulder.

“N-no.”

“Okay.”

And she knew that he meant it. He’d sit there, erection still throbbing in his pants as she cried it out silently. That only made her cry harder. She owed it to him to tell him what had happened. She didn’t even know why she’d kept it to herself. Maybe she’d just wanted to pretend for a little longer that the future she’d imagined for them could happen.

“I blew it,” she finally said.

“I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,” Rowan said. Her body was suddenly exhausted, and she couldn’t sit upright anymore. Or maybe she just couldn’t look at his face during this conversation. Instead, she slid until she was slumped across his lap and cuddling into the soft fabric of his pants. She struggled to calm her breath as he ran his dexterous fingers down her back and up again.

“You may as well break up with me now,” she sniffed.

Rowan’s hand paused on her back and tilted her ruddy face to look up at his concerned gaze. “Ace, I thought we talked about this. No matter what happens, we’re not breaking up.”

“That’s what you say now, but…” Another wave of tears took over as she sobbed. “What if you meet someone else? Some pretty and smart Wendlyn girl who fits into your world?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Rowan asked, seeming genuinely perplexed as his finger pushed aside the stream of tears on her hot cheek. “You fit in my world perfectly.”

“But all those girls at Wendlyn are going to be from upstanding families with two parents whose names are on libraries, and I bet they wear real pearls and have perfectly painted nails that are never chipped, and—”

“Aelin, what the fuck are you going on about? Why would I care about any of that?”

She bit her lip, sniffing back another round of tears as she finally told Rowan about Evalin’s surprise appearance and how of course she couldn’t have gotten that interview without Evalin’s help, tugging on those elite strings. And how clear it became that she was anything but that.

Rowan scratched at her scalp, and she leaned into his comforting touch.

“I don’t use the word hate lightly, but I fucking hate Evalin. What she did to you, surprising you like that with no warning was completely fucked up. She should have told you she was going to be there. Leaving you unprepared like that wasn’t going to help your chances, even if she thought being there would. You deserved a heads up. And the fact that she didn’t think you did just shows how little she understands about life. And you.” He took a deep breath. “And it’s okay to feel fucked up about what she did. But, Ace, it’s not okay to think I’m just going to suddenly disappear from your life if you end up at another college. That’s not going to happen. Never. Ever ever. I’m going to be in love with you for the rest of my life. Forever.”

“But—”

He held up a finger to her lips, shushing her. “But also, one person’s review of you isn’t going to make or break your college admission. You don’t know what anyone thinks of this Xavier dude. He could be hated! They could have him interview people as a barometer for who not to accept.”

“That feels highly doubtful, Ro,” Aelin laughed through the remnants of her tears. “But I appreciate your optimism.”

“All I’m saying is, it’s not over until the school year starts. And even then, it’s not over. Best case scenario, you get in with me for the fall. But there are a hundred other things that could happen before then. You could get waitlisted and get in, you could apply to transfer after a semester or a year, if you wanted. Or, other best case scenario, you love wherever you end up, and we still make this work with phone calls and video calls and weekend visits. Because I’m going to love you for the rest of your gods damned life, so stop trying to get rid of me,” he said, poking her cheek with each pointed word. “It’s insulting.” He paused, looking her over thoroughly, and it felt like he could really see through her in that moment, and she could hear his words before he even said them. “I’m not your mom.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” he asked. “Because I definitely don’t have my last name on any libraries. And I couldn’t tell you what a real pearl looks like if a million dollars were at stake. And guess what? I bite my nails, and the only reason Evalin even came around to the idea of me is because Wendlyn became interested in me. You think that I feel like I’m going to magically fit in there, but I doubt many students were raised by their single aunt and grew up working in her restaurant. I don’t have a trust. That’s why I needed this scholarship.” He paused. “If we’re weighing which one of us belongs at Wendlyn more than the other, only one of us is a legacy there, you know?”

“Okay,” she whispered, but the hurt was still so raw, and she felt ragged from her marathon of crying. She could feel Rowan still hard in his pants, and she felt awful. She went to reach for him, but he sternly put her hand back by her side.

“Don’t even think about it.”

“But—”

“We’ll celebrate after I win the game tonight,” he said.

And true to his word, they did.

[eretzyisrael]

President Sisi, how can you say Jews were not persecuted in Egypt?

Once numbering 80 – 100,000, there are fewer than a handful of Jews left in Egypt. Yet ‘Jews were never persecuted in Egypt,’ President Sisi of Egypt declared to US secretary of state Anthony Blinken. Here is Edmond Haddad’s response in JNS News: 

Carefree days on Abu Kir beach in Egypt in 1938 (History of Egyptian Jews Facebook page)

Let me tell you about oppression and persecution: In 1947, my uncle went to prison for 15 months for purchasing a train ticket to Tel Aviv. In 1948, my father broke his arm trying to prevent the burning of his factory. He was beaten in 1950 because of his religion.

In May of 1956, Jews employed by Egyptian public institutions were sent on vacation, then dismissed. When he announced the blockade of Akaba, then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser dared the “Jews” to come—not Zionists or Israelis, but Jews. On Nov. 23, 1956, Egypt’s Minister of Religious Affairs declared, “All Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state.” Imams read this statement in mosques across Egypt.

In 1962, I went to the bank with my mother to open a savings account. After the teller saw on my identification card that I was Jewish, he threw the money I gave him back at me and told me that Jews could not have savings accounts in Egypt. Muslim teachers in my school often told us that Jews were not wanted in Egypt, so we’d better not talk in class.

In 1967, all Jewish homes and property were confiscated. All male Jews were put in detention camps for anywhere from six months to three years. Just before Nasser died, all the prisoners were deported and their families expelled.

I summarize two eyewitness accounts from my cousin Gamliel and Ibrahim Farhi, who were both imprisoned in Egyptian detention centers: The police arrested all Jewish males over the age of 18. Their businesses, cars, furniture and possessions were confiscated or auctioned off. The prisoners were taken to Abu Zaabal prison. “No one was called by their name there,” I was told. There were no watches, no shoes and only women’s names for the prisoners. The prisoners were forced to undress and run around the yard while the guards beat them. Their heads were shaved. Most were raped. They were fed white cheese full of worms and bread full of bugs. For six months, their families didn’t know if their loved ones were dead or alive. This torture continued day and night. Nasser released them only in June 1970.

At the time, Egyptian Jews were of mixed education, wealth, religious observance and political beliefs. The wealthier members of the community founded banks, owned department stores and traveled freely abroad because they could afford the bribes required. Most Jews were stateless, because their applications for Egyptian citizenship were almost always denied.

Many Jews converted to Christianity or Islam and tried to assimilate. Jews spoke several languages, but not Hebrew. They were often ambivalent about the State of Israel. Some spoke against Israel even after they were expelled from Egypt. Most of the middle-class and wealthy Jews immigrated to the U.S., Brazil, Argentina and France. Most of the poor Jews immigrated to Israel.

In Egypt, Jews were continually harassed, insulted and mocked. The secret police would knock on their doors in the middle of the night and ask them when they were leaving Egypt. Had they bought their tickets? They had better leave within a week or else. Over 35,000 Jews left or were expelled after the 1956 war. By 1967, there were about 2,000 Jews left in Egypt. Today, there are only two Jews in the entire country.

President Sisi, although you and some of leaders of the Egyptian military have close relations with Israel, most Egyptians continue to hate Israel and Jews. In 2016, a member of the Egyptian group Tawfik Okasha was physically attacked and expelled because he invited an Israeli diplomat to his home for dinner. A 2023 survey of Arabs living in countries that have signed peace agreements with Israel found that 84% don’t support the agreements.

President Sisi, how can you honestly say that Jews were not targeted in Egypt or other Arab and Muslim countries? While living in Egypt, I was ashamed of being Jewish. I was a slave in Egypt and did not realize I was free after we left. I missed my home, school and “comfortable” life. It took years for me to realize that my life changed for the better because I could now live as a Jew and be proud of my heritage.

Read article in full

[boy-above]

some lore for minette and mikhail:

mikhail is the last of his species, the others having been wiped out just under ten thousand years ago. most of them were killed in war while the remaining few were exiled to the tundra where they were expected to die. mikhail, a normal solider at that time, watched as his remaining comrades started freezing to death, and for reasons unknown he was able to summon a great strength. he ascended to godhood right there, and gained what came to be known as the great flame pelt. the heat he produced saved the remaining few people there, and without anywhere else to go they established a tiny village in the middle of the tundra, made only possible by mikhail's heat. exiling people to the tundra was common practice in the other kingdoms, so whenever exiles were found alive they would be welcomed to the village. it grew over the centuries, with mikhail being declared their king and god. eventually the last few members of his species died of old age, leading the now immortal mikhail alone as the only survivor.

minette's country is a very rich and corrupt place. it's situated on a very thin but tall mountain with infrastructure built into the sides. it's almost entirely inaccessible if you can't fly, as minette's species are all winged. if you're disabled and cannot fly, you're treated as a lesser being. in fact, anything deemed as an "imperfection" is punished in this society. you strive to be a perfect person and if you can't meet their standards you'll live a life of ostracization. the lowest class lives the closest to the ground, and the people get wealthier and more influential the higher you are on the mountain. the royal palace is of course at the very top, closest to the mother sun. they worship the sun here, which never sets. their species has a special connection with the sun, it gives them their power and life. if a member of the species were ever to have their connection to the sun severed, they would die within hours.

this was what happened to minette. she was born flightless, and that was a source of shame and embarrassment for her parents. they hid her from the public and stewed on what to do. minette was the crown princess, meaning she alone had inherited ability to weld the divine power her mother, her queen, used. her parents decided that the only solution would be to rip the power from minette and give it to her sibling instead. this is a process they thought would kill her, but as it was an unprecedented circumstance they didn't expect the outcome. minette lived, as an immortal godling she could not be killed despite having her power taken and connection to the sun severed.

this was a devastating event for minette, a being who depends on the sun suddenly not feeling its warmth for the first time, and knowing you never would again. it was like in an instant her life wasn't worth living anymore. despite the shock and pain she felt, she knew she had to run before her parents could finish the job. she was terrified that they would take her wings, as it's common practice for ones wings to be removed when they're exiled from the country. minette ran, and did not stop running. she traveled through several different kingdoms with one man in mind. she'd heard from parents and other royals about king maksimillian, a wolf god whose pelt rivaled the sun. being without the sun doesn't just make her cold, it results in a chronic pain that can't be managed or shaken. some days it's a dull ache while on others it can be excruciating, on top of having fatigue and general weakness. minette hoped that it was true that his pelt really did feel like the sun, because maybe she could not be in pain anymore.

eventually she made it to the tundra. as a nonhuman being the cold doesn't actually harm her, it's not exactly comfortable but she was of no danger of freezing to death. she ventured through until she found the village, now a proper (albeit small) kingdom. after finally managing to get close to the king, she discovered that yes, he truly did feel like the sun. she was afraid at first for anyone to find out her true identity. her country and its neighbors had after all had a large part in the killing of his people. minette was born long after this happened, currently she's only 500 years old. still, a royal daring to step foot in his kingdom could be a great disrespect. it took a while but once minette told mikhail of her true identity, and that his presence alleviates her of her pain, he immediately welcomed her into the palace.

mikhail can be quite prickly and stone faced, and many find him to be intimidating and even scary. but he treated minette so well and was truly the kindest man she'd ever met. because of her need of his heat, she would spend a lot of time with him. at first her bed was in the room next to his, eventually it moved in his room next to his own, and eventually they shared a bed. she'd lay on his stomach as he was afraid he'd squish her otherwise, their size difference is quite large. they grew very close over time, and minette trusted him more than any other. sometimes minette needed his heat while she bathed, so he would sit behind a screen as to protect her decency. eventually she started trying to coax him into doing away with the screen, there's nothing she wouldn't want him to see, she says. one day though she realizes her arms are too weak to wash her hair , and she meekly asks if he can help her. eventually washing her hair becomes a daily activity and he becomes less shy around her. one day minette gets very brave and asks if they can bathe together, and mikhail reluctantly agrees. mikhail's tub is very large and minette finds that the water nearly goes over her head, so she finds that sitting on his knee is much preferable, and that's their routine from then on. becoming much less shy and hesitant around each other.

eventually minette does confess her feelings for the king, and he's hesitant at first. he doesn't want to accidentally take advantage of her, being afraid that she feels obligated because he provides her with heat; or that she simply thought she liked him because he was the only man she trusted, and perhaps if she got out more she'd discover there are men she likes much more. eventually minette managed to convince him of her feelings after much persistence. mikhail finally accepted her feelings and obviously he felt the same, just very afraid of hurting her somehow. the two were eventually married and the kingdom readily accepted minette as their first queen. mikhail had never loved before in his thousand years, so everyone knew minette must truly be something special.

minette is infertile, she discovers. she doesn't know if she was born that way, or if was another unfortunate side effect of being taken from the mother sun. all she knows is that her fertility problems make her incredibly sad. mikhail says that it's just fine if they don't have children, it's not mandatory to have an heir or anything or the sort. but minette wants a child and mikhail strives to give minette anything she wants, so they spend centuries trying every single fertility spell, potion, blessing, concoction, whatever, to try to have a baby. adoption is of course an option, but minett really wants mikhail's baby. she wants to hold a child that looks like mikhail, him being the last of his species makes this especially important to her. after centuries of trying they finally manage to conceive, and after months of telling herself not to get too attached because she's so afraid of miscarrying, minette has a beautiful, healthy, baby girl. she had milhail's ears and claws and teeth, all things minette absolutely loved about her husband. the entire kingdom celebrated their new little princess and knew that this baby was so so incredibly important to their gods, their faith in which could never be shaken.

minette lived the first few years of her life in sadness and pain, thinking she could be happy, but her life in the tundra saved her from it all. she started life as a princess denied her throne, and now sat in a tiny throne next to her husband, a very, very, happy queen.

[wehavecomeforyourprivateschools]

White working-class males are now recast as the establishment’s salivating attack dogs; the overseers of imperialism, enforcing the bidding of their wealthier masters. Their role in securing most of our human rights — through workplace struggle in the trade unions, strikes, demonstrations, wars and riots — is to be erased from our collective consciousness.

This is what I was saying before about how the white working class man that drives a white van and plasters for a living is the enemy of the liberal left, communists and anarchists. He is definitely racist, homophobic, responsible for emissions, rising sea levels and other bad stuff like swearing. They think he is retarding society because he's thick. He and his partner are blamed for the lack of revolution because they're too busy at the pub or watching Eastenders even though no one does those things anymore. And it's because of all this that we have to write him off and thus any chance of revolution because the working class in the UK are particulatly bad unlike in Chile where they're all left wing lol.

It's a stupid middle class attitude cos it's ignorant to class analysis and labour history.

As Irvin says,

In this bizarre schematic model, working-class football supporters in Liverpool are deemed on the same side as rabid establishment mouthpieces such as The Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie, who demonised, vilified and lied about them. Conversely, black teenagers in inner London estates, continually the victims of harassment by the Metropolitan Police and at the bottom of Britain’s opportunity pile, are ludicrously deigned to have common cause with the privately-educated colonial elites placed strategically in the media and commerce through “equal opportunity” positive discrimination schemes.

[thethirdromana]

I was gonna ask you some stuff about Quincey and the aftermath of the Civil War, but that wasn't really near the 1890s so idk if it's relevant.

Also similar to Mina maybe supporting eugenics I would imagine Seward probably engages in a lot of pseudosciences

But more interestingly, what do you think Dracula's politics would be? He's pretty removed from human society by being a vampire and his home in Transylvania is pretty remote, but he was still a nobleman there and he was moving to England, which he planned to conquer. I'm curious where he'd fall, when pretending to be and working with (?) humans in Romanian politics (if you feel like researching it) and English politics. Another cool layer to this is if you subscribe to the popular theory that he's really Vlad the Impaler. What would a warlord from the mid-1400s think of the politics 400 or so years later? That's barely even thinking about him being a vampire.

Also, what would Renfield's politics be like?

Quincey and the aftermath of the Civil War is a fascinating question that I will definitely leave for someone who knows more US history than I do.

Dracula, on the other hand... first of all, the relevant set of politics is Hungarian, not Romanian. Transylvania was part of Austria-Hungary in the 1890s. There's actually an interesting story here, in that vampire myth was originally associated primarily with Hungary. Then Bram Stoker set Dracula in Transylvania, which became part of Romania in 1920, and Romania ended up inheriting vampire myths in the process. Which has generally done the Romanian tourist industry no harm at all. (Though when I was in Bucharest last weekend, my lovely tour guide, Andrea, was clearly a bit annoyed by people asking about it).

Anyway, we have a decent sense of what Dracula's politics are, because he spells them out on May 8: he's proud to be part of a fighting, conquering race, he values "warlike days", he disdains peasants, and he generally holds that might makes right.

Given his pride in "beating the Turk on his own ground", I think we can assume that he didn't approve of Austria-Hungary's neutrality in the Russo-Turkish War in 1877-8.

In some ways he fits into contemporary society. He is a boyar, one of the highest rank of feudal nobility, who retained a great deal of power in 1890s Austria-Hungary. Where in the UK the growth of industry made the middle classes wealthier, in Austria-Hungary that wealth often went straight back to the nobility. Just six percent of the population had the right to vote in general elections, compared with 18% in the UK (meanwhile New Zealand had universal suffrage from 1893).

But Dracula is still a product of an earlier time. He wants to increase his power through conquest, not through modernising his estate or being appointed to the board of directors of a bank. And while Austria-Hungary did grow through conquest (occupying Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, for instance), it wasn't at nearly the same scale as other contemporary empires - for example, Austria-Hungary didn't take part in the Scramble for Africa.

Honestly, it makes perfect sense that Dracula would want to come to Britain. If he wanted conquest, carried out with indifference to cruelty, he would have got on extremely well with Cecil Rhodes. To an extent this is what the story of Dracula is about: what if foreigners came to Britain and did to us what we do to them? The War of the Worlds, published at the same time, asks essentially the same question but with aliens.

(This is the bit where someone comes along and says yes, but don't forget that Bram Stoker was Irish. Which is true, but he was also a supporter of the British Empire.)

As for Renfield, most of what we learn about his politics comes from October 1. He's from high society and is a member of the Windham Club. He celebrates the roles Quincey, Van Helsing and Arthur play "by nationality, by heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts" - in other words, he seems to be open to people advancing themselves through meritocracy, but also through hereditary rights. To me, this reads as conservative, but not reactionary.

One thing that does strike me is that his point about Texas - celebrating its admittance to the Union - relates to history that was 50 years old at that point (Unless I'm misunderstanding the reference?). Renfield is 59 during the events of Dracula. Is the implication here that he's stuck in the past? We don't know how long he's been institutionalised, but since his memories of Arthur's father relate to youthful drinking games, it could be 30 years or more. He may be disconnected from contemporary politics - and given how much the world changed in the late 19th century, that could make for quite a shock if he'd ever had the chance to learn more.

As ever, I'm not a historian, and other people should feel free to offer corrections.

[colorisbyshe]

I'm thinking about just how different it must be to be wealthy and consume media. Like, what do they think when a movie or a book is against rich people? What do they think when a cartoon or a tv show talks about the plight of the poor? Do they think "oh well I'm not like that!" And how do they relate to poor characters? If they do it at all. It's just so bizarre to me.

I know a few wealthy people. Not UBER rich but like... fairly wealthy. Maybe just "upper middle class" but wealthier than most people could ever dream of being. Relative to me, they're rich.

And the thing about rich people is they almost always frame themselves as not rich enough. If there is something they want but cannot afford, they aren't REALLY rich.

If they have a 6 bedroom home but can't afford a yacht, well, they aren't really rich. If they have a 6 bedroom home AND a yacht but can't afford a SECOND 6 bedroom vacation home, well, they aren't really rich. Or if they have that vacation home but their neighbor's house has .5 more bathrooms... it's like they don't even have a vacation home at all. (Note: None of the people I know are this level of wealthy, just giving examples.)

They know what it's like to suffer from not having the money for the things you "need."

And if they have things they want but money can't buy, well then they're time-poor, love-poor, whatever-poor which means it's just like being money-poor, isn't it? Those poor nepo babies didn't have loving parents, just like the rest of us. Only, y'unno, they went unloved with nannies, five play rooms, and designer clothes while the rest of us went unloved AND worrying about rent at an age where you shouldn't even KNOW about rent.

So they can't possibly be like the evil, greedy rich people in the movies because they don't have everything they want. They can't be like the evil, greedy rich people because they donate to charity (and then complain about taxes being used to help people in ways they don't get to control). They can't be like the villains because they work essential jobs like CEO. They aren't superfluous, they are the backbone of society.

And you know what... this happens across all types of privilege when consuming media. White people listen to Mitski sing about her struggles as an Asian American woman and relate to the alienation, not really internalizing... they are often the source of said alienation. Straight people watch a gay character get bullied and relate to feeling hurt by words but don't internalize their microaggressive comments about their gay cousin is the same shit the bully is saying.

People don't want to internalize that they are the bad guy in someone else's life, even if they didn't intend to be. To the rich, if they aren't spending money directly on hiring goons to stab poor people at random, they aren't the villains.

And, if they were ever poor before (or even just less rich), everyone is just jealous they made it out of poverty and no one realizes that they can still relate to the poor and therefore can't be taking advantage o them or anything like that.

[squiddcakes]

Hello! A lot of you had positive responses to my last post, so here I’ll be writing my personal rewrites of the I.M.P. Crew (Sorry this took so long, I got side-tracked this weekend <:]). For a reminder of what my redesigns looked like, you can find them Here. I’m gonna go from left to right and start with the first crew member:

Mildred (or Millie)

I did a lot of reworking around Mildred since a majority of her characterization is basically nonexistent, so I gave her a personality with a lot of potential and complexity that’s on par with her male crew members.

Mildred comes from a very low-income, Southern family in the Wrath Ring. She grew up on a barn with her parents and several other siblings, making her essentially a middle child. She worked on their farm for most of her life as a hand and delivery girl to send fresh produce to buyers and the local market. It was like this for some time until the family business had gone dry due to some messy ties with the upper-class that resulted in them going into poverty. Wanting to help her family and support them financially Mildred left to go find work elsewhere, in which she meets Blitzo and is hired onto the I.M.P. team.

She’s very hard-working, a bit brutish but has a heart of gold, and is blunt and out-spoken. She’s not very sophisticated but has a lot of Wisdom to her and gives some great advice to Loona as the only other woman in the workplace, and someone for Loona to look up to in times of need. She gets along great with everyone except Moxxie, who she butts heads with constantly due to their conflicting personalities and backgrounds. Speaking of Moxxie, he’s next on the list.

Moxandicus (Moxxie)

Moxxie was an Imp born into the wealthier part of Imp society, basically making him the equivalent of your typical “uptight, sophisticated rich boy”. His family comes from a line of competitive businessmen, none of that mafia mumbo-jumbo, though they probably do have some loose ties to them in some way. Moxxie is the odd-one-out of his family, rather than taking an interest in the family business, instead finds his passion in Mortals History (this man is so infatuated with Humans culture its crazy). Because of this, his family looked at him more as a nuisance “wasting his time on silly hobbies”, and basically cut him off from his wealth until he “proved himself worthy” of being welcomed back into the family. Now broke and nowhere to go, Moxxie finds himself looking for work, where he meets Blitzo and joins I.M.P.

I imagine my Moxxie has a very similar personality to the one if the show, except he’s more educated, calculating, snooty and uptight, and less of.. I don’t know how to put this— coward? Butt of the joke? You get what I mean. He’s essentially the straight man and voice of reason for the group, and is the one who usually has to get them out of their pickles when working. He doesn’t have a lot of street smarts and is less willing to get his hands dirty compared to everyone else. Like I said earlier he clashes a lot with Millie and frequently questions Blitzo’s authority, but most of the time doesn’t argue back on the count of that’s his boss. He’s indifferent towards Loona, though questions why a teenager is working for them in the first place.

Blitz(o)

A lot of Blitz’s backstory and personality is mostly the same: Grew up in the circus in the Pride Ring, left after wanting to seek more in life prove to everyone someone from his social class can make it big in the world, yadayadayada. However I did rewrite some things that I believed wold make his character a lot better/more tolerable:

He’s still on good terms with his sister, they’re just really busy all the time so they don’t have a lot of time to talk or see each other (I’m so sick of this dude not having at LEAST one good relationship).

He and Verosika are still on bad terms due to their messy break-up, though I want to believe Blitzo regrets and sometimes even misses her and the actions that led to their falling out, though due to his pride refuses to admit it out loud.

None of that weird “sexually harassing my coworkers” shit. That was weird and gross.

I gave him a personality that’s more attuned to “if Weird Al was a bounty hunter who grew up in the circus”. He was always some silly little guy to me. The man grew up in a circus, I’d expect him to be a little clowned down if you get what I’m sayin’.

His relationship with Loona is typically the same. He adopted her when she was around 13-14 and has been raising her ever since as his teenage daughter (None of that weird “treating hellhounds like literal peta thing that was weird and confusing). He makes her work as their secretary and “social media manager” as a way to earn a weekly allowance and also “the kids are hip with it she’ll do wonders for us promotionally”. She does not, he just refuses to admit it.

Leona (Loona)

I’ve done a lot of reworking for Loona as well, same reasons as Millie. Istg they do not know how to wrote female characters.

Loona is a hellhound born from the Sloth Ring. She doesn’t know a lot of her background, but was raised in foster care for a small portion of her life until Blitzo took her in when she hit her teenage years. Before that however she took a liking towards astrology and magic and would constantly read about it in her formative years. When she began living with Blitz she began attending schooling to further learn about magic and how to translate older works, which is how she’s able to use Stolas’ book for the IMP team to use. She get’s teased on a lot in school for being one of the only Hellhounds there, which causes her to feel insecure about herself and shut in from people including Blitz.

Loona’s a very quiet, closed-off teenager (16-17), who’s very much in that “going through a phase” part of growing up. She’s very insecure about herself and is easily-impressionable, which is why she looks up to Millie so much, since she’s cool and is the only other girl in the office space to talk to. Loona’s relationship with Blitz is the same, except she actually acts like a teenager and not an abusive asshole. She wants to prove to herself that she’s not some “loser nobody” and can actually do magic and make friends with other teens her age.

And that’s it. Sorry it was so long I had a lot to say lol. If you have further questions, direct them to my ask box.

[ranticore]

some of the outfits i drew up to get a handle on what different classes of men wear in Régian era Inver (1860s. the king is Régis, therefore it's the Régian era). left to right are middle, upper, and lower class getups.

not pictured: bowler hats & top hats. Only two groups of people were known to go out in public without some sort of head covering - rangers and priests. everyone else wore a hat befitting their class. felt bowler hats for most men, silk tall hats for the gentry. women wore bonnets (fancy) or headscarves & shawls (less fancy)

every man in inver wore gaiters as part of their daily dress, these are not stockings because they go outside the trousers and over the shoes, and usually fasten a little way below the knee. it's a rainy, muddy, snowy country, and these gaiters protect your lower legs from the elements. also it's just fashionable. the ability to wear gaiters in a pale colour & fragile type of fabric was a mark of class, with the upper classes expected to wear white satin or silk. it was a way to show off how little you ever had to go outdoors into the dirt of the city or countryside, as the white would always be clean, and a way to flex your ability to have your clothes washed regularly (few people did).

everyone else used either wool or leather gaiters, usually in darker colours (brown/russet was common) that didn't show up the dirt so well. although, cities like Invergorken turned every item of clothing coal-black eventually whether you liked it or not. they were bulky and usually ill-fitting, with the lowest classes usually having the fasteners/buttons on the inside of the leg, to make them easier to put on. wealthier people who would be expected to ride horses had the buttons on the outside (and upper classes had buttons on the outside because they had people do that for them)

aping the upper classes to appear richer has always been a thing so you would see the lower classes wearing white gaiters on special occasions, though they would be very quickly taken off and stored away from dirt as soon as possible.

clothing was nearly invariably wool or linen, with wool being more readily available (linen was imported from hibernia). a winter overcoat (left) usually incorporated some form of cape down to the elbows and closed all the way to the shins or ankles, and was worn over the more usual day suit & coat (right). those are trousers, not breeches; they tend to be pretty baggy, even among the upper classes, and usually end with a stirrup that passes under the foot.

[justforbooks]

César Aira

He has published more than 100 novels, gives his work away, and his surrealist books have a massive cult following. Now Argentina’s favourite rule-breaker is tipped for the Nobel prize

Afew years ago when Patti Smith played at a cultural festival in Denmark, she told the crowd that she was happy to be playing in the presence of one of her favourite authors. It was said she had only agreed to play the festival because the author, César Aira, would be in the audience. Aira, although celebrated in his home country, Argentina, was little known outside Latin America until he was discovered in 2002 by the Berlin-based literary agent Michael Gaeb, who was enchanted by his unconventional, surrealist books, which shift atmosphere, and even genre, from one page to another.

At first it proved difficult to sell Aira’s novels to a wider audience. “The fundamental problem when promoting César’s work is that the editor always asks: ‘What is the novel about?’” Gaeb told me. “And in the case of César, it’s not easy to answer that question.”

Gaeb has since sold Aira’s books in 37 languages. At the start of October last year, the English betting site Nicer Odds named Aira as a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, slightly ahead of candidates such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie, who have appeared more regularly on such lists.

“I already know that every October, until my death, I’m going to have to put up with that.” Said by any other writer, this would come across as a humble brag. But Aira doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who appreciates disrupting events. “Sometimes the candidacy is useful to me,” he said, laughing. “For instance, now we live in a more luxurious apartment, one a little beyond my circumstances. And they rent to me because they see that I am a candidate for the Nobel.”

His apartment is located just five blocks from his office, which in its turn was the house where he lived for more than 40 years with his two children and his wife, Liliana Ponce, a poet and a scholar of Japanese literature. The recent move took place because Ponce has an illness that affects her mobility, and the new building has an elevator.

Aira, who does not speak to the local press and whose interviews with foreign media are usually short and conducted via email, rarely leaves Flores, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood that’s best known today as a textile hub for the clothing stores in wealthier areas of the city. Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, in a small town in the south of the province, 300 miles from the capital. “I was thinking just now of my first memories of childhood because they are of the revolution of 1955,” he said – the year Juan Perón was removed from power by a coup for the first time. There was only one cinema, and television had not yet caught on. But the town had two well-stocked public libraries. “When I was still a teenager, I was already reading Joyce, Proust and Kafka,” Aira said. His precocity was also stimulated by an amateur public education in which classes were taught not by specialised professors but by volunteers with gigantic private collections of books. There were doctors who taught philosophy classes (“in those days, doctors were humanists”) and lawyers who taught history. “I didn’t have that kind of bureaucratic education where the teacher knows more,” he said. “It was something a lot freer.”

When he was about 14 years old, Aira met Arturo Carrera, a friend who, like him, would become a nationally recognised writer. Aira dedicated himself to prose; Carrera, poetry. The friends tried to stay up to date with the literary world by getting hold of magazines that were based in the capital. One of those publications, Testigo (Witness), held a contest. Carrera sent a few poems, and Aira sent a story. They both came out winners.

At the time, the majority of promising secondary school students in Coronel Pringles continued their university studies in Bahía Blanca, a city 75 miles away. “Law was the only graduate course they didn’t have,” Aira said. He told his parents he was interested in a law degree and moved to the capital. “I wanted to come for the art galleries, the cinemas,” he said. For two years, he studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, and then he transferred to the department of literature.

Testigo folded before it could publish Aira’s winning story. But one of the judges of the award, the novelist Abelardo Arias, wrote to congratulate him. Aira and Arias began a correspondence, and soon Aira showed Arias a manuscript. Arias loved it and passed it on to the publisher Galerna, which agreed to print it.

