what

i confess a lot mostly and do whatever i want

[nevver]

Wait till your otter gets home, Simon Lee

[tetsuo-shiba]

今日の瞳を忘れない

[neuters]

i need both of these now

[lesbianmichelmishina]

the reason these exist (iirc) is because peppa pig is banned in china for “promoting gangster attitudes”: peppa was popular (for whatever reason) with “shehuiren” (anti-establishment internet users), who made a lot of memes involving peppa and even got tattoos of her because it’s funny. the result of banning peppa is that shehuiren-types liked peppa even more afterwards, and now she’s a bit of a counterculture symbol in china. hence these shirts.

[ink-pedia]

Jaclyn Réhe

[amidstsilence]

| Urban Garden |

🌵Shop

[nrthuldraa]

[househunting]

$1950 per month/ 2br - 750ft2

Denver, CO

[satancheerleader]

@hetaumamusic that skull wallpaper though in the bathroom can i just say BILLIE HOUSE

[satancheerleader]

i’m a shitty writer

being told my words are so easy to understand, simplistic really.

you, like, get straight to the point.

how do i improve when i’m surrounded by lackluster compliments. lifting up my ego, whereas i know inside just how awful i really fucking am. my unknown future circulating around my decisions. everything i do will affect me negatively somehow.

love brought bugs.

school brought debt.

steps i make toward bettering myself equals into just as much misery. sometimes i hope that i can break away from this destructive and delusional cycle. everything feels so predictable? yet it is all so sudden in the outcome. everyfuckingtime i have the rug pulled out from beneath me, landing me flat on my ass. lying there, accepting the feet across my miserable goddamn face.

constantly looking backwards, believing that it was easier then. you’re just going through a bad time, it will get better. they keep telling me that, as if those words contain any weight in this catastrophic universe.

secretly, though, i love it.

i love the feeling of my gut being punched. i long for the constant cravings of those that i am not allowed to desire. my need to destroy something as addicting as that purple shit i snorted in april.

that purple shit was good shit. it made walking through the streets on 14th and c, barefoot in my ex-boyfriends superman shorts, with some hippie dude i met off tinder, seem like the greatest time of my life.

(okay, so i didn’t just meet him, i had a crush on him all through high school, and he completely ignored me until i got tits and gained confidence. probably the worst lay of my life. minus marine boy version 2.)

romanticization for those who throw my love in the garbage is kiiiiiinda a hobby of mine. i mean, can you count 32 cocks that you’ve sucked AND regretted? i have that in the bag, a bag of dicks if you will. so many hard dicks kevin smith will be making misogynistic jokes about it in his first classic. (hahahahaha, isn’t it FUNNY that she’s a SLUT? we won’t address this again except in a humorous fashion shaming her sexual freedom, but HAHAHa 37 dicks. classic.)

enjoyment for media isn’t the same anymore, i mostly rewatch shows i know have a good sense of humor that i’ve seen a million times. with male characters that have redeemable, realistic qualities. (except aziz, man fuck aziz, why did you have to ruin parks&rec with your awful actions you goddamn assaulter.)

brooklyn 99 makes a lot of brushing teeth jokes. i need to be better about that, my gums bleed. i probably need to see a dentist and have expensive work done, but i can still chew, the toothaches aren’t that bad, and i’m poor so i’ll carry on.

sitting in clothes that compliment my body helps to get myself out of the funk i push myself into. make-up is hardly part of my routine anymore, due to the fast food grill i bend over everyday. lipstick is an even less enjoyed endeavour, due to the chore of reapplication. nyx got my back, though, they tend to be pretty consistent.

my new partner is really consistent too, and he’s something that is hard to write about because i really do fail to encapture the love, acceptance, and patience he shares with me. life is pretty shitty, but this little light that understands the facets of my personality is the redeeming element.

just know if you don’t want to stay with me forever, that is okay, i love you and respect anything you want. i just always want you happy.

when his sister, aka my best friend since 15, told me that my relationship with her brother didn’t  have  to be permanent and her love with still remain if such break-up were to occur.

this shit made me want to stay.

for the first time i have a choice of who i am with. for the majority of my youth i was trapped into the idea that who you choose is the one you have chosen. without this level of permanent commitment you’re practically fucking worthless. you’re just a natural whore who loves the feeling of dick so much (sorry i’m on my period and thinking about fucking every second so just deal with the frequent cock references, man penises are rad, in my mouth is even better) that she can’t even find a permanent dick to stick to.

being told that my decisions aren’t going to permanently affect my life helps ease my need to die a lot. knowing that it is okAY for stuff to change, it is okAY to be a different person in two, five, and ten years. the ability to form and morph into the inevitable person i will be at my last breath is comforting. having a support system that recognized, and is okAY with working within that dynamic is even more comforting.

this year has been draining, agonizing, exhausting, ridiculous, and liberating. the understanding of my own mental make-up, and the type of work i have to put into it is a necessary aspect of my evolution. looking back on the writing of my past, preserved temporarily in the vast imaginary network of GoogleDocs, is a path outlining the distance i have traveled in just a short amount of time.

oh, also, i’m growing my hair back out.

