M E E K S

(Em)Powered by sunshine. Nature, dogs, and sometimes nerdy things. ESFJ. I climb sometimes.

[imaginingfromtheblock]

does the mortifying ordeal of being known guy know that his paragraph from a six year old NYT opinion piece about emailing pictures of goats to coworkers has become God Tier Tumblr Gospel ? like does he KNOW though

[imaginingfromtheblock]

WOW thank you @inkstrangle​ for bringing it to my attention that as of last August, which is to say the chronological peak of the “mortifying ordeal” meme on tumblr, tim kreider absolutely DOES know and in fact wrote an entire brilliant essay reflecting on the phenomenon:

But what I wish I could tell all those children of the internet, holed up in their rooms, isolated online, is that they can only imagine the worst of relationships: they think that what another person will learn about them is what they see in themselves — the squirming, icky, insecure mess inside. They don’t know yet that the ways in which they’re secretly screwed up and repulsive are boringly ordinary. The issue isn’t that you’ll be despised for who you really are — that, as a friend and I used to say about girls we were dating, “she’ll realize.” It’s scarier than that: it’s that you lose control over who you are. Other people get to decide. And it may turn out that you’re not who you thought you were.

As an artist, you don’t get to decide why people love your work. […] I would describe my reaction to seeing my writing reanimated as meme as “nonplussed,” maybe “bemused.” It always does some slight violence to a writer’s intentions to yank a sentence out of its context and present it as if it were a complete, isolated thought, like a maxim or commandment. I am not in the business of pretending to be in possession of any wisdom, or of telling other people what to do: this is the realm of self-help and advice writers — in other words, of charlatans. Part of me worries it’s an indictment of my prose that it should lend itself so well to Tumblr memes, the digital equivalent of needlepoint samplers. […]

But the things people love about you aren’t necessarily the things you want to be loved for. They decide they like you for reasons completely outside your control, of which you’re often not even conscious: it’s certainly not because of the big act you put on, all the charm and anecdotes you’ve calculated for effect. (And if your act does fool someone, it only makes you feel like a successful fraud, and harbor some secret contempt for them — the contempt of a con artist for his mark — plus now you’re condemned to keep up that act forever, lest she Realize.) My last girlfriend found my flaws, the things that annoy even me about me, amusing. When you break up with someone, you don’t just lose them, but a version of yourself. You don’t even get to know what your children will remember you for; it probably won’t be what you thought were the important moments. […]

As The Velveteen Rabbit teaches, we don’t become fully real except in other people’s eyes, and in their affections. At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.

[redrola]

[regularlesbian]

come on

[margbarcis]

this is fucked up 

[ripleyandweeds]

something about this bird just unlocked something insane in scientists’ heads

[regularlesbian]

this is unlocking something insane in my head to be fair

[juliamstarr]

9.24.18

Instagram

[jasonincalifornia]

Roads of Zion

Instagram//Society6

[shutyourmoustache]

“My name is Brianna Meeks, and I have an offbeat but clear-headed dream. It has been on my mind since the death of my beloved grandfather in 2007. After thirteen years of wishing, I have the chance to make it come true.

My grandparents were named Arthur and Annie Stone, and they were the children of sharecroppers. They too were sharecroppers until the 1960s, when they were able to purchase their farm outright. They raised three daughters there, including my mama.

When Papa died, Nanny could not run the farm on her own, and my mom and her sisters made the choice to sell it. I was 17 at the time, and the longing for that farmhouse with the dark green shutters has stayed on my shoulders all these years since.

Simply put: I am going to try to buy it back. Miraculously, the current owner is looking to sell it.

This is the one chance I’ll ever have to do this.

For me, the story begins in 1995, the first of countless times I remember piling in the car with my siblings and parents, driving the three and a half hours from Atlanta, GA, to Nanny and Papa’s house in Petersburg, TN. This farmhouse was where we spent countless happy Thanksgivings, Christmases, and summer holidays.

