MJ

. TX | AR 25. Living the dream. Long live the Queen.

[zohbugg]

So last night was my first welding class and the second i walked through the door the teacher said “hey you’re zoe right” and I started to panic because how does the teacher immediately know who I am fuck did I have this teacher before how come i don’t recognize him fuck fuck i’m a terrible person

turns out i’m just the youngest person in the class by about 30 years so the deduction wasn’t that hard

anyways, apparently people keep taking the welding class over and over again and the wait list is like 100 people long and so it was by some act of providence of pure dumb luck that I managed to get a spot. This also means I was the only person there who hadn’t welded before.

I’m stationed at a big center table where the teacher can keep an eye on me, and everyone else is in booths on the surrounding walls each making their own projects. And these are impressive looking projects. One guy is making a side table, a woman is making a giant metal rocking chair, and another guy was making a wind chime out of old compressed air canisters. 

The elderly gentlemen in the booth right behind me introduces himself to me as Jim and asks me if this is my first time and I say yeah and he smiles at me and tells me I’m gonna love it and how this class is so fun.

Immediately Jim becomes my new best friend. He comes over whenever I stop to take a break and asks how I’m doing and even helps me take the welding mask off when I couldn’t figure out how to do it myself. 

at one point i see Jim and another old guy talking to the teacher and i catch the old guy pointing at me. now being pointed at is usually never a good thing. the teacher has had me welding edges of scrap metal together so I can get a feel for the equipment. The teacher comes to check on me and I jokingly as him if those seasoned guys were making fun of me. 

Turns out I’m super good at welding and the old guy didn’t believe it was my first time welding ever and Jim was trying to convince him I was a newbie. :D

So for the entire 3 hour long class, like 15 middle aged and elderly people would periodically come by my table and check in with me, making sure I’m having fun and asking me questions about my life, and things like, do you know where the drinking fountain is, making sure I’m taking breaks, looking out for me and that kind of thing, all while being completely kind and supporting and complimenting me on my welding skills. 

and that’s how a community center welding class gave me 15 new grandparents. i love them all and this class is going to be amazing

[zohbugg]

important addition 3 years later because I forgot:

the other elderly gentleman’s name is Gino and spoke with a thick Italian accent and took to calling me Bella for the rest of the semester. Jim made sure to always take the booth closest to me. 

Another guy in the class named Mike did salvage diving as a hobby and always showed me pictures of the cool stuff he’d found. He also made very cool sculptures out of spoons, forks and knives. I at one point made an offhand joke that I was moving soon, and was jealous that Mike had all this cutlery to spare to make sculptures out of. (I was going to be moving in with my boyfriend and neither of us really had a lot of kitchenware) The next class he brought in an entire cutlery set insisting that he was trying to clean out his house because he had so many and wouldn’t take no for an answer. We still have them to this day :)

They had cupcakes waiting for me on my birthday and on the last day they had framed picture of me with my final project because “it’s important to celebrate your successes” and encouraged me to give it to my mom (which of course I did, along with my cattail sculpture)

long story short I would die for each and every one of them and there’s a group email chain that we all still keep in touch with and as of a few months ago it was Gino’s 85th birthday. 

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i love it when you accidentally meet eyes with a stranger in public and you flash a quick polite smile and they look at you like they wish you were dead in a ditch

[deadmomjokes]

I’ve seen this several times on my dash and always with southerners being confused in the tags why the rest of the US is like this, and as a southerner, I have to say, SAME. Like, there’s plenty to hate about the south, don’t get me wrong, but at least in general we have public courtesy down to a science. I ordered at a Sonic out West once and the guy specifically had someone take over his headset so he could come out and shake my hand because he was from Tennessee and it was the first time since he moved West that he heard anyone say “Yes sir.” And it’s just…. Automatic for me? And this polite smile thing, people will jump and glare and I’m just trying to be friendly not awkward? What else is a socially anxious southern child to do upon accidentally making eye contact? Look down and hurry away? Isn’t that rude??? Someone explain why is smiling met with such anger I am confused and afraid.