“It was a big thing, even more so for a young person of that age,” Aira said.

One day, walking aimlessly through the streets of the city with a friend, he came across a building he knew. “Here, in this building, an editor wants to publish a novel of mine,” he told her. “Let’s go up.” When he arrived, he asked to speak with the person responsible for his book. Then he asked for the manuscript back: “I don’t want to publish it any more.” The editor was astonished.

I asked Aira why he’d acted like that. “Just because,” he said. He shrugged and laughed. “I wanted to impress her.”

To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books. Nobody I met in Buenos Aires ventured to pin down exactly how many volumes Aira has published. César Aira, un catálogo (César Aira: A Catalogue), organised by the writer and lawyer Ricardo Strafacce, is the most notable effort to itemise his work. Launched in 2018 with the aim of helping the uninitiated, the catalogue reprints one page from each of Aira’s books. The catalogue was commissioned by his publisher in part to commemorate his 100th book (Aira likes round numbers), but in the time the catalogue took to reach the printer, Aira had already written two more.

When I sat with Strafacce in the Varela-Varelita bar in Buenos Aires at the end of a November afternoon, he was still indignant with the catalogue’s publisher, who he said had made changes without telling him. For instance, the publisher had edited the date of publication for the Aira story El hornero (The Ovenbird). “I’m furious,” he said. “You can talk to [the editor]. I don’t give a shit.” He complained about another small modification: in the biographical information for one of the titles, to his mention of Madrid, the editor had added “Spain”. In Strafacce’s eyes, the detail made him seem like an idiot, a “boludo”.

“Don’t writers get worked up about the most incredible minutiae?” said Francisco Garamona, the editor in question. With a cigarette in one hand and a glass of soda in the other, he explained that he’d merely used the version of El hornero that Aira himself had authorised, rather than the one in circulation, which was pirated. He was sitting on a sofa in La Internacional Argentina, his bookshop, where he also operates his publishing house, Mansalva. Today, Mansalva probably publishes the most titles by Aira. “There he is, and here are more, here’s another, and here,” Garamona said as he counted the shelves in the bookshop. “One, two, three … seven. Seven niches of just Aira.”

In a way, the decor reflected Garamona’s multifaceted career; in addition to being an editor and a bookshop owner, he is a musician, a film-maker, a poet and the former owner of an art gallery. Today he is also one of two editors whom Aira defined for me as “official”. The other is Damián Ríos, from the publisher Blatt & Ríos.

The honour of “official” editors must inspire some pride in Ríos and Garamona, because Aira has worked with more than a few. His extensive body of work is decentralised in dozens of editorial houses, the vast majority of them tiny, which makes him an author at once ubiquitous and elusive. In this context, it’s not difficult to understand how a controversy like the one with El hornero came about. Aira must be one of the few writers in the world, maybe the only one, to sell 25,000 copies of one title and at the same time launch other titles in much smaller print runs. He has never charged royalties or advances for the small publishing houses in Argentina. “That was the agreement I made with Michael [Gaeb],” Aira said. “I don’t meddle with the world. And he doesn’t meddle with Argentina. In Argentina, everything is free.”

Aira’s strong cultural presence today conceals the stuttering start of his career. “For many years, this was the only proof I was a writer,” he said, showing a handful of yellowing pages, the nucleus of a book without a cover. His voice shook, this time, emotion had truly moved him. In his hands was a copy of Moreira, considered by some to be his first published novel. In the background, an atmospheric combination of dissonant chords and piano notes faded away. “I only listen to Morton Feldman these days,” Aira said. He added that he’d recently made an exception to listen to Now and Then, a “new” song by the Beatles completed thanks to help from artificial intelligence.

After going up to the office of the publishing house Galerna in 1969, in that half-impulsive gesture to ask for his manuscript back, some years went by before Aira had a chance to publish again. Moreira was supposed to come out in 1975, but was delayed. The editor of the book was Aira’s friend Horacio Achával, owner of the publishing house Achával Solo. In 1976, there was another military coup in Argentina. “Horacio was a political militant and had to go away,” Aira said. “He took off. He went to Uruguay.” The copies of Moreira, still without a cover, were left stranded in a warehouse. Years later, Achával returned to the country and finalised the cover. The book was officially launched in December 1981, just weeks after Ema, la cautiva (Ema, the Captive), which came out from another publishing house in November 1981 and today disputes with Moreira the title of Aira’s official debut.

Strafacce told a different story. “Moreira was printed in June 1975,” he said. “The money ran out, and there wasn’t enough to print the cover because in the same month, there was a financial crisis and a bank run here in Argentina.”

Aira published a few books in the 80s, but according to Sandra Contreras, who founded a small publishing house that published him throughout the 90s and 2000s, it was not until 1990’s Los fantasmas (Ghosts) that he accelerated his production. At the time, she said, he also spoke more explicitly of a new phase, “the beginning of the regular publication of his novelas and novelitas”. Aira was the first author to be published not only by Contreras��s publishing house but also by Mansalva and Blatt & Ríos in the early 00s.

In the 90s, small publishers like these were rare. Garamona said that this began to change in 2001, when after almost a decade of one-to-one parity between the Argentine peso and the US dollar, the local economy went through one of the worst recessions in Latin American history. Importing books became expensive. And so, after spending years favouring authors from Spain, local bookshop owners finally had eyes for Argentine literature.

When Gaeb first encountered Aira’s work in Guadalajara, in 2002, Aira had already begun to occupy his paradoxical central position at the margins of the culture. “He is a writer who exists in different fields, at different levels,” the fiction writer and critic Alan Pauls says, from his Berlin study, in a conversation over Zoom. “On the one hand, he has quite a lot of popularity. And on the other, he remains a niche writer, a cult writer. We still think of him as a writer of the avant garde, a manufacturer of very sophisticated objects. He’s someone who occupies the centre to his regret, not because he looked for it.”

To get hold of Moreira today isn’t easy – on the site Mercado Libre Argentina, in mid-December, there was a copy going for about $1,200 (£950). On the cover that for years remained unfinished, there is a monstrous, saturnine figure riding a yellow horse. Beneath the image, the first sentence of the novel prominently appears: Un día, de madrugada, por las lomas inmóviles del Pensamiento bajaba montado en potro amarillo un horrible gaucho (“One day at dawn, through the unmoving hills of Thought, mounted upon a yellow colt, there descended a horrible gaucho”).

In Spanish, El Pensamiento can refer to both the abstract noun, and the village close to where Aira was born and spent his childhood. The phrase gives a taste of the kind of mixture harboured within the novel. Evoking Juan Moreira, a folkloric knife-fighting hero of the Argentine Pampas, the book narrates a gaucho-esque pantomime, shot through with philosophical allusions and images from dreams. In Moreira, one can already recognise the multifaceted and frenetically imaginative style for which Aira would later be known. But the Airean machine still seems to just be getting started: there is a heavy self-consciousness that is absent from the books that follow. In these later works, his prose is limpid and inviting. Here is the start of El mago (The Magician), published almost exactly 20 years after Moreira:

In March this year, the Argentine magician Hans Chans (his real name was Pedro María Gregorini) participated in a convention of illusionists in Panamá; the event, just as the invitation and promotional leaflet described, was a regional meeting of prestigious professionals, a preparation for the great world congress the following year, which was celebrated every 10 years and this time would take place in Hong Kong. The previous one had been in Chicago, and he had not gone. Now he planned not only to participate, but also to establish himself as Best Magician in the World. The idea was not crazy or megalomaniacal. It had a foundation as reasonable as it was curious: Hans Chans was a genuine magician.

Aira takes this magical premise seriously, drawing from the dilemma a tale both comic and – in its exploration of the complex relations between being and seeming – densely philosophical. Hans Chans has the gift to be an illusionist, but not the vocation. He is too self-indulgent to dedicate himself to the profession. The narrator writes: “Maybe, paradoxically, the advantage he had played against him and condemned him to mediocrity.” Without patience for the theatre of magic, Chans limits himself to drawing handkerchiefs from wine glasses, and things of that sort.