But for Arthur and Annie stone, the story starts 150 years before that. To the period just after the American Civil War called Reconstruction.

Quick history lesson if you need one: Agriculture was the economic force of the Southern United States, and the enslavement of people descended from stolen Africans kept the economy afloat. After the enslaved became freedmen, General Sherman proposed that the land seized from former Confederates should be divided among the freedmen, as repayment for their treatment.

This is commonly referred to as Forty Acres and a Mule, and it was a promise that wasn’t kept. Instead, the land was returned to the former Confederates who previously owned it.

The land needed to be worked. And there was an entire population -- only recently considered citizens in their own right -- who needed work and food and security. Enter: sharecropping.

Sharecropping was an exploitative model. It worked like this: a tenant would live on and work a portion of a landowner’s plantation, farm, or land. In exchange, that tenant kept a (usually small) portion of the crop come harvest time. Sharecroppers had very little agency. They didn’t own their own equipment, they were forced to accept the prices the landowners were willing to pay, and if they stuck up for themselves they risked their livelihood and family home.

In the last years of her life, Nanny told me that she had taken to being pen pals with the son of the landowner she sharecropped for. He apologized for the ways he and his family had wronged my grandparents. It is no small feat that these people -- my people -- born not even 60 years after the dissolution of slavery, broke the mold of their families and somehow overcame admitted wrongdoing. That feels like another miracle.

If all I ever accomplished in my life was buying back my grandparents’ farm and restoring it to something they would be proud of, that would be enough. I want to live a life where my siblings and our children can go back there for holidays. I want my mama to spend more Thanksgivings or Christmases there in her life.

So I am asking you to please help me get my ancestral home back. I would appreciate anything you can contribute. And if you are not in a position to donate, all I ask is that you share the link to this campaign with everyone you can think of.

Nanny and Papa spent their entire lives in the picturesque state of Tennessee; living through the roaring twenties, the great depression, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and so much more.

Their lives make up the history of that land. It’s now on me to determine the future of it.”

HELP BRIANNA MEEKS BUY BACK AND RENOVATE HER ANCESTRAL FARM!!!

[sistertaxon]

[luisonte]

Boys will be boys

[coherently-screaming]

Only acceptable use of the phrase

[maghrabiyya]

SCIENCE

[anemonequeen-moved]

me and the boys discovering capacitance

[demiiwhiffin]

everything is a learnable skill

[sadiepickles]

The biggest scam your brain is telling you is that everybody else is human and allowed to make mistakes but that you yourself have to be perfect and flawless to deserve their company

[socio-logic]

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

[crazy-pages]

Here, have a study (x) showing that mothers underestimate their daughter’s physical capacity from as young as 11 months old (though in reality it’s identical to that of their son’s at the same age). And if you think that parents acting on those expectations won’t alter their children’s development, then I have a sloped bridge to sell you.

[waandering]

[lustik]

The Braiding the Knoll - Angela Eastman.

Lustik:  twitter | pinterest | etsy

[driedsquidfairy]

[protoslacker]

““The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear’s phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn’t even make sense. “Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food.” Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity’s foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing.”

—

Siobhan Leddy in The Outline. We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin

Her novels imagine other worlds, but her theory of fiction can help us better live in this one.

There’s a link to a PDF of Le Guin’s essay here.

[spillywolf-deactivated20190920]

If courage isn’t the absence of fear but doing the right thing regardless of it, maybe confidence isn’t the absence of insecurity but knowing you have real worth despite it

[oncemylove-deactivated20180625]

this is beautiful

[randomslasher]

By this same token, maybe goodness isn’t the absence of bad thoughts or impulses, but the conscious choice to behave according to your moral ideals in spite of them. 

[huariqueje]

Side View D   -   Richard Bosman, 2016

American,b.1944-

Monoprint hand painted, 21.75 x 29.75 in.