[sea-anon]

Exactly!! When I moved to Missouri I was baffled at how rude everyone is! Like I saw someone I knew at Walmart and stopped to chat and they didn’t even stop! They just went ‘hi’ and moved on. Like????

And when I moved here I made cookies for the neighborhood, cuz that’s what you do and the first place I went they said “we don’t eat things with sugar” and shut the door.

Like why do y’all hate everyone so much?

[krystal-prisms]

I’m Canadian and am also confused

[sea-anon]

Well yeah everyone knows Canadians are the friendliest people in the world

[deanismymom]

I’m from Indiana and I’m pretty sure if you don’t talk to someone you know In Wal-Mart for at least 5 minutes you go to jail

[sea-anon]

No but that would still be rude in kentucky

You are expected to talk for at least 15 minutes, say goodbye (like, a “take care y’all, tell me how that knee is doin”) and then you talk for another ten minutes, move a little further apart and say goodbye again (“well I better get going tell your nana I said hi”) and then you talk for a while and say goodbye one more time (“I’ll see y’all at church on Sunday/school/Jo-mart/Nana’s funeral”) and move on to the next person

And don’t even get me started on food etiquette

[weaselle]

It’s not a south v. west thing, it’s a city thing. That’s why New Yorkers are the purest version of this. And it’s why I get both sides. I grew up in a small town in Northern California, and it was proud of all the small town things – “you can leave your door unlocked” and all that. I got a job for a while as a bank teller, and this coworker of mine had moved there from New York. I liked him (I tend to get along with folks) but a lot of people thought he was rude. “short” “impatient” even “brusk” were some descriptions of him, not just from our coworkers, but from the bank customers too. They complained because he always rushed them, never wanted to make small talk, etc. One day I was working next to him, and I heard him verbally pushing yet another customer along, just racing him through the transaction against his will, and I thought, I’m gonna say something to him about it. As soon as the customer left though, before I could say anything, my coworker goes “damn I hate people like that, get to  the front of the line and want to tell me their whole life story. So RUDE!” So I say something like, how is he the one that was rude to you? And goes, like he can’t believe how stupid I’m being, “ not to me, to all those people in line behind him that want to finish up here and get on with the rest of their day! You’re at the bank, you know why you’re here, you step up, you do a polite greeting and get the fuck down to business. Everybody has shit to do, and they can’t do it until you shut up about your life story that zero people drove down here to listen to. It’s so selfish! I can’t stand people like that”   Since then, I’ve lived in San Francisco, and L.A., and Montgomery Alabama, and Germany and Portland and Oakland and a bunch of little ass towns like Suisun Ca, and Kenwood and all kinds of places, Santa Cruz and Rohnert Park. And I’ve thought about the thing that guy started me noticing. It’s true. The closer in to a city (and the larger the city) the more the concept of polite changes from “how you are effecting the person you are communicating with” to “how you are effecting the people packed in around you” In Oakland there are like, zero grocery stores (Oakland is literally documented as a “food desert”) and so the best grocery store in Berkeley is also a favorite grocery store of Oakland residents and it is… full. You’ll spend a full 30 minutes in the snake of cars circling around in the parking lot waiting for somebody to finish shopping and leave so a parking spot opens up. Once inside, it’s more of the same. Shopping carts are cart-front to ass cheek. You literally can’t reach onto a shelf for a box of cereal without waiting for somebody to give you a break in traffic. Sometimes you get stuck standing in a single spot for several minutes, boxed in on all sides.  I’ve only been twice, and I swear to all holy gods that if I saw two people trying to catch up on chit chat while we all tried to maneuver around them, I would been reaching for my murdering stick. It’s called skype motherfuckers, go the fuck home and talk to each other, jfc, the rest of us are trying to make a deadline for some other shit we gotta get done today. Now, going back home, to small town Nor Cal, yeah, I don’t want to be rude, I’m gonna stop and say hi, I’m gonna ask about your family, I’m gonna rack my brain and remember that you had a sick cat or a trip you were trying to take or an interest in boats, and I’m gonna ask about that shit, fuck yeah tell me about how the tomatoes are coming in this year, I hear the birds are worse than ever. Anyway, city folk ain’t rude, they just polite different; suitable for city life.

