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Oct. 29th, 2018
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mhalachai replied to your post “So, my Kindle died in Kyrgyzstan, the casualty of our very late…”
“my Kindle died in Kyrgyzstan” is the start of the best book *ever*
You know, I haven’t even figured out how to make a good story out of it, though!! Like… there should be something in that. Especially the added details– that the taxicab was supposed to come at 3:45am but didn’t show up until after 4:30 and the booking company claimed the first one they sent got in an accident, and how the hotel concierge on the phone with the taxi company was the very first Kyrgyz person I witnessed coming anywhere close to being mad about anything, even speaking sharply (they’re incredibly chill people on the whole; the worst I’d seen up to that, including in some objectively unpleasant and even physically dangerous situations, had been mild-mannered eyerolling) (but, like, if we’d missed our flight, the next one wasn’t for a week), and especially how the cab’s trunk was already occupied by of all things a button accordion and this was why my luggage did not neatly fit and in his haste the taxicab driver had to cram things in an ungainly way, and I just
I can’t make that a great story, I just don’t know how to organize it. It’s just too much.
Instead it’s really just a good line.
You know, shit, I still haven’t posted up like, any of my photos from that trip. I have it all written up and ready to go and I just haven’t figured out how to organize it. Shit! Oh well.
(Your picture was not posted)
mhalachai replied to your post “So, my Kindle died in Kyrgyzstan, the casualty of our very late…”
“my Kindle died in Kyrgyzstan” is the start of the best book *ever*
You know, I haven’t even figured out how to make a good story out of it, though!! Like… there should be something in that. Especially the added details– that the taxicab was supposed to come at 3:45am but didn’t show up until after 4:30 and the booking company claimed the first one they sent got in an accident, and how the hotel concierge on the phone with the taxi company was the very first Kyrgyz person I witnessed coming anywhere close to being mad about anything, even speaking sharply (they’re incredibly chill people on the whole; the worst I’d seen up to that, including in some objectively unpleasant and even physically dangerous situations, had been mild-mannered eyerolling) (but, like, if we’d missed our flight, the next one wasn’t for a week), and especially how the cab’s trunk was already occupied by of all things a button accordion and this was why my luggage did not neatly fit and in his haste the taxicab driver had to cram things in an ungainly way, and I just
I can’t make that a great story, I just don’t know how to organize it. It’s just too much.
Instead it’s really just a good line.
You know, shit, I still haven’t posted up like, any of my photos from that trip. I have it all written up and ready to go and I just haven’t figured out how to organize it. Shit! Oh well.
(Your picture was not posted)
via https://ift.tt/2AyogTm
Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning (raining. why are raincoat hoods so comically undersized. i used to commute by driving into a sunrise and then a sunset, it sucked, i was so pumped to be heading west in the morning to go to work until i figured out the prevailing winds around here scream nonstop out of the west so every morning this winter i’m going to get my fucking face scoured off and my hood pushed back and that’s that, so, it’s time to return to my pitiful first garb attempts where i tried to make myself a hood and do it properly this time in fucking nylon ripstop waterproofing with a goddamn drawcord around the face or i’ll die this winter, for reals, this should be a product i can buy but it doesn’t seem to be) and idly daydreaming, and i actually got sort of inspired for the solarpunk mammoths novel again, by a very roundabout kind of thing, so.
one of the books i own on kindle is T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War duology, and I was rereading it kind of idly the other night in between marathon bouts of reading Martha Wells Books of the Raksura series to the four-year-old (you’d be amazed how little censorship it takes to make that book into, well, not a kids’ book, but a book you can mostly read to a little kid, well maybe just Farmkid, who has spent her whole life witnessing the processes by which animals become food and so is really unworried about the concept of death, for a little kid anyway) (occasionally during action scenes she says “I hope Moon doesn’t [die in extremely specific and relevant way]!” [like, extremely relevant, she’s good at plot, I’m going to get her to help me come up with action scenes for real] and I’m like “remember we already read one of the sequel stories so we know he doesn’t”).