*

[thechanelmuse]

How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope

The stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

Not that the raw material for the racist watermelon trope didn’t exist before emancipation. In the early modern European imagination, the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant. The watermelon, noted a British officer stationed in Egypt in 1801, was “a poor Arab’s feast,” a meager substitute for a proper meal. In the port city of Rosetta he saw the locals eating watermelons “ravenously … as if afraid the passer-by was going to snatch them away,” and watermelon rinds littered the streets. There, the fruit symbolized many of the same qualities as it would in post-emancipation America: uncleanliness, because eating watermelon is so messy. Laziness, because growing watermelons is so easy, and it’s hard to eat watermelon and keep working—it’s a fruit you have to sit down and eat. Childishness, because watermelons are sweet, colorful, and devoid of much nutritional value. And unwanted public presence, because it’s hard to eat a watermelon by yourself.  These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves.

This may be surprising given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans’ lives. Slave owners often let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. The slave Israel Campbell would slip a watermelon into the bottom of his cotton basket when he fell short of his daily quota, and then retrieve the melon at the end of the day and eat it. Campbell taught the trick to another slave who was often whipped for not reaching his quota, and soon the trick was widespread. When the year’s cotton fell a few bales short of what the master had figured, it simply remained “a mystery.”

But Southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. Slaves were usually careful to enjoy watermelon according to the code of behavior established by whites. When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

Emancipation, of course, destroyed that relationship. Black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons during slavery, but now when they did so it was a threat to the racial order. To whites, it seemed now as if blacks were flaunting their newfound freedom, living off their own land, selling watermelons in the market, and—worst of all—enjoying watermelon together in the public square. One white family in Houston was devastated when their nanny Clara left their household shortly after her emancipation in 1865. Henry Evans, a young white boy to whom Clara had likely been a second mother, cried for days after she left. But when he bumped into her on the street one day, he rejected her attempt to make peace. When Clara offered him some watermelon, Henry told her that “he would not eat what free negroes ate.”

Newspapers amplified this association between the watermelon and the free black person. In 1869, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published perhaps the first caricature of blacks reveling in watermelon. The adjoining article explained, “The Southern negro in no particular more palpably exhibits his epicurean tastes than in his excessive fondness for watermelons. The juvenile freedman is especially intense in his partiality for that refreshing fruit.”

Two years later, a Georgia newspaper reported that a black man had been arrested for poisoning a watermelon with the intent of killing a neighbor. The story was headlined “Negro Kuklux” and equated black-on-black violence with the Ku Klux Klan, asking facetiously whether the Radical Republican congressional subcommittee investigating the Klan would investigate this freedman’s actions. The article began with a scornful depiction of the man on his way to the courthouse: “On Sabbath afternoon we encountered a strapping 15th Amendment bearing an enormous watermelon in his arms en route for the Court-house.” It was as if the freedman’s worst crime was not attempted murder but walking around in public with that ridiculous fruit.

The primary message of the watermelon stereotype was that black people were not ready for freedom. During the 1880 election season, Democrats accused the South Carolina state legislature, which had been majority-black during Reconstruction, of having wasted taxpayers’ money on watermelons for their own refreshment; this fiction even found its way into history textbooks. D. W. Griffith’s white-supremacist epic film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, included a watermelon feast in its depiction of emancipation, as corrupt northern whites encouraged the former slaves to stop working and enjoy some watermelon instead. In these racist fictions, blacks were no more deserving of freedom than were children.

Read more

During his interview with Hot 97, director Ryan Coogler touched on the stereotype of Black people in America eating watermelon and discovering it’s importance in South Africa while making the movie, Black Panther:

“When I was in the Kingdom of Lesotho [a country surrounded by South Africa], I took a little drive up a mountain and a woman was handing out slices of watermelon to the shepherds. The shepherds would take them, wrap them up, and treat them like they were gold or diamonds or something. I was like, ‘What is up with y’all and the watermelon?’ She was like, ‘Oh man! This is the most important food out here. It’s the only food you can eat that’ll fill your stomach up, and give you the hydration and nutrients when you’re out here in the sun.’ And I was like, ‘Yooo, where I’m from, they make fun of us for eating that to the point that we don’t even want to eat it in front of people.’ [She couldn’t understand it.] She was like, ‘Why wouldn’t you want to eat something that’s so important to your culture? How can somebody tell you not to do that?’” 

[crunchbuttsteak]

Capital classes: I wonder why “eat the rich” and guillotine jokes are so popular among millennials?

Also Capitalists:

[despazito]

[blacktwittercomedy]

[gutsrighteye]

stop rebooting shit and hire actually talented screenwriters, directors, photographers, and artists for original ideas. no one wants to see the same shit recycled over and over again. enough romanticizing the past, fuck nostalgia. pay people to make new and interesting shit, damn. what are these people afraid of? actually entertaining people?

[okayysophia]

Thank you!!!!!!

[satancheerleader]

don’t look at me ever or try to be anything but a passive college student before noon Monday through Friday thanks

[satancheerleader]

I hate theater kids more than anything else. My us cinema class I should feel like I fit in and normal but N O P E. I feel like an annoying outsider. Usually this feeling is easily subsideable but today I am exhausted bc of two hours of sleep and my feelings are 100x exemplified

[queers-are-welcome-here]

[satancheerleader]

.

[thebootydiaries]

me: i love this band

someone 30-40 years older than me: they’ve been around for awhile you just getting into them?

me: why didn’t you prevent vietnam?