Sarah. Engineer. Artist. Activist. Hopelessly in love with the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones. Aspiration? Astronaut. Occupation? Student. Hometown? Houston, Texas.
Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.’ And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?
“59. it’s beautiful, but I don’t like it” from 100 essays I don’t have time to write: on umbrellas and sword fights, parades and dogs, fire alarms, children, and theater, sarah ruhl (via likeniobe)
Capitalism doesn’t have a plan, you know. It only goes in one direction and it doesn’t care what you want.
The most advanced capitalist states are literally at the stage of collapse and yet we deny that perhaps the problem is capitalism. Capitalism is a system that we can prove with any science is fucking the planet and yet the rich can convince most this is progress. This is like burning your hands on a hot stove and thinking the problem is anything but fire.
Capitalism not only eats babies, it makes sure those babies suffer horrific and needless deaths first because suffering is less costly than care. Better if their parents are helpless to do anything but watch. Teaches the rest the lesson.
Capitalism does better the more people are made to suffer. Why? Because those who are made to suffer are the easiest to domesticate and farm for profit. Pavlov taught us that much. Come on. Our freedom is leashed because capitalism profits that way.
Capitalism wants your parents to die long, drawn-out, painful deaths from preventable diseases because managing slow, painful death is a hugely profitable enterprise employing tens of thousands of people. Don’t question what makes good-paying jobs, idiot. Fastest growing career sector.
Capitalism is why there are six empty houses in this country for every homeless person but thousands still freeze to death. Capitalism is why we waste 40 percent of our food while children die of starvation. Capitalism is why 200 species went extinct today. Capitalism is why we’re all going to war for oil under the North Pole. Capitalism is why your kid is going to die in a water riot.
I haven’t read it since seventh grade, but my favorite part of Twilight that I remember is the “radioactive spider” line bc it implies that
when presented with a dude who looks somehow eerily identical to his adopted siblings while sharing none of the same genetic features, a dude whose adopted siblings are apparently all dating each other, a dude whose family never socializes with other students, is never seen around town, NEVER EATS, a dude whose entire family is super dedicated to attendance and punctuality but just straight up LEAVES TOWN on sunny days,
Bella thought “could he be….Spiderman?”
My second favorite part is that she Googled it.
The biggest problem I had with twilight is why anyone would stay in high school longer than the allotted 4 years? I hate that? It literally made me so mad esp if you have been in the american school system like i bet theyre still as dumb as an other american also they have been going to school for so long and never once thought about sex ed? Also how are they going to school without ssns? Which leads me to my next point is that Carlile is Stealing dead peoples ssns for his demented family Thats right everyone Vampires Are committing tax fraud
First of all, I’m actually almost certain that Carlisle pays taxes. That’s just such a Carlisle thing to do. He probably does them all himself late at night sitting in his study wearing a pair of glasses he doesn’t need. “Our dad is weird,” Emmett says. Rosalie rolls her eyes, “he’s not our dad.”
THAT SAID, yes, it’s totally ridiculous that Twilight takes place in high school. I think the concept itself would have been 100% more entertaining if Bella had been a a junior transfer student from a southwest community college to University of Washington in Seattle, commuting every day from Forks, where she finds out the weird dude from her college chem lab lives too (I’ve commuted 40+ minutes to school, it’s doable).
Not only is this more believable, but it would also be a lot more entertaining and potentially funny for Bella to just slowly realize she has at least one class a week with each of these weird-ass pale kids from her hometown.
Edward’s in chem with her. She accidentally sits down next to Rosalie in calc before she recognizes the resemblance. Emmet’s an overwhelmingly enthusiastic Fitness Management major who starts sitting next to her in Western Civ after he notices her talking to Edward. “Are you pre-med? You seem like you might be pre-med. My dad’s a doctor!”
Alice tries desperately to help her in a wheel-tossing class Bella had to take as an art elective after she put off choosing an art elective until it was the only one left. She asks herself daily why she didn’t take Art History. Jasper is there too. He doesn’t look like he’d be into pottery, but it seems like he’s into anything Alice is into (I still argue it’s literally impossible that he functions in public at all, but we’ll roll with it anyway).
Make Esme a professor at the school, too. Adorable. She’s that Mom Professor everyone loves and and respects (and also sort of fears). She always excuses absences as long as you send an email.
Instead of collecting graduation caps and gowns, they collect degrees.
Imagine Emmet bringing up the time he was almost a doctor, but having to actually be around the patients ended it. Carlisle says “I warned you the entire time you were in undergrad.”
After a few weeks of plot devices similar to the actual book (near-death parking lot experiences, etc.), Bella runs into Esme at the grocery store in Forks (I actually love that they buy groceries) and realizes my god, these people live here?
It would also make more sense that Bella were moving back in with her dad despite hating the Pacific Northwest so intensely. None of that sort of quirky “minor league baseball” stuff. She absolutely Would Not live in a dorm with some random roommate, so going to school where she could live with her dad was about all that made sense. The in-state tuition to a great university was just an added bonus.
It would also make the romance more enjoyable. NOW, a lot of people complain that a 100+ year old would have no reason to be interested in a high schooler in the original series, but I believe it’s very implied that all of the Vampires aren’t just physically frozen at their age, but they’re mentally and emotionally stuck forever as well.
Which is, you know, horrible. That’s why some of them are so damn angsty and emotionally volatile. That’s why Bella insists that Edward turn her sooner than later. Bruh, if you wait until she’s 25, she’s going to out-grow your maturity-level.
STILL, I think a romance between 21-23 year olds would have been better, by a little bit.
It would also make a lot more sense for them to be in college because of the way they function. They wouldn’t all be eating (or not eating) together in the only cafeteria as the entire student-body tried to pretend to not stare.
Less people would notice their eerie resemblance, their coordinated absences, and their overall weirdness, which would make more apparent Bella’s alleged super-strong powers of observation when she started putting things together.
Instead of there randomly being a sudden spike in criminals in that little town, Edward could dramatically rescue Bella’s naive ass from a party her human friends dragged her to.
I could go on, but this is eventually going to become and entire College Au rewrite of Twilight in excruciating detail. So I’ll stop.
this is all I ever wanted.
did i just enjoy twilight meta in the year of our lord 2017
We are throwing phone-banking parties, all over the country, tomorrow (6/24).
At our Call out Corruption phone-banking parties you can meet people who believe government should work for all of us while making calls for candidates who will make that become a reality.
I’ve been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles. Thirty years later, there’s still the same sort of excitement I get from it. It’s still fun to inhabit different characters and play different things, so it’s all in that panoply of acting
[Caption: a photo of Don Cheadle from the chest up. He’s slightly turned to the left, laughing. He’s wearing a pink sweater and is in front of a pink background, all the colors in the picture bright and gleeful.]
there’s a big difference between “food waste” as in “farmers destroy tons of food to avoid exceeding quotas” or “supermarkets throw away this much edible food because it doesn’t sell”
and “food waste” as in “it is not actually within the capacity of humans to perfectly predict and track household food consumption, so a certain amount of food per household inevitably goes bad and has to be thrown out every year”
the idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious
Truuuuuuuueeeeeee, other large sources of food waste:
- Restaurants. The fact that the rich expect restaurants to have every article on their menu available at all times means every restaurant has far more food than they need and throws a lot of that shit out.
- Big inhuman organisations with intense bureaucracy. Think hospitals, schools, prisons, refugee camps and the army. Organisations that provide food for a very large group of people but are not allowed (and/or can’t be bothered) to give that food away if there is too much of it.
Some of the most spectacular food waste I’vepersonally witnessed was an army training camp that threw away 250 sealed lunchboxes because the training ended one day early, and a refugee center than threw away over 100 loaves of bread while people in the center where hungry because regulations stated that every refugee got two slices of bread for breakfast.
And I’m supposed to feel guilty about half a tomato rotting in the garbage? Nah, that’s not food waste. That’s just life.
Shifting the guilt to the consumer is an intentional marketing ploy. The same was done when soda companies switched from bottles to cans
Originally soda machines had a place for you to return your bottle which the company would collect, sanitize, and re-use. Consumers paid a deposit when they bought the soda, then got it back when they dropped the empty bottle in the slot. Bars and restaurants also had to pay the deposit and redeem the bottles for a refund
Then companies decided it’d be cheaper to use disposable aluminum cans. Soda is something people often consumed in public places like parks and in front of stores. Increased public trash led to a litter problem. Environmentalists pressured the soda companies to fix the problem by bringing back the deposit and recycling programs. Instead, the companies started anti-liter campaigns that placed the guilt wholly on the consumer
This was decades before curb-side recycling existed. Recycling plants were few and far between, and consumers would have to save up cans then cart them to one of these facilities to recycle them, which few individuals had the time and transpiration to do. The ad campaigns led to people demanding more public garbage cans, which did reduce liter, but those were purchased and maintained at city expense and the contents went to landfills. It also led to the general public believing littering and landfill problems rested squarely on the shoulders of consumers even though the corporations had a perfectly good recycling system that they could have continued
Big business wants you to blame yourself and each other for problems they caused, and they’d rather spend money on guilt shifting ad campaigns than use that money for something good