Anyway.
If you haven’t read the Clocktaur War books, they’re charming and impactful and all-over pretty great, but I had felt zero interest in writing any fic for them, and haven’t looked any up. They kind of– they’re a neat package unto themselves, or so I’ve felt, anyway. It’s not that the characters aren’t compelling, I just feel like we find out enough about them, and we have enough of the various Tragic Backstories, and I guess we don’t get Brenner’s backstory and he does wind up a sympathetic character but I sort of don’t really want to know, it’s probably kind of grim. Anyway.
The dynamic between the two principal characters is, I think, the reason the series exists– the main character is a small petite woman who is very clever and she does have some action chops (climbing through windows, knifeplay, and so on), and then her love interest / other guy whose POV we get is a disgraced/betrayed former paladin who is enormous and beautiful and has a sword three feet long and so on and so forth. (He does a lot of Noble Suffering in an extremely attractive way throughout the book, and it’s very female gazey and I did enjoy it enormously.)
During one action scene, the main character has to rescue the Hot Hunk from captivity, and she makes her daring entrance and has his sword with her, and then an enemy charges her and she can’t even properly hold his sword, let alone swing it– so she throws it at the charging enemy’s feet, very cleverly, and then kills them with a knife when they stumble. It’s extremely smart and heroic and such, and it’s from Hot Hunk’s POV and he’s extremely hearteyes about it. Great!
And I was pondering on that, and how it was a good scene and all, but then I was like, you know, I would like the girl to be able to wield the sword just once.
And I remembered the Solarpunk Mammoths novel. And part of my problem writing it was that I was hung up on how the fuck the plot was going to work, and part of it was, I think, that I just couldn’t make the one character be sexy in my mind– and I don’t mean, like, I personally have to be attracted sexually to a character to write them compellingly, I just mean I wasn’t feeling them on any level, really.
But I remembered that at some point I had decided that the dynamic between two of the characters, from the beginning, was going to be that she was a Buff Muscle Girl and he was a Skinny City Nerd. And I had lost interest in that, but.
Maybe I should just go back and try to write that scene, where he figures out that she could pick him up if she wanted to, and see if I can’t just let the plot work itself out after that.
(I feel like there should be all kinds of characters, and there’s definitely an important place for short girls to feel represented, right? Slate from Clocktaur War is fantastic rep as a female character– she’s smart, she’s repeatedly described as not beautiful [including by the Hot Hunk who is falling in love with her], she’s not particularly coordinated outside of her particular areas of specialty, and has clear eyes about her physical shortcomings. And that’s great.
I’m not making Steampunk Mammoths Heroine a Gwendoline Christie character either, though– there’s definitely a place for that archetype and I love it as well, but. I’m making her not particularly tall and not particularly built; she looks more like a lot of the women I farm with, who in normal clothes just look like an average person but when you have a 75-pound bin of something you can’t pick up, they’ll come over and instead of taking the other side to help you, will kindly wave you off and just pick the thing up and carry it across the courtyard themselves without particularly exerting themselves, and they’ll use good posture and lifting techniques while they’re at it, because they do this sort of thing all day every day.)
(Your picture was not posted)
Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning (raining. why are raincoat hoods so comically undersized. i used to commute by driving into a sunrise and then a sunset, it sucked, i was so pumped to be heading west in the morning to go to work until i figured out the prevailing winds around here scream nonstop out of the west so every morning this winter i’m going to get my fucking face scoured off and my hood pushed back and that’s that, so, it’s time to return to my pitiful first garb attempts where i tried to make myself a hood and do it properly this time in fucking nylon ripstop waterproofing with a goddamn drawcord around the face or i’ll die this winter, for reals, this should be a product i can buy but it doesn’t seem to be) and idly daydreaming, and i actually got sort of inspired for the solarpunk mammoths novel again, by a very roundabout kind of thing, so.