[juniperpomegranate]

This is such a great explanation, and really important.

[cloacacarnage]

i know its the mets, but this is the coolest shit i’ve ever seen a human being do

[futureblackwakandan-deactivated]

Wtf????

[theryanproject]

Smoove with it too 

[meqabitch-deactivated20200901]

This is the kind of shit you see in anime that shows that a certain character is stronger than other characters. 

[bankuei]

“Pathetic.  You can’t even hold the bat you dare step to the plate? Have you no respect for the sport?”

[pardonmewhileipanic]

reminds me of this gif

[sueanoi]

[batter-sempai]

Baseball players are to be feared

[mydadisindianajones]

Person: Wow, why did you get all dressed up just to go to the grocery store?

Me: 

[onlyjonasrares]

[meekalah]

These babies either wore the same outfits for every show back then, OR this is from a Little Rock show May of 2007.

[sc4pp]

me giving affection: oh man i really hope im not like overstepping my boundaries here. what if i make them uncomfortable? do they feel obligated to say thank you? am i going too far and scaring them? what if i’m annoying?

me receiving affection: AAAAAAAAA!!!!! AAAAAAA!A!!!!!!!AAAAAAAAAAAA

[hilarioushumorfromouterspace]

[thatsbelievable]

[torgan]

going to begin using #3 AT ONCE

[forevernoon-deactivated20181218]

This is really nice work……..                                                                                via Art LOVER

[thathealeygirl]

THAT’S how you make lace??

[aerylon]

And THIS is why lace was a worn primarily by royalty and aristocracy for so many centuries..  It was expensive and time-consuming to produce.  Wearing it, and wearing LOTS of it was a blatant show of wealth and excessive consumption.  

Mechanically-produced lace wasn’t really a thing until well into the 20th century, but there remains a wide gap between the quality of  mass-produced and hand crafted

[beachgirlnikita]

In general textile arts are highly underated considering the amount of skill and time needed to execute pretty much anything.

[johnthestitcher]

I am always amazed by the  people that do this and somehow keep all those threads from tangling!

[polyhedralprincess]

Going forward Im gonna add "How did your company take care of people during the corona virus?" To my questions I ask interviewers. Cause I can count friends of mine who were fired with no pay on two hands and this shits fucked up.

[nicolemakes]

That is an excellent question to ask!

[openshowers]

[mexicanjesuschrist-deactivated2]

This is the gay and sexier version of that “wow” vine

[alexander]

im ?

[majortvjunkie]

blessed video

[myhockeyworld87]

I’m not sure how I’m supposed to see this and not reblog it!

[northisnotup]

Thats just how hockey players are

[meekalah]

Just... what....

[fencehopping]

[everythingfox]

“I am fierce!”

(via)

[casual-isms]

Unlearning How White People Ask Personal Questions

http://www.samefacts.com/2014/05/culture-and-civil-society/unlearning-how-white-people-ask-personal-questions/

[beautytruthandstrangeness]

Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.

[ziyalofhaiti]

****new link****

by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014           

When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.

He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.

At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.

For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.

My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).

Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.

Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.

Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.

From the perspective of ameliorating all the racial pain in the world, this change in my behavior is a grain of sand in the Sahara. But I pass this experience along nonetheless, for two reasons. First, very generally, if any of us human beings can easily engage in small kindnesses, we should. Second, specific to race, if those of us who have more power can learn to refrain from using it to harm people in any way – major or minor — we should do that too.

[thenatsdorf]

2019 Fashion year in review. (via @rover_thecat)

[pricklylegs-deactivated20250727]

That mouse necklace! 

[ottermatopoeia]

[star-anise]

That is a cat with a LOT of affection for the person holding the camera

[prideprejudce]

buckle up yall because here’s another story from the infamous wedding shaming group

[sandersstudies]

I love genuinely innocent “boys will be boys.” Just saw a guy come out of a frat house to poke a pair of jeans they’d left outside - they were frozen solid, and as soon as he confirmed that, like twenty more boys came rushing out of the house going “YOOOOOOOOOO”

[rebelminds]

I heard grunting outside my window the other night and there were four boys struggling to push this giant snowball (like 7 foot diameter) down the sidewalk.