It would not be unfair to read El mago as an allegory for the career of Aira himself: of someone who has the gift of writing but for whom the most deeply rooted conventions of the profession seem meaningless. Just like Hans Chans, the author is aware of his gift. Aira is affable and courteous, but he is far from being modest. (Modesty, faked or not, is another convention of the profession.) About the manuscript he asked to take back from Galerna in 1969, he said: “It was better than anything else that was published at the time.”

He has never been afraid to throw darts at other writers. When we spoke, he was disdainful of Roberto Bolaño, saying he had read only one novel by the Chilean author, which he found “terrible”. Aira also said that the great Argentine novelist Juan José Saer had once warmed to him, when he was young and starting out, but then became envious when Aira started getting more attention. In 1981, shortly before Moreira was finally published, Aira wrote an essay titled Novela argentina: nada más que una idea (The Argentine Novel: Nothing But an Idea), which mounts a general attack on literature of the period. The essay begins:

The current Argentine novel, beyond a doubt, is a stunted, ill-fated species. In general terms, what defines a poor novelistic product is the poor use, crude and opportunistic, of the available mythical-social material. In other words, the meanings that dictate how a society lives at a given historical moment. But the literary transposition of a reality demands the existence of a very exact passion: that of literature. And a rapid, provisional survey, not at all exhaustive, of Argentine novelists reveals that they have not read deeply, and show a complete absence of that passion along with its epiphenomenon, talent.

Aira, who had not even published a novel at that time, sticks his scalpel swiftly and mercilessly into a series of authors, most of whom have been more or less forgotten. The essay, though, is remembered these days for Aira’s attack on Ricardo Piglia, who, until his death in 2017, was a kind of public rival to Aira, at least in terms of the very different literary forms they espoused.

Pauls linked Aira’s attacks at the start of his career to his ambition to reconfigure the Argentine novel. “When he emerges in the literary environment, he knows perfectly well the writers he has to tussle with,” he said. For Pauls, Aira disturbed the paradigm of a certain progressive Argentinian literature, a literature of the left, very masculine and politically committed. “Something that literary school could not stand, for example, was a certain kind of work with frivolity, with the banal, with the superficial,” Pauls said.

Aira’s style crystallised very early on. Even if Moreira is not at the level of his next books, there is no clear sense of progression in Aira’s trajectory. Maybe for that reason, none of the readers could point to a favourite work.

Aira said he will have two new novelitas ready soon. He said he plans to give one to Ríos and the other to Garamona. “And now I’ve been thinking, because one of them came out better than the other, more imaginative – who will I give that one to?” he said, laughing.

Aira rejects great theorising about his decision to give away books free or publish the majority with small publishing houses. “His form of publishing is part of his poetics, his resistance to editorial capitalism, his punk attitude,” Gaeb said.

Contreras classified the hyperproduction of little books for small publishers as an aesthetic decision. “Something like: it’s enough for a tale to be imagined to make it necessary to publish,” she said. “There is also a fascination for the book as a unique object.”

Pauls said he interprets this decision as an avant garde way of thinking: “If the kind of literature I make is never going to have hundreds of thousands of readers, what happens if I inundate the market with books?”

When Aira was asked if he was edited nowadays, first he said that “nobody revises anything”. Then he conceded that Ríos sometimes makes one comment or another. Ríos corroborated this, but found it hard to define the exact nature of his comments, and he made it clear that they weren’t about anything structural. Contreras said that in her day, she at most corrected the odd typo.

Garamona laughed at the notion of editing or revising a text by Aira. “He has written since he was a teenager without stopping, and has such a mastery of form and content that in the end there isn’t much left to do,” he said. “You just have to pick it up, make a good cover with a pretty design, correct two or three errata.”

Los hombrecitos con sobretodo (The Little Men in Overcoats) is the title of the novel Aira defined as the most imaginative of the two he recently finished. “What happens is that here in the neighbourhood, two blocks away, where the fire station is located, men pop out at night,” he said. “At midnight they come popping out of the ceiling. Little men suddenly appear like that, really tiny men, they all wear overcoats. And at night, I go and watch them.”

He spoke as if he were beginning a fairytale. The low, tremulous voice transiting between fine irony and rapture; the sense of humour; the erudition; the sedentary life in a dark house in the neighbourhood where he’d lived for decades, from which he generates cosmopolitan, compact stories full of metafictional layers – all of it reminds us a bit of Jorge Luis Borges.

For an Argentinian, to say a great local writer seems like or is influenced by Borges must sound absurdly lazy. But both authors start their brief, densely packed books with literary anecdotes or memories written in crisp prose. In the works of both, there are frequent essayistic digressions. Both persistently turn to the literary technique of ekphrasis. There are metafictional and metaliterary games, references to other works.

The main difference is perhaps in the intensity and direction of the narrative swerves, and Aira’s greater comfort with pop culture and genre literature. Whereas a story by Borges might take up a lost 19th-century Persian manuscript, a novel by Aira might locate it behind the balcony of a McDonald’s in Flores, pored over by an adolescent with an acne problem.

Borges was almost infantile in his complete dedication as a reader, distant from the mundane hustle and bustle of the world. Nobody had anything substantial to say about Aira’s private life either. “He likes to drink coffee and talk about literature,” Ríos said. Gaeb said that Aira sometimes seems to get along better with children. (In fact, the person about whom Aira spoke with the greatest passion, albeit briefly, was Arturito, his only grandson.)

Strafacce, his friend for more than 20 years, said he found it easier to explain what Aira doesn’t talk about. “We’re used to not speaking about politics because I’m Trotskyist,” he said. “And César is not.”

It was the week of the second round of the presidential election. A few days later, the Peronist Sergio Massa, a member of the centre-left governing coalition at the time, would be defeated by the far-right Javier Milei. “Milei is worse than Bolsonaro,” said Aira, in his only comment about politics.

That day, before going to the cafe, Aira passed through the Museo Barrio de Flores. Earlier, he had been irritated at a package from one of his foreign publishers: a box containing copies of one of his novels in Dutch translation. “They keep sending me those here,” he complained, as if sending books to the author himself were a kind of gaffe. Aira handles books with the avidity of a collector. He was mesmerised for a good while that afternoon by an edition of the French author Raymond Roussel, one of his surrealist idols, and he showed us a little purple box the size of a pack of cigarettes: a tiny special edition the Biblioteca Nacional had made of El ilustre mago (The Famous Magician), another novel of his. But for some reason, he wanted to rid himself of the box with the Dutch edition.

The Museo Barrio de Flores does exactly what its name suggests, displaying all kinds of memorabilia – old calculators and radios, paintings, newspaper clippings, political propaganda – related in some way to famous inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The definition of “famous” is broad, ranging from Perón – who lived there with his first wife – to the two preteen nieces of the museum’s director, who created a children’s library during the pandemic and appeared on the front page of the newspaper Clarín. Aira seemed at ease there. His name occupies one of the steps on the staircase by the front door. On the step above is the name of the great writer Roberto Arlt; on the one below, an advertisement for a real-estate broker.

Aira left the box of books with an employee and continued through the museum. At one point he dwelt on a framed letter written by Pope Francis, another former inhabitant of the neighbourhood. “Did you see how pretty the pope’s handwriting is? They don’t teach that in school any more, no.” He went to another room, where there was a showcase with some of Aira’s books.

When he opened the door, there was a group of ladies sitting around a big table. A class was in session. They all smiled pleasantly, focusing their attention on the author. Only the instructor of the course seemed to be younger than 65.

“What is the name of the little plane that flies near the ground?” one of the ladies asked.

“The what?” said Aira.

“The little plane,” the lady repeated, with a certain impatience, lowering her open palm toward the floor. “The one that flies near the ground.”

For a while, everyone stared at Aira, waiting for an answer. “An unexpected question,” joked the instructor awkwardly.

Aira shrugged, and we went to the corner to look at his showcase.

✔ This is an edited version of César Aira’s Magic, published in the Dial. The article originally appeared in the Brazilian magazine Piauí

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[ussjellyfish]

new job?

