30-something y/o child. Artist, computer scientist and mom to Dog, Pup and Cat. I have an interest in writing, endurance sports and anarchism. She/they. Location: the Netherlands.
God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.
Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.
Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.
The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.
Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.
A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.
stop me if you’ve heard this one but men will search for women who are full of joy and confidence so they can leech off of it and then after they’ve left her empty and burned out and drained of all the life that once existed behind her eyes they’ll say she isn’t the woman they fell in love with
Solitude is choosing a sort of pain, training to conjugate the verbs of the heart with the freedom of the self-sufficient, or being more or less detached from your exterior self and forced to plunge inside yourself without a parachute.
The coliving people selected someone else. I’m seeing J tonight to eat and talk. My mom gave me a journal because she thinks it’s a good idea for me. T asked me to sit his cat again. I will accept a tiny but outdoorsy living space in The Middle Of Nowhere. I’m planning my first solo vacation in my life.
Got an invite to see an affordable coliving apartment in Amsterdam. The residents will pick who comes to live with them.
Do I now pluck my facial hair again to improve my aesthetic capital and thus my chances of being accepted??
Ok I did it. End of my tiny rebellion for now. Please all fingers crossed, I really want to stay in Amsterdam.
I think it was a decent place, close to public transport and a park with a room that is very spacious for Amsterdam standards and creative people of which I really liked one. Going to confirm my interest in the place tonight please cross fingers once more for them to select me 🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼
i’m listening to gathering moss, by robin wall kimmerer, and she is talking about a very odd job she was consigned to do, where an eccentric millionaire recuited her to consult on a “habitat restoration”. when she arrives, the job they actually want her to do is to tell them how to plant mosses on the rocks in his garden. he wants it to look like a specific, beautiful wild cliff in the woods nearby, with centuries-old beds of moss growing thick and strong. she tells him it is impossible. such a thing would take decades to accomplish.
later, she is called back to look at the progress of the moss garden and is amazed by the thick, well-established mosses. how did they do it? she asks.
then they take her out to the woods and show her that they have been blasting huge chunks of rock out of the cliff, packaging them in burlap, and moving them to the owner’s garden.
This quote really got me: “The owner is a man who loves mosses, and the exercise of power. I have no doubts of his sincerity in wishing to protect them from harm, once they conformed to his landscape design. But I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the sovreignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and diminishing the possessed. If he truly loved mosses more than control, he would have left them alone, and walked each day to see them.”
[id: a screenshot of a tiktok that shows a page full of text over an image of what appears to be a woman walking down a city street. She is light skinned and is wearing dark sunglasses and a tan fur or wool coat, and she has shoulder-length red hair. The text reads:
“have a signature dish, have a signature scent your friends will associate with you forever, wear the same coat for 20 years, be an icon, unswayed by trends, clothes are cool because you wear them, words sound right because you say them, trust your intuition, do things everyone tells you not to do. You are the only one who knows whats best for you and it will be the right thing because you decided it is.”
My mom told me she noticed the hair on my chin an told me how it had suddenly appeared on hers too.
I’ve plucked it since I was a teenager, but I’ve decided to let it grow, I told her. It belongs to me, so why can’t it stay? I think many women have facial hair, the internet is overloaded with tips on how to remove it. But since they all make it disappear, we think it’s abnormal. So who am I plucking it for? I’m embarrassed most of the time and I don’t want people to think I’m dirty or not taking care of myself. But I’m letting it grow regardless, for now. It’s my tiny rebellion.
She looked at me in a way I had not expected at all and said: I think you’re asking the right question.
