My whole life adults have called me ‘Miss <my name>’. My parents, teachers, former bosses, and more, all continuing to do it despite me repeatedly asking and pleading with them not too. My band director in high school did this DAILY, in person, over the loud speaker, in assemblies, it didn’t matter. He still did it. It always felt overly sexual and gross all with a sprinkle of belittling and I hated it. I know so many people with my name and not once have I ever thought of calling them ‘Miss <name>’. It just feels and sounds so gross. I hate it and the holidays is when the people in my life who ignored those please all resurface and start calling me that again. 😭
being a woman isn’t about the body you were born with or your feelings or your brain it’s about being haunted by this quote from margaret atwood for your entire life
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
A Kansas archaeology professor believes he's found the lost city of Etzanoa, spurring a rethinking of traditional views on the Native Americans' early settlement of the Midwest.
Of all the places to discover a lost city, this pleasing little community seems an unlikely candidate.
There are no vine-covered temples or impenetrable jungles here — just an old-fashioned downtown, a drug store that serves up root beer floats and rambling houses along shady brick lanes.
Yet there’s always been something — something just below the surface.
Locals have long scoured fields and river banks for arrowheads and bits of pottery, amassing huge collections. Then there were those murky tales of a sprawling city on the Great Plains and a chief who drank from a goblet of gold.
A few years ago, Donald Blakeslee, an anthropologist and archaeology professor at Wichita State University, began piecing things together. And what he’s found has spurred a rethinking of traditional views on the early settlement of the Midwest, while potentially filling a major gap in American history.
Using freshly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors more than 400 years ago and an array of high-tech equipment, Blakeslee located what he believes to be the lost city of Etzanoa, home to perhaps 20,000 people between 1450 and 1700.
They lived in thatched, beehive-shaped houses that ran for at least five miles along the bluffs and banks of the Walnut and Arkansas rivers. Blakeslee says the site is the second-largest ancient settlement in the country after Cahokia in Illinois.
On a recent morning, Blakeslee supervised a group of Wichita State students excavating a series of rectangular pits in a local field.
Jeremiah Perkins, 21, brushed dirt from a half-buried black pot.
Others sifted soil over screened boxes, revealing arrowheads, pottery and stone scrapers used to thin buffalo hides.
Blakeslee, 75, became intrigued by Etzanoa after scholars at UC Berkeley retranslated in 2013 the often muddled Spanish accounts of their forays into what is now Kansas. The new versions were more cogent, precise and vