The Stories We Forgot

So here I am, attacking my thoughts, as Ms. Alice Walker put, with a scalpel. I wonder if this is going to hurt at all?

[shardeva]

Letter to a 30 Year Old Me

Dear 30 Year Old Me,

I wonder who you are, and what you are doing. Did you achieve your dream of being a teacher? Or did you end up publishing that book you always wanted to write?

I wonder if you're happy. If not happy, are you at least satisfied with the way your life is going?

I hope it's true what they say. That each decade of one's life is infinitely times better than the previous one. If anything, I just want it to be better than what it is now.

I hope you are settled. I hope that you have the courage to pick up everything up and leave when you feel something is not right. I hope you've developed the voice you always wanted to have. 

I always wanted you to speak from the heart and as loud as possible. That's something I can't really do right now. But I want you to be able to.

[shardeva]

Do you ever feel like you're just going through the motions? Somewhere down the line of getting older, I've lost all interest in my life. When did it get to be enough that I wake up every morning just to go to work? That I go home from the office every evening just to have a break from work? Most days I don't have enough energy to do anything except eat and maybe watch an episode of a sitcom that I used to find funny. Nowadays I rarely find anything funny. But I find the act of doing so comforting. Familiar. Then I close my eyes for the night and repeat the same cycle the next day.

I've let relationships get away from me. Even when I'm with friends I still find myself strangely watching myself try to interact like an interested participant. I've become adept at knowing which gaps in the conversation to nod my head, offer a "you're right" or a noncommittal "hmm". My advice to friends feels like a generic ripoff of something I heard Oprah say, only more poorly delivered.

[supermoviemaniac]

Meet the MCU's Ms Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, played by Iman Vellani!

I think the recent Avengers videogame has helped pushed the character into the limelight, helping people realise how great the character can be, so let's hope the Disney+ show can mimick the same charm and fun characteristics we saw in the game!

Welcome to the MCU! I'm sure everybody is excited to see you play such an awesome character!

[nprbooks]

Our pals over at the Code Switch blog have been spending the month debating what makes a good pandemic read, and talking to some of their favorite authors. You can find the main episode here – but I wanted to highlight a couple of convos with the authors of some of MY favorite books this year, Talia Hibbert and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. (And if you haven’t read either Take a Hint, Dani Brown or Mexican Gothic, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR???)

– Petra

[therestofyourstory]

Solid advice

[popoponya]

High in the halls of the kings who are gone

Jenny would dance with her ghosts

The ones she had lost and the ones she had found

And the ones who had loved her the most

(если новая песня из ип не про нерданель то я даже не знаю

идеи статуй взяты из прекрасной серии картинок с феанорингами у silmaspens надеюсь меня простят)

[starswaterairdirt]

“On moonlight nights, they danced.”

Fairyland, 1926.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite.

[lord-of-flyting-deactivated2021]

Why Bharatanatyam Is Appropriative

@goawaygora this is for you, because I saw this point on your post & had to elaborate. I’ll keep this short.

Essentially, erotic temple dancing has been around in India for millennia. In ancient India, up until the 20th century, it was known as sadeer attam, and practiced by a hereditary caste of singers and dancers called devadasi. Devadasis were NOT prostitutes. They were generally highly accomplished and quite well regarded. In classical Sanskrit and Tamil dramas, their counterparts were known as nagarvadhus and included people like Amrapali, Madhavati, and Vasantasena.

Devadasis’ decline in status began during the Mughal era, but the British were the ones who kicked it off in earnest. The combination of sensuality and worship in devadasis’ sadeer performances was too much for their tiny Victorian brains to process, and in 1910 they banned temple dancing across India. This threw many traditional dancers into unemployment — and the waiting arms of brothel madams, creating a social issue still rampant in India today. Thanks, गोरे!

Shortly after this ban, a woman named Rukmini Devi came onto the stage, pun intended. Rukmini belonged to a privileged Brahmin family, and had married a white guy named Arundale. She decided that she really liked sadeer, but (1) oops her husband’s people had banned it earlier, and (2) good Brahmin women were not supposed to dance erotically. Rukmini’s solution? She enlisted some of the last few traditional dancers to teach her, completely disrespected their customs and refused to treat them as gurus, and bastardised and sanitised the original moves of sadeer attam into what we know as bharatanatyam today. With the help of her husband and the Theosophist Society of Madras, and without consulting with her actual teachers, she managed to land performances and get her new dance form British Approved™️.

I’m being a bit harsh here. Bharatanatyam isn’t a bad dance form. It’s lovely, takes a lot of skill, and actually empowered quite a few sheltered Brahmin women to learn an interesting skill. It even became part of India’s independence movement. However, it’s important to keep he history of bharatanatyam — and sadeer attam, the dance it killed off — in mind when appreciating it.

[acecroft]

I am a princess. All girls are! Even if they live in tiny old attics, even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young, they’re still princesses - all of us! A LITTLE PRINCESS (1995) dir. Alfonso Cuaron

[shardeva]

Fan Theory: Nora and Iris

Is Don Allen going to be introduced on the show? If so, I think he might be a key factor in the downfall of Iris and Nora's relationship. 

Honestly, I understand why Nora is mad at her mother, but the anger seems like it goes much deeper than her finding out she was being lied to. 

 I think Don and Iris were inseparable as kids, but Don dies in an accident that Nora blames herself for. Queue to Nora finding out that her mom had her powers removed, she probably thinks that she could have saved her brother if it weren't for what Iris did. 

And then on top of that, Iris didn't tell Nora the truth. Someone else did and that same person also may have persuaded/helped her go back to the past. I'm wondering if that person is Reverse-Flash? Someone who got rid of the new Flash so they could wreck havoc in the future? 

 I really want to see the dynamic between future Iris and Nora. I sympathise with Iris. She lost her husband and did the only thing she could think of to prevent her child from having the same fate.

[shardeva]

The Sri Lankan government is going to start compensating victims of the civil war that ended in 2009. I wonder if this is true? Anyway, money does help but it can't really repair a broken heart or bring a family member back from the dead. Nor is it enough to call back the thousands who fled in fear of their lives. I don't know a single Tamil person who hasn't lost a loved one because of this war.

[browngxl]

Brown is beautiful and powerfull ❤ 

[sweetlikecandy]

#relatable

[itsbettyjughead]

Let’s do this!!

[shardeva]

This movie is perfection. 

[noonesaidlifewasfair]

Living with Dad was like living with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One day he was a madman with his hair standing on end and his nostrils flaring threatening to kill me; the next day he had no memory of what transpired the night before, and we carried on like nothing happened.

Mary Kate DeCraene author of “No One Said Life Was Fair” a poignant and humorous memoir about growing up in an alcoholic family.

Available in paperback and Kindle on www.amazon.com

(via noonesaidlifewasfair)

I feel this deep down in my soul. It’s a constant recurring behaviour in my family. Sometimes I don’t want to get out of bed. There are some days I get anxiety so powerful I can’t even look at my dad. And then there are days where everything is normal. But I’ll never call him my hero again. 

It’s not even like I can talk about what I’m going through with my friends. If I only tell them the bad, then they’ll think my dad is a terrible human. But if I tell them the good, then it’ll feel like I’m lying about all the terrible things that have happened. Nothing I do or say could ever accurately describe what my father has become. No one can fully see the what I’ve been going through. Not unless they’ve gone through it themselves. 

The worst part of this all is the guilt. My guilt. I sometimes let myself believe that if I were somehow better, then he would be better. But that’s a misconception and it’s taken me a long time to realize that I, the person I am right now, even at my worst do not deserve this kind of abuse.

There are times I snap and try to fight back. But then I wake up the next day feeling like a terrible person. I always think “Why did I say that? It’s not really him. It’s the alcohol. He would never do that when he’s normal.”

But when normal happens so rarely nowadays, I sit back and wonder if this is now my new normal and I’ve just been holding on to a hope for something that’s never going to come. 

[daisyjazzridley]

Loving Vincent (2017) dir. Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

[chibijinebra]