I interviewed at a different district on Friday. (I'm a math teacher). I have been teaching 7th/8th, with the advanced classes, because no one wants them, so the fun stuff like geometry and fancy algebra). I've had 4 different classes in the past year, which was a lot, but I did a good job.

I interviewed at a suburban district where my brother lives with his wife and kids. I have been teaching in St. Paul, big urban district. 3rd biggest in my state, 30,000+ students, 8 middle schools, BIG district.

My school has about 600 students, and 5 math teachers.

Potential new school has 1000 students, and 7 or 8 math teachers. It's wealthier. Myold school is in a nice neighborhood (too nice for me to ever afford a house) but it's very mixed economically and racially. It's in an odd position because there are some really privileged students who are really advanced and need one set of things and other students who have really strong needs another way. It's a difficult balance. The kids are great.

I'm sure the kids at the new school would be great. It's wealthier, newer building, more resources. I probably wouldn't have to fight to get whiteboard markers.

more under a cut

Murray (current school) - upsides and downsides

Upsides

I know everyone. I really like most of my coworkers. They're great. I have a work best friend. We're gaining a really fantastic 8th grade history teacher that I could work with, which would help my floor.

I'll get to teach more interesting math. I'm the department head. I have a lot of power (sort of) and I get to pick the interesting classes and can really reshape the department. (partially because no one else cares, but it's fun).

It's the least effort, I'm set up to go back there, I have a plan that works for Felix (he goes to a new school in the 4 year old program. He gets to ride the bus home, which is a big step and I'd have a much easier commute immediately.

I could move to a smaller apartment near work and walk. (in January). I'd still have to drive Felix until he's in kindergarten, but he'd go to a really good elementary school, and I'd be in a really nice little walkable neighborhood. Great little grocery store, taco place, parks, playground, walking distance to work best friend's house.

Pension/retirement here is really good, like, stunningly good.

Downsides

My principal is incompetent, tone deaf and really difficult to work with. He's incredibly privileged, lives in the suburbs (the far out rich suburbs), he has a fancy car, he loves to hear himself talk. He's...someone I avoid rather than enjoy talking to.

Assistant principal thinks she's saving the world while is literally the embodiment of every meme about terrible admin. She's the one who gives a kid a cookie when they cuss you out. She's dragging the building down in so many ways and principal can't do anything to stop her. (there's something weird where she's kind of blackmailed the district? she can't be fired, but desperately needs to retire and won't. She's saving the world, the rest of us are terrible. (she seems to genuinely believe this and it is weird).

We had to go on strike to get a 2% raise in 2020. Our contract is up again and we're negotiating, and we nearly went on strike in 2022 but they gaved at the last minute. With the economy being what it is we're probably going to ask for 5%, and not get it and...there's some uncertainty.

I don't have tenure and will finally get it after this year. (This is in the middle, I guess?)

I am CONSTANTLY asked to cover other classes because we don't get enough substitutes. (like...once or twice a week, it's a lot).

New School SLP -

Upsides

Principal seems amazing. I've only met her for an hour and half, but she trained with my favorite principal ever. She's new to the school and very excited to be there.

Math department is really competent and the way they do teaching and grading is awesome. Really neat program of self reflection for students. I'd be walking into something made by people who know what they are doing and I wouldn't have to make it. I could just use theirs.

They asked my pronouns in the meeting. I had to argue to get current job to talk about them.

I drive to visit my brother's family at least once a week, and it's 20 minutes one way (with freeway). It would be about 10 minutes, no freeway. We could walk on a nice day.

I could move in January (my current lease doesn't run out until then and the penalties are stiff). I have a wide variety of apartments to chose from, near parks, near schools, some of them are in nice walkable areas. It's the suburbs, so slightly different lifestyle. I could definitely bike to work, good paths for that.

If we live in SLP we're much closer to brother and that would even out some of the responsibilities for Dad. I'm definitely moving, by myself in January, so dad needs his own plan by then, but, who knows what he'll chose.

Downsides

Absolute chaos in the near term. I'd need to leave one job (turn everything in, exit, meet with new HR, etc etc. We're going to Scotland on Wednesday so it would be fast and furious for awhile.

I don't know anyone at new place. (I will but...that's scary in the middle term).

Felix would need a different school. So I'd have to find one. I think I can make it work, but it'll be annoying for me.

My commute will be awful until January.

It will be harder (though not impossible) to hang out with my one friend from old work.

I'm struggling here, so this one is probably better?

6th grade math is less interesting, but less behavior problems. They're squirrels, but they're cute at that age.

smaller district? if it sucks, it'll really suck. (but I don't know yet).

Pension is less good. Any salary gains I got would be gone in how much I'd have to put away for retirement.

Brother #1 who lives in Iowa says it's okay to have two decent choices, and they kind of are. It matters how much admin/work culture influences my job, and where I want Felix to go to school. (there is a push that sububrbs would be better for him, I thnk he'd be fine anywhere, he's a good kid).

The short term chaos would be a LOT. (I can do it , it's just a LOT).

[just-late-roman-republic-things]

Today in The Last Generation of the Roman Republic: slavery, manumission, and slave owners being dumbasses.

Around 30% of the Roman empire were enslaved people; in Rome itself, around 30% were enslaved and another 20-50% were freed people. Most slaves came as prisoners of war or were bought at eastern markets. Freed people were automatically citizens - and they voted.

So when you think of the "Roman people," think of not just ethnic Romans, but Spaniards, Gauls, Greeks, Jews, Africans, and others from all over the Mediterranean. And if you see a historian or classical source portraying the common people as violent, gullible or only caring for "bread and circuses," that's thinly-veiled xenophobia and classism.

Why was manumission so common? Because keeping slaves was often more expensive than freeing them. When the Romans instituted a grain subsidy, restricted to male citizens, they accidentally created an incentive for slave owners to free slaves to save money.

Most Romans refused to take jobs that had become associated with slaves and freedmen. These jobs included skilled labor like physicians, artisans, and trade, so most small business owners were actually ex-slaves.

This resulted in the beautiful irony of Romans complaining about their ex-slaves becoming wealthier than they were. For completely preventable reasons. The slave owners just thought they were too good to do those jobs themselves.

This is not to downplay the awfulness of slavery, especially in the plantations and the mines, where manumission was rare. Besides being cruel and unjust, slavery was also a destabilizing force due to the constant threat of slave revolts. And, although Gruen doesn't go into this, slavery actually makes a country poorer because it interferes with the growth of a robust middle class.

(Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, pp. 359-365)

[archaickobold]

First worldbuilding post! It's a long one, so I put it under a read more:

Basic worldbuilding:

The setting of all of this is a place just called The City, which is a massive, continent sized city consisting of interlocking skyscrapers, that has been standing for the past 5,000 years. There are some sci-fi, futuristic, cyberpunk elements, along with some dystopian elements, too. 

Notably, there is also a very firm class system, literally built upon the structure of the City itself. Most people in the City will never set foot on the ground in their lifetime, instead living in the upper floors of the skyscrapers. The people living at the very top, or the Upper, are called Uppers, the ones in the Middle are called Middleites, and the ones at the bottom, or the Lower, are called Lowers. Their wealth corresponds with their location– the wealthier a person is, generally, the higher up they live, even within the sections.

Along with the class system is a large amount of classism, as well. Uppers generally regard Lowers as being filthy and violent, and Lowers tend to regard Uppers as pretentious jackasses. The Middle tends to be less polarizing, but Uppers still look down on them for not being as rich as they are, and the Lowers see them as thinking that they’re better than them, or as Upper wannabes. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn’t.

The City is also split horizontally, not just vertically, into 21 different sectors and districts. Some of these are more worldbuilt than others, with some having fully fledged politics, while others are still essentially just names. It’s a work in progress! 

Additionally, another very important element of this is that everyone in the City also has some superpower, of some type. It first activates around 10-12, depending on how powerful the power is. The stronger, the younger it kicks in. For my existing main characters, this power can range from telepathy, to astral projection, to sound deadening, to aerokinesis, to teleportation, and many, many more. I could make an entire post just about how powers work, and I might just do that, later. 

Map:

Small, additional worldbuilding notes: 

Sol is the god of this world, though generally isn’t very relevant. Mostly used as an exclamation to replace “oh god” with “oh sol,” because I felt like it damaged the immersion.

The Head of the State is the person in charge of a sector or district, and their Keys are their advisors.

Dating between an Upper and Lower is seen as taboo and could get both the Upper and Lower socially ostracized if their relationship was found out. 

Lowers and sometimes Middleites will introduce themselves to strangers with a nickname, rather than their actual name, because unless you are willing to pay to have your private information kept private, it is very easy for someone to find it with just a name and appearance. Uppers can afford this privacy, Lowers and Middleites, not so much. 

Transphobia, homophobia, etc, are very, very much less of a problem in the City than irl. I don’t want to have it in my story too much, and so I don’t. 

Very basic description of some characters (Honestly, will probably be elaborated on more in a later post/through the writings):

Lucas: he/him, cis guy. Currently a Middleite, but was raised in the Upper. Dating Miro and Slate. Power is lesser astral projection, so while he can astral project, he can’t move anything around. Has made bad relationship decisions in the past, but is generally optimistic and upbeat. Lives with his dad, and has slowly started to adapt to the Middle. He tends to end up as more of a mediator, but he’s trying to stand up for himself more.

Miro: he/him, trans guy. Lower. Dating Lucas and Slate. Power is greater astral projection, so he can astral project and move things around some, like a poltergeist. Tends to be more mischievous and generally a little shit, but also fiercely protective of the people he cares about. Takes great pride in being a Lower, and while he isn’t the happiest about having to hide his class while in the Upper in order to date Slate, he’s willing to do it for him.

Slate: he/him, cis guy. Upper. Dating Lucas and Miro. Power is sound deadening, so when he focuses, he is able to make himself and anything he focuses on perfectly silent. He is the heir to Key, or an advisor for the Head of State. He’s apparently a little oblivious, but he’s smarter than he lets on, especially when it comes to politics. When it comes to street smarts, he is less knowledgeable, but he’s learning more from just being around Miro. He also has to hide his class when he’s in the Lower with Miro, but he doesn’t mind quite as much. It’s refreshing to him, really, to not be seen as anyone special. 

[gatheringbones]

[“Sanger agreed with conservative eugenicists that the high birth rate among the unfit was “the greatest present menace to civilization.” But she objected to the second goal of the conservative approach, or what she called “orthodox eugenics,” which encouraged wealthier women to birth more children. For her, a “cradle competition” in which wealthy women tried to out-reproduce the poor dangerously advocated that wealthier women match their rate of childbearing with “the most irresponsible elements in the community.” Too many births, she insisted, drained mothers and their numerous children of health and vitality. She had an almost nineteenth-century view that the body is possessed of finite force that gets diluted with each pregnancy. If wealthier women reproduced at the rate of the poor, she felt, they would end up birthing the unfit.

Sanger countered that birth control would in fact prove a valuable tool of eugenics. She and other feminists argued that the goal of eugenics was to use the achievements of science and technology to improve women’s health and create and sustain a nation of better “quality.” Across the English-speaking world, historians Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford have argued, feminist birth controllers joined “hand in glove with eugenicists to popularize the notion of rational family planning.” Control was at the heart of their movement: contraception meant “to direct, to regulate, to counteract,” Sanger explained. Animals no more, the middle class could “civilize” sex itself, transforming basic instinct into a tool of women’s liberation and scientific progress. “We must perfect these bodies,” she enjoined, not weaken them, through regulating the birth rate. Eugenic feminism sought not only to curtail the reproduction of the poor—it also hoped to optimize the women of the middle and upper classes.”]

Kyla Schuller, The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

[askauradonprep]

Got any Alexander and his Adoptive mama, Sienna hc ?

Art by @antonellacat1098

Awww, sure! Belated Mother's Day head canons XD

She has no idea what to do when a baby was left on her doorstep but she couldn't very well leave him alone. She and her husband hadn't had any biological children and they wanted to be parents so they decided to raise Alexander.

Sienna and her husband were one of the wealthier families in their town - they were pretty solidly middle class. So they were able to provide Alexander with the best they could.

She knows how smart he is and that's why she pushed so heavily on education - because she knows he wants to learn and she knows he can make the most of it.

She didn't like Lampwick not just because he was badly behaved but she was worried something bad would happen to Alexander because he was hanging around with Lampwick, whether or not it was Lampwick's fault. And well....her worst fears came true. Alexander DID get hurt while hanging out with Lampwick (though, again, it was not his fault).

She was absolutely beside herself when they couldn't find Alexander. She was begging the police for updates every chance she got.

Needless to say, when they found Alexander, she was not about to let him out of her sight. She became more protective of her son - though Alexander was more used to that than Lampwick, he still chafed at new rules and especially at her worsened dislike of Lampwick and Alexander's friendship.

She calls him every night to talk about his day when he's at Auradon Prep. As much as he complained about her renewed sense of protectiveness, he liked this. It was nice to hear from her every day when he spent a long time as a donkey not hearing from her.

They liked to go to the library once a week when he was little. He loved reading and being read to and they had so much fun.

She loves Eilonwy and takes any chance to visit or have them over.

She knows how to make all his favourites and she sent the recipes along to the kitchen staff in Llyr so he could still have them sometimes.

[blackcandlesinwinter]

It's really disappointing that discussion of class politics is so stunted on this site. Like most commentary you see is either "anyone who buys pre-cut vegetables or home decor is bourgeois and should be beheaded" or "only the billionaire class is truly rich and deserving of criticism." And these are both just such immature views.

Like, if your understanding of class is at the level of "you're too rich if you have throw pillows" you're really not any better than the hard-line conservatives who complain that a homeless person doesn't deserve help because they could just sell their car, or a jobless person doesn't need help because they still have a cellphone.

But on the other side, sure, there's a huge gap in power and wealth between what we might call the "upper middle class" (UMC) and someone like Elon Musk. But the upper middle class still has specific class interests which strongly incentivize and perpetuate wealth disparities and white supremacy. In fact, this class has a HUGE harmful impact on socioeconomic realities, in some ways maybe moreso than the billionaire class. And that's worth pointing out and critiquing!

Like, the way the UMC pushes to draw school districts so that their children never have to share schools with too many poor or black kids (resulting in wealthier neighborhoods having well-funded schools while poor neighborhoods which collect little tax revenue have underfunded schools). Like the way that MC and UMC folks will fight tooth and nail to prevent low-income housing from being built in their neighborhoods, resulting in effective segregation of cities and suburbs by class and race. Like the way that wealthier Americans will use the police as their weapon to harass and drive away homeless people, people of color, and poorer people from their communities and their streets for their own comfort. Like the way that UMC folks may not be 1%ers, but they still have enough wealth to take advantage of tax loopholes and tax-sheltering schemes to avoid paying their fair share. Gated communities. Anti-pan-handling ordinances. White flight. Gentrification. Tens of thousands of golf courses. Rampant consumerism and waste. Not to mention the number of careers within this class which specifically exist to perpetuate and support the existing class divides.

And, importantly, I'm talking about CLASS here, not individuals. I have no doubt that there are plenty of individual UMC folks out there who are specifically fighting against these things and are trying to use their wealth to make their communities better for all. But those would be people who are working against their class interests. The upper-middle class as a whole has class interests that are fundamentally opposed to the interests of those with less wealth, and which are largely aligned with the interests of the super-rich. Working against one's class interests is also extremely challenging, particularly if you were born reasonably wealthy, since your class will have shielded you from fully understanding the problems you're trying to solve. Thus, attempts to help are often misguided or ineffective, and sometimes ultimately end up serving the wealthy more than the poor. That may not even be intentional, but it's how class works and perpetuates itself.

I dunno, I guess I'm just frustrated that every time any critique of the upper-middle class seems to venture onto this site, it immediately seems to get derailed with either "kill them all!" or "you're not allowed to criticize the wealth of anyone not in the top 0.1%!" I'd love to see people start to think past that dichotomy.