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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@eliotcoburn
Crying hard tears of lafter
Welcome to Econogirl, she of a mighty heart and endless will to fight for the common good. She has a friend named Niki who is a working single mom always in need of babysitting for her son, Marshall. Niki has friends named Steak and Potato Man and Digitally Organized Yoga Missy, neither of whom Econogirl  likes so much. Also, Econogirl is a conflicted environmentalist who would like to have stuff as cool as Batman's.
Mount of the Gods
My eight-year-old son is writing a screen play about supernatural pirates called Mount of the Gods that is pretty entertaining. I couldnât believe how much pirate and ship lingo the kid has mastered. Itâs like twelve year old Master and Commander. Turns out he plays some pirate computer game all the time. Boy, the things we donât know about our boys. His main character is a really, I mean really, bad egg âa  murderous, heartless scoundrel â and his secondary character is a sweet, kidnapped guy who constantly worries about the family he left behind. I told my son he might think about the fact that his protagonist is such a bad guy and that the other guy is really the hero of the story, the guy weâre going to root for and hope wins in the end.
âReally?â he asks me. His twelve year old mind cannot grasp how anyone could be less interested in the murderous shipâs captain than the kidnapped dweeby guy.
âThe kidnapped dweeby guy is the true man,â I tell him. âHe knows his family depends on him and he doesnât want to let them down.â
âOh yeah,â he says.
âThe other guy is tough and scary and all, but in the end heâs just a big bully who never grew up.â
 Dylan thought there was more to him than that.
 âOkay,â I said, âI can see that.  Maybe he starts out doing all these bad things but somewhere along the way, he discovers what heâs doing wrong and he grows as a person. Maybe your hero leads him toward that.â
 âYeah, good idea, Iâll think about that.â  Â
 Hmmm, Iâm thinking, that was too easy.  Weâre on page 21 of the screen play. Weâll see what happens.
âthe only respectable positionâ
I got in some hot water making this argument to my die-hard atheist friends over the years, so I wonât say it myself again. Here is Martin Amis saying the exact same thing, and I donât even know the man. I also donât know why there arenât more of us out there. I really donât.
From an interview for Prospect, Feb, 2010, as quoted in Wikipedia:
In 2006 Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly, "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.[53]
In 2010 he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe...Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."
protofibrilous
At some point along the way, I discovered that all experience is private, whether you are in a crowd or alone at home, whether a thousand people hear you, or none. The only relief that comes is in conversation, when an idea is shared or contested. If the conversation is prolonged it stays with you like a friend even in troubled times. But more often the connection is protofibrilous. Tentative, merely potential. Sometimes a smiley comes. It is brief and refreshing like the air-conditioned gust of a closing door; sometimes it takes the form of an equally pithy attack on your gender, whose effect is, for many understandable reasons, Â much more prolonged.
blue-eyed, white girl
There is an expression: it's in our blood. I think about that a lot. Not about our genetic makeup, but what we are inside the heart and the mind, our mothers and fathers, our grandmas, the stories we hear. I was made blue eyed and light haired. That is what people see when they look at me. But I don't see blue when I look out of my eyes. I am the sum of a poor German family who lived in a cabin in the woods, a Mexican immigrant family who changed their name to pass as white, and a lot of English. I am the doctors and carpenters and farmers; the mamacitas and the grandmas; the pedophile and the man who gave up his life to save a homeless drifter. A lot of people go into us.
I don't mind when activists say that I am privileged because I'm white. I figure it has to be true. All else being equal, I must be better off than I would have been if I were dark skinned and had a history of no civil rights. Our parents grew up before civil rights. It's not the past. It's still right now.
What I mind is being made invisible. I was made invisible by my friend who said that all white people are racist; I was made invisible by a writer who complained she couldn't stand 'nice white people' and all the shit they say trying not to sound racist; I was made invisible by an activist who said that the Cherokee relatives we once boasted about were figments of our imagination. Maybe my ancestor, Tilden Coburn, was not Cherokee, I wouldn't know. But it was beautiful to think so, that's all. It was beautiful that my Grandfather was proud of his alleged non-white self. And my mother was proud of her Mexican family. She told us so many stories they swirl together: my doctor grandfather, La Paloma, Tia Carolina and the little oil well, Pancho Villa and the revolution. My first free act as a brand new adult out of school: I went to Mexico to live and to speak the language of my mother's family.
Outside of this, what I remember most is being scolded by strangers about racism; don't say negro, say colored; don't say colored, say black; don't say black, say African American; then black again, say black. What are you ashamed to say it? Are you ashamed to say black? You associate the color black with dirty don't you? Well, yes, I do. It's an unfortunate coincidence is all. Dirt is dark brown. I associate pale skin with sickness too. It doesn't determine my opinion of an entire race of people.
We moved to the south after my parents divorced and it was the black and Mexican girls who befriended me. They were kind to me. I loved them. It was the school who took them away from me. They put me in the white classes where no one was kind to me. I had a crush on a boy named Addis, a shy boy who never talked to me. But I remember his face when his friends told him I liked him, the flash of his white teeth when he smiled and looked at me across the yard before he folded back into the other kids on the playground.
Do we really have to crush white people to make room for black people? Is that the only way? Can that ever work? I am not a racist. That is not who I am. If you say that to me, you don't know me.Â
this grey day
It's raining again. And rain is good, so...