[snarling-through-our-smiles]

I once lost my keys at a frat house.

My drunk ass had actually walked home without them, pounded on my apartment door, gotten let in by my rightfully-disgruntled roommate, and proceeded to pass out on the couch.  Apparently I puked in the toilet before passing out.  I do not remember this part.

The next morning, I schlepped back to the frat house.  I stood there, right in front of the front door.  This was a novel experience for me.  I’d never been at a frat house in broad daylight before.

A boy, presumably, of the house, asked me what I was doing. 

“I lost my keys in here last night,” I called back.  “I was seeing if I could go in and look for them?”

He opened the door and gestured for me to come in.

“Go wherever you want.”

I’d never seen a frat house post-party before.  Wandering up the stairs and through the halls, I was surrounded by hungover and still-drunk frat boys stumbling around in their socks and sandals and gym shorts, seeking out food and showers like moths to a porch light.  A few of them threw puzzled glances my way.  I’m sure they thought I was some post-bacchanalia hallucination.

I entered one room where a boy was drunkenly watching some Old Yeller-esque movie on a tiny TV in the corner of his room from his bed.

“Do you like dog movies?” he asked, voice all mumbly from grogginess and also from the fact that his face was squished against his pillow and half-buried by his blanket.

I told him I did.

He mumbled again, pleased, and asked what I was doing.  I told him I was looking for my keys.

“Sorry, I haven’t seen any keys around here.”

I didn’t doubt him.

Twenty minutes had passed.  I’d searched just about every bedroom and nuclear-waste-dump-site of a bathroom in that house.  I’d given up on ever finding my keys and was prepared to beg my roommates’ forgiveness and get a new set copied.

As I stood there in the hallway, silently bewailing my predicament, a particularly-burly frat boy approached me.

“You need help with something?”

“I lost my keys here last night and I can’t find them, I’ve looked everywhere.”

“What do they look like?  I’ll put it into the group chat.”  He was already pulling out his phone.

No one ever checks a group chat, I thought, but what the hell.  It was worth a shot.  “Um, it’s just a ring of keys.  The keychain is a pink plastic cat, though, like yea big.  Like bright pink, you can’t miss it.”

He nodded, presumably typing this description faithfully into the group chat.

“Alright, I sent the message out.  Good luck.”

And with that, he turned and left.

A few moments later, I heard a distant thundering.  It was coming from upstairs, and it was getting louder and louder.  One assumes that how I felt in that moment was how Simba felt seeing the wildebeest stampede through the ravine as a horde of large young men all thundered down the stairs, making a beeling for me.

“Someone tell the girl!” One of them shouted, faceless in the mob.  “Girl!  Hey, GIRL!!!  We found your keys, girl!!!”

They circled around me.  I hadn’t felt that small since I was maybe eleven years old.  One of them split himself off from the crowd.

“Are these -” he pulled out a ring of keys from his pocket, “your keys?”

And lo, there was the distinctive bright millennial pink cat keychain dangling off the ring.

“Yes,” I whispered.  “Oh my god, yes.”

“EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!”

The cheer went up.

Turns out he found them in the bathroom upstairs.  I thanked them again profusely.  There was a scattered round of “no problems” and then, just as suddenly as they descended, they all dispersed, like ships in the night.

[gatorfisch]

THIS is boys will be boys

[suddenlysteven]

on a camp with teenage boys recently and as i was one of the camp leaders, it was part of my duties to help wake said boys in the morning (at 6am or a similar ungodly hour).

we (the camp leaders) found the most efficient way to do so was to blast music from a tinny little speaker one of us owned.

so before the sun itself has risen, we’re walking down a corridor with 8+ rooms filled with 6 or more boys in each, blasting the one and only Let It Go from Frozen, hoping to wake a few students, preparing for hateful commentary.

instead, what we got was the thumps and shouts of boys excitedly leaping from bunk beds, stuffing on shirts and bursting into the corridor to scream the lyrics to Let It Go.

every.single.boy.did this.

as soon as the song finished, they acted like it never happened and went back to their rooms to get dressed.