one of the books i own on kindle is T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War duology, and I was rereading it kind of idly the other night in between marathon bouts of reading Martha Wells Books of the Raksura series to the four-year-old (you’d be amazed how little censorship it takes to make that book into, well, not a kids’ book, but a book you can mostly read to a little kid, well maybe just Farmkid, who has spent her whole life witnessing the processes by which animals become food and so is really unworried about the concept of death, for a little kid anyway) (occasionally during action scenes she says “I hope Moon doesn’t [die in extremely specific and relevant way]!” [like, extremely relevant, she’s good at plot, I’m going to get her to help me come up with action scenes for real] and I’m like “remember we already read one of the sequel stories so we know he doesn’t”).
Anyway.
If you haven’t read the Clocktaur War books, they’re charming and impactful and all-over pretty great, but I had felt zero interest in writing any fic for them, and haven’t looked any up. They kind of– they’re a neat package unto themselves, or so I’ve felt, anyway. It’s not that the characters aren’t compelling, I just feel like we find out enough about them, and we have enough of the various Tragic Backstories, and I guess we don’t get Brenner’s backstory and he does wind up a sympathetic character but I sort of don’t really want to know, it’s probably kind of grim. Anyway.
The dynamic between the two principal characters is, I think, the reason the series exists– the main character is a small petite woman who is very clever and she does have some action chops (climbing through windows, knifeplay, and so on), and then her love interest / other guy whose POV we get is a disgraced/betrayed former paladin who is enormous and beautiful and has a sword three feet long and so on and so forth. (He does a lot of Noble Suffering in an extremely attractive way throughout the book, and it’s very female gazey and I did enjoy it enormously.)
During one action scene, the main character has to rescue the Hot Hunk from captivity, and she makes her daring entrance and has his sword with her, and then an enemy charges her and she can’t even properly hold his sword, let alone swing it– so she throws it at the charging enemy’s feet, very cleverly, and then kills them with a knife when they stumble. It’s extremely smart and heroic and such, and it’s from Hot Hunk’s POV and he’s extremely hearteyes about it. Great!
And I was pondering on that, and how it was a good scene and all, but then I was like, you know, I would like the girl to be able to wield the sword just once.
And I remembered the Solarpunk Mammoths novel. And part of my problem writing it was that I was hung up on how the fuck the plot was going to work, and part of it was, I think, that I just couldn’t make the one character be sexy in my mind– and I don’t mean, like, I personally have to be attracted sexually to a character to write them compellingly, I just mean I wasn’t feeling them on any level, really.
But I remembered that at some point I had decided that the dynamic between two of the characters, from the beginning, was going to be that she was a Buff Muscle Girl and he was a Skinny City Nerd. And I had lost interest in that, but.
Maybe I should just go back and try to write that scene, where he figures out that she could pick him up if she wanted to, and see if I can’t just let the plot work itself out after that.
(I feel like there should be all kinds of characters, and there’s definitely an important place for short girls to feel represented, right? Slate from Clocktaur War is fantastic rep as a female character– she’s smart, she’s repeatedly described as not beautiful [including by the Hot Hunk who is falling in love with her], she’s not particularly coordinated outside of her particular areas of specialty, and has clear eyes about her physical shortcomings. And that’s great.
I’m not making Steampunk Mammoths Heroine a Gwendoline Christie character either, though– there’s definitely a place for that archetype and I love it as well, but. I’m making her not particularly tall and not particularly built; she looks more like a lot of the women I farm with, who in normal clothes just look like an average person but when you have a 75-pound bin of something you can’t pick up, they’ll come over and instead of taking the other side to help you, will kindly wave you off and just pick the thing up and carry it across the courtyard themselves without particularly exerting themselves, and they’ll use good posture and lifting techniques while they’re at it, because they do this sort of thing all day every day.)
(Your picture was not posted)
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buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning…”
that makes me think of my boss when I worked for the chemistry dept in college. she was maybe five feet tall, around 50 years old, and I remember one day her saying to me, over a five-gallon drum of acetone, ’[lace], don’t try to lift this, it’s probably too heavy. let [your male coworker] do it’ … and then easily picking it up herself.
