I Can NOT Stop Thinking About When C.s. Lewis Introduced A Character By Saying His Name, Unfortunately,

i can NOT stop thinking about when c.s. lewis introduced a character by saying “his name, unfortunately, was Eustace Scrubb” like BRUH no need to do him dirty like that 😭😭 you GAVE him that name. tf

i wanna be a cool unshakable asshole but instead i do one nice thing for an old lady and have to struggle not to cry when she thanks me.

“There’s a much quoted proverb in the world of finance that I hate: Give a man a fish and you will feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime. I say bullshit to this. Do the poor really not know how to fish? And what good is it to know how to fish if the rights to fish are owned by powerful landlords? And if the river is polluted by upstream tyrants? And what good is it to be taught to fish if the price and distribution of fish is controlled by conglomerate monopolies?””

— Ananya Roy, “Who Profits From Poverty?“  (via whoiscamillepaglia)

WHAT’S YR NATIONALITY!?!? This guy shouts at me during drag queen karaoke at this gay bar two stops down the line. In order to talk about a hurricane, you first have to talk about a preexisting disturbance over the ocean, so you have to talk about mean ocean temperature, so you have to talk about human industry and sun rays, so you have to talk about helium, so did you know helium was named for the sun god Helios and was defined by a gap in the solar spectrum so literally not itself but what surrounded it, so of course we have to talk about the solar system, the Milk Way, the networks of universe and the Big Bang. How far back do you have to go to answer any question about race?

Tommy Pico, from Nature Poem (via bostonpoetryslam)

What they don’t tell you about prolonged periods of introspection and careful observation is the harm that can come from being totally alone in that process, with no one to remind you that feeling, learning, watching, and healing are communal. When lonesome thought is fetishized, you feel obligated to suffer in silence, to see all struggles as individual rather than collective. You tell yourself that maybe you’re just growing apart from things you thought you knew, that you’re not doing healing right, and this must mean you’re just inadequate. And at some point, you obsess over this cultivated lifestyle of being quiet, small, and invisible as a means of personal protection that you feel forgotten about and in the end, you have no one but yourself to blame.

Sometimes I wish I could speak and write like I used to. But the more I see and interpret, the less I speak because I become increasingly aware of my own mental boundaries as well as the structural limitations I didn’t want to know existed. And the less I speak, the more I simply think myself into non-existence – or at least, what feels the closest to thinking but not really living.

What does it mean to be seen without desiring all of the accompanying narcissism that attaches itself to forms of recognition? I’ve been thinking and re-thinking the politics of recognition for almost exactly half of a year. Recognition is something so paradoxical to me, and thinking about it is bound to drive you to a point in your mental health where any mention of soap-bathing, bubble-blowing “self-care” rituals make you want to disappear a little more with each passing day. I wonder what it does to a person to ponder alienation in alienation for this long, in addition to all of the recognition rituals that compensate for it. My heart hurts just trying to wrap my mind around that.

I grabbed coffee with a friend I admire so much yesterday, and I asked her if she was feeling this way, too. She said something I knew to be true, but so desperately needed to hear and be reassured by: “Everyone is feeling this way. This feeling is political, not just personal. It permeates daily life and it’s only getting worse and worse.” And I can feel it all the way from Egypt to the United States, the two places I keep escaping for each other only to find myself retreating again for the other. The current global crisis in capital that is building up is wreaking havoc on so many of us in the most insidious ways imaginable. But even attempting to communicate this is difficult and frightening because alienation is so often strategically pathologized, misdiagnosed as “depression”, and written off as individual suffering. And so, we all suffer in silence.