Mostly Bored, Never Boring

Queer, Halachically Observant, Texan, Jewish Feminist. Historiography, Middle Eastern Politics, Puppies, Angst, Sex, Assorted Other Minutely Important Things. steersqueersandhalacha.tumblr.com That's the Conversion Blog.

[yoursummerdreamz]

[freedomss0n]

[niqabisinparis]

friend: why are men like this 

me: *pulls PDFs out of nowhere* you see when the agricultural revolution started 

[lvnnsi]

[purplebuddhaproject]

[noc10-moved]

*parts a bead curtain as i enter the room, carrying a glass of lemonade* 

hey….

nothing you ever read, watch, or participate in will be ideologically pure and without its problems. your quest to consume the most unproblematic material will be, in the end, fruitless. your enjoyment of anything will be sapped away, leaving you a husk starved for media.

 it is okay to enjoy things that have problems to them, so long as you do it critically and with an open mind, and take care to consider others.

*leaves the way i came*

[progressivejudaism]

[officialinternet]

[mugicha1]

summer looks  ☀️

[mugicha1]

this post is ruining my life

[dropneurons]

[fox-teeth]

Magical Art Therapy ● Sigils for Mental Health

(series)

[jkottke]

Unlikely simultaneous historical events

A poster on Reddit asks: What are two events that took place in the same time in history but don’t seem like they would have?

[quantumblog]

Spain was still a fascist dictatorship when Microsoft was founded.

There were no classes in calculus in Harvard’s curriculum for the first few years because calculus hadn’t been discovered yet.

Two empires [Roman & Ottoman] spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.

When the pyramids were being built, there were still woolly mammoths.

The last use of the guillotine was in France the same year Star Wars came out.

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded.

[seasonsmayklaine]

Pablo Picasso died the year Pink Floyd released “Dark Side of the Moon” (1973) 

Prisoners began to arrive to Auschwitz a few days after Mc'Donalds was founded. 

Coca-Cola is only 31 years younger than Italy. 

Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II were born in the same year. 

The Ottoman empire still existed the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.

[historyofromanovs]

The first wagon train of the Oregon Trail heads out the same year the fax machine is invented.

Nintendo was founded at the same time Jack the Ripper was on the loose.

We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase.

Oreos were invented the same year the Titanic sank.

The Mongols fought the Crusaders and the Samurais at the same time.

Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landings than she did to the building of the Pyramids of Giza.

[it-happened-one-night]

I cut up my credit card and turned it into wall art. Probably the best long term thing that I couldn’t chosen to do as a new years resolution, but in the short term it’s annoying as hell. AMEX is freaking out about me not paying them back in full immediately, and I woke up this morning to find out that USAA had given me an overdraft fee I didn’t earn, and my Cox bill that should have gone through in January never went through. 

[it-happened-one-night]

Dear Self;

Once you finish this lesson plan about light and color, you have permission to get super stoned. 

Love,

Myself

[lexxercise]

Scavenger //

I’ve seen Star Wars twice now and I still don’t think I can put into words how much Rey means to me.

// Available as a print.

[beeishappy]

Stay safe this holiday season.

[judedoyle]

Likable

My affection for Hillary Clinton is hard to explain. It wins no fights and earns you no friends to admit it: Actual warmth, even protectiveness, toward this impossible, frustrating, contradictory, polarizing, disappointing woman. My finding Hillary intensely “likable” is weird, and I admit it. It doesn’t signify universal approval of her decisions. I can and do disagree with Hillary Clinton, regularly and strongly. But some part of me also hopes that Hillary Clinton is having a nice day. 

I’ve come to believe that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act. I spent much of this year working on a long project on how women are demonized in the media. Hillary Clinton was a fairly large part of that story – she had to be; if you want to talk “women that people hate,” she’s kind of unavoidable – and I spent a while sorting through Clintoniana, dating back to the early ‘90s, to find nasty things people had said about her, or common narratives about her personality. It wasn’t pretty – the worst stuff for Hillary was way worse than I’d expected, and there was way more of it than I expected to find – but it was also illuminating, in some key ways. I got a better sense of the pressures that she has to live with, and how they’ve informed her decisions.

I also realized that, unless you really take a look at those pressures, the narrative around Hillary Clinton’s “likability” is doomed to be inaccurate, in some way. She might even be very easy to dislike, if you weren’t looking at those narratives, or if you underestimated their severity. But, in my experience, trying to parse Hillary Clinton without also parsing Hillary-Hate is like trying to drink water without touching the glass. As long as you refuse to deal with the container, the actual substance tends to stay permanently out of reach. 

Keep reading