Yes. Yes! Yes this.
I just get tired of Everyone Knows You Need To Be Big To Be Strong, and I know it’s because we have such a visual culture at this point, but in real life, when you do manual labor, you start to realize that size is not at all an indicator of how strong someone is, and a lot of times, it’s knowing how to use your body, it’s practice and practicality. Someone smaller will have to lift with their legs or strategically get their shoulder under it or something; someone larger will know that lifting it straight up will hurt their back so they’ll get a knee under it instead, that kind of thing.
One thing I will say for my BIL– he’s the kind of guy who opens car doors for women, but they tend to hire a pretty balanced crew, gender-wise, and there’s generally a pretty frank assessment of people’s strength based not on gender or physical size, but rather on real criteria, like “come over here and pick this up, can you do it? ok no? all right we’ll give you this other job” and there are very few jobs that someone physically can’t do, it’s just that a taller person would be faster, and a shorter person would do better at that other job, and such.
I’m old enough now, though, that when the various men at the office job are like “oh let me carry that” I’m like “fine go ahead” because I really don’t care to prove myself.
BIL and Dad have been putting rafters on the new barn, and it’s a lot of heavy lifting, and Dad is 74 and has a bad shoulder, but man, he can still lift really heavy things despite being only 140 pounds. BIL is 6′2″ and about 200 lbs, and he’s very, very strong, but he has a family history of severe back problems, and has been fighting against developing his own back problems for his whole working life, so he’s extremely careful about how he lifts things. He does, and he can, and he’s very strong, but he’s also learned to be smart about it.
On Friday, I had to climb up into the back of the dump truck to lift things up into the barn loft, and i had a terrible moment of being, like, a humorous Internet video about an elderly corgi, because I stared at that truck bed, which was a solid four and a half feet off the ground, and absolutely did this little what-do-i-do dance, it was hilarious and terrible. I had no idea how i was going to get my fat ass up into that truck, and my dad took pity on me and was like “ok I’ll come down and climb up there” and I was like no sister did it so i should be able to! and eventually I figured out that I could climb the wheel and then cantilever myself out over the flange of the truck bed by hanging onto the side, but it was so pathetic, and so sad. And then I basically didn’t do any of the lifting either because my angle was bad. It was pathetic. And then I had to get down. Argh!
Listen, if you want 40 pounds moved over and over again across a room, I’m your woman. But I don’t really climb or jump, that’s just how it is.
(Your picture was not posted)
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “Apropos of basically nothing, I was walking to work this morning…”
that makes me think of my boss when I worked for the chemistry dept in college. she was maybe five feet tall, around 50 years old, and I remember one day her saying to me, over a five-gallon drum of acetone, ’[lace], don’t try to lift this, it’s probably too heavy. let [your male coworker] do it’ … and then easily picking it up herself.
Yes. Yes! Yes this.
I just get tired of Everyone Knows You Need To Be Big To Be Strong, and I know it’s because we have such a visual culture at this point, but in real life, when you do manual labor, you start to realize that size is not at all an indicator of how strong someone is, and a lot of times, it’s knowing how to use your body, it’s practice and practicality. Someone smaller will have to lift with their legs or strategically get their shoulder under it or something; someone larger will know that lifting it straight up will hurt their back so they’ll get a knee under it instead, that kind of thing.
One thing I will say for my BIL– he’s the kind of guy who opens car doors for women, but they tend to hire a pretty balanced crew, gender-wise, and there’s generally a pretty frank assessment of people’s strength based not on gender or physical size, but rather on real criteria, like “come over here and pick this up, can you do it? ok no? all right we’ll give you this other job” and there are very few jobs that someone physically can’t do, it’s just that a taller person would be faster, and a shorter person would do better at that other job, and such.
I’m old enough now, though, that when the various men at the office job are like “oh let me carry that” I’m like “fine go ahead” because I really don’t care to prove myself.
BIL and Dad have been putting rafters on the new barn, and it’s a lot of heavy lifting, and Dad is 74 and has a bad shoulder, but man, he can still lift really heavy things despite being only 140 pounds. BIL is 6′2″ and about 200 lbs, and he’s very, very strong, but he has a family history of severe back problems, and has been fighting against developing his own back problems for his whole working life, so he’s extremely careful about how he lifts things. He does, and he can, and he’s very strong, but he’s also learned to be smart about it.
On Friday, I had to climb up into the back of the dump truck to lift things up into the barn loft, and i had a terrible moment of being, like, a humorous Internet video about an elderly corgi, because I stared at that truck bed, which was a solid four and a half feet off the ground, and absolutely did this little what-do-i-do dance, it was hilarious and terrible. I had no idea how i was going to get my fat ass up into that truck, and my dad took pity on me and was like “ok I’ll come down and climb up there” and I was like no sister did it so i should be able to! and eventually I figured out that I could climb the wheel and then cantilever myself out over the flange of the truck bed by hanging onto the side, but it was so pathetic, and so sad. And then I basically didn’t do any of the lifting either because my angle was bad. It was pathetic. And then I had to get down. Argh!
Listen, if you want 40 pounds moved over and over again across a room, I’m your woman. But I don’t really climb or jump, that’s just how it is.
(Your picture was not posted)
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sydsliftingface:
sydsliftingface:
hongkong-97:
lilsnoozyvert:
lilsnoozyvert:
lilsnoozyvert:
lilsnoozyvert:
big fucking surprise but trump is blaming the temple for not having been armed lmao
“if they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation” —trump in response to a reporter’s question about gun control
what is it gonna take for you freaks to realize that antisemitism is still real and is deadly, right now, in 2018
you all need to fucking reblog this no offense. especially if you aren’t jewish
source, and another source in which the synagogue says they do in fact have guards, but only on major holidays.
how far do people have to go just to survive, and how long is this going to go on until the blame is finally focused on antisemitism itself?
I have a hill to die on right here so im just gonna go off for a second. It wasnt until this year that i realized security is not a normal regular everyday thing for churchgoers. I never realized until this year that all the cameras and guards and cop cars and bag checks were for a reason. It was just how i grew up, thats just how it went. You checked in with the security desk, a guard would look in your purse or tallis bag and then youd be on your merry way. It never occurred to me that they were Actually Looking For Threats, its just always been a part of my religious experience.
We know people hate us. We know people want to kill us, that’s kind of our entire history.
Those people who were murdered didnt die because they were unprepared, they died because somebody wanted them dead.
אנחנו נתגבר ונשרוד גם את זה.
Also just for the record, the implication that being Not Christian means you should be prepared to die at any time is sickening. Fuck you.
Well, and the Kroger gunman tried to shoot up a black church first, but the doors were locked, so he went off and shot two grandparents at a supermarket instead.
It’s just like all the rape culture bullshit: make sure the bad people get someone else. Having safeguards in place isn’t going to mean no violence happens, it means the violence will happen to someone else.
And that’s the only choice we have? To protect ourselves, to make sure there’s always someone more vulnerable. Because if we don’t, we’re to blame for not protecting ourselves enough.
There’s no consideration that we should try to have a society where this kind of violence doesn’t happen. No; there’s just inevitable violence, and if you’re killed, it was your fault for being the most vulnerable.
(Your picture was not posted)
sydsliftingface:
sydsliftingface:
hongkong-97:
lilsnoozyvert:
lilsnoozyvert:
lilsnoozyvert:
lilsnoozyvert:
big fucking surprise but trump is blaming the temple for not having been armed lmao
“if they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation” —trump in response to a reporter’s question about gun control
what is it gonna take for you freaks to realize that antisemitism is still real and is deadly, right now, in 2018
you all need to fucking reblog this no offense. especially if you aren’t jewish
source, and another source in which the synagogue says they do in fact have guards, but only on major holidays.
how far do people have to go just to survive, and how long is this going to go on until the blame is finally focused on antisemitism itself?
I have a hill to die on right here so im just gonna go off for a second. It wasnt until this year that i realized security is not a normal regular everyday thing for churchgoers. I never realized until this year that all the cameras and guards and cop cars and bag checks were for a reason. It was just how i grew up, thats just how it went. You checked in with the security desk, a guard would look in your purse or tallis bag and then youd be on your merry way. It never occurred to me that they were Actually Looking For Threats, its just always been a part of my religious experience.
We know people hate us. We know people want to kill us, that’s kind of our entire history.
Those people who were murdered didnt die because they were unprepared, they died because somebody wanted them dead.
אנחנו נתגבר ונשרוד גם את זה.
Also just for the record, the implication that being Not Christian means you should be prepared to die at any time is sickening. Fuck you.
Well, and the Kroger gunman tried to shoot up a black church first, but the doors were locked, so he went off and shot two grandparents at a supermarket instead.
It’s just like all the rape culture bullshit: make sure the bad people get someone else. Having safeguards in place isn’t going to mean no violence happens, it means the violence will happen to someone else.
And that’s the only choice we have? To protect ourselves, to make sure there’s always someone more vulnerable. Because if we don’t, we’re to blame for not protecting ourselves enough.
There’s no consideration that we should try to have a society where this kind of violence doesn’t happen. No; there’s just inevitable violence, and if you’re killed, it was your fault for being the most vulnerable.
(Your picture was not posted)
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walburgablack replied to your post “went to my mom and dad’s last night for dinner. dad’s birthday. we had…”
*hugs* good for you, hon.
torrilin replied to your post “went to my mom and dad’s last night for dinner. dad’s birthday. we had…”
*hugs*
mific replied to your post “went to my mom and dad’s last night for dinner. dad’s birthday. we had…”
Brave of you to be honest with him. It’s really hard with family.
oh man, I don’t mean to be like, I should get Wokeness Points for this! I just thought I should put it out there, that like, these fights are a thing and I had to have one.
The downside isn’t that my relationship with him is in any danger– my family don’t tend to hold grudges or keep arguments going or anything. It’s just frustrating, because I don’t know that it did any good. He likes to argue, and sometimes he deliberately makes controversial points to try to draw someone out into an argument, and it was fascinating when I was like, 15, and honestly it was probably really good for me as a young person to experience that because by the time I got to college, Libertarian Bros would try it with me and I’d be like “listen you’re not even making your own point right, this is the argument you’re trying to use and I’ve heard it before and here’s how I’ve refuted it in the past but I’ve thought of like six more ways since, sit down I’m not done” and so I never made the mistake of dating an Edgy Libertarian Bro and actually probably semi-accidentally cockblocked a lot of them at parties I went to because I have always been loud and oblivious– and the awful side effect was that a lot of them became infatuated with me and I had no idea why, but.
How did I digress into my college days. I don’t know. They were a thing, and at the time I had a good time but I really did have this weird little ragtag band, mixed up of just-discovering-themselves lesbians, and wannabe-edgy-libertarian bros, who were sort of unhealthily fascinated with me, and i really hope they figured out what the fuck they actually wanted because it sure wasn’t me and I had no idea how to help them. ANyway. Anyway, men, go ahead and raise your daughters this way because it seems to work out.
Anyway– the downside is that it really doesn’t matter how well you argue with dad, he still does what he does. I still remember about 20 years ago I absolutely went for it and argued him to a standstill over gay marriage, I conclusively won that argument and he had nothing else to say, I had countered every single one of his points and i hadn’t even gotten mad about it, I absolutely won, and the next month I heard him say the same stupid fucking line about next they’ll be marrying dogs and I was like what even is the fucking point.
BIL is way better at this than me, by the way, and let it be a consolation to all of you– he’s out there fighting the good fight, being really friendly to Trump supporters and then sweetly, kindly, logically, mercilessly asking them just why it is that they believe the thing they do, he’s got his sources ready and he’s like but that argument is based on a fictional news story, in reality this very different thing happened, isn’t it counterproductive to form policy decisions based on fiction, why can’t we formulate our laws on real things that really happened instead?
Neither of us is making any difference, I feel like, but– we’re trying. It’s got to matter. I should try harder. I argued with BIL about it– being nice to these people isn’t working, we should just shun them– and he pointed out that, well, he’s the only person under 60 on the Farm Bureau, and a large number of his customers and people he needs to have professional relationships with are lifelong Republicans, so he really has no choice but to be nice, and anyway, he’s a white man, they’re going to listen to him.
All you can do is try, I guess.
(Your picture was not posted)
walburgablack replied to your post “went to my mom and dad’s last night for dinner. dad’s birthday. we had…”
*hugs* good for you, hon.
torrilin replied to your post “went to my mom and dad’s last night for dinner. dad’s birthday. we had…”
*hugs*
mific replied to your post “went to my mom and dad’s last night for dinner. dad’s birthday. we had…”
Brave of you to be honest with him. It’s really hard with family.
oh man, I don’t mean to be like, I should get Wokeness Points for this! I just thought I should put it out there, that like, these fights are a thing and I had to have one.
The downside isn’t that my relationship with him is in any danger– my family don’t tend to hold grudges or keep arguments going or anything. It’s just frustrating, because I don’t know that it did any good. He likes to argue, and sometimes he deliberately makes controversial points to try to draw someone out into an argument, and it was fascinating when I was like, 15, and honestly it was probably really good for me as a young person to experience that because by the time I got to college, Libertarian Bros would try it with me and I’d be like “listen you’re not even making your own point right, this is the argument you’re trying to use and I’ve heard it before and here’s how I’ve refuted it in the past but I’ve thought of like six more ways since, sit down I’m not done” and so I never made the mistake of dating an Edgy Libertarian Bro and actually probably semi-accidentally cockblocked a lot of them at parties I went to because I have always been loud and oblivious– and the awful side effect was that a lot of them became infatuated with me and I had no idea why, but.
How did I digress into my college days. I don’t know. They were a thing, and at the time I had a good time but I really did have this weird little ragtag band, mixed up of just-discovering-themselves lesbians, and wannabe-edgy-libertarian bros, who were sort of unhealthily fascinated with me, and i really hope they figured out what the fuck they actually wanted because it sure wasn’t me and I had no idea how to help them. ANyway. Anyway, men, go ahead and raise your daughters this way because it seems to work out.
Anyway– the downside is that it really doesn’t matter how well you argue with dad, he still does what he does. I still remember about 20 years ago I absolutely went for it and argued him to a standstill over gay marriage, I conclusively won that argument and he had nothing else to say, I had countered every single one of his points and i hadn’t even gotten mad about it, I absolutely won, and the next month I heard him say the same stupid fucking line about next they’ll be marrying dogs and I was like what even is the fucking point.
BIL is way better at this than me, by the way, and let it be a consolation to all of you– he’s out there fighting the good fight, being really friendly to Trump supporters and then sweetly, kindly, logically, mercilessly asking them just why it is that they believe the thing they do, he’s got his sources ready and he’s like but that argument is based on a fictional news story, in reality this very different thing happened, isn’t it counterproductive to form policy decisions based on fiction, why can’t we formulate our laws on real things that really happened instead?
Neither of us is making any difference, I feel like, but– we’re trying. It’s got to matter. I should try harder. I argued with BIL about it– being nice to these people isn’t working, we should just shun them– and he pointed out that, well, he’s the only person under 60 on the Farm Bureau, and a large number of his customers and people he needs to have professional relationships with are lifelong Republicans, so he really has no choice but to be nice, and anyway, he’s a white man, they’re going to listen to him.
All you can do is try, I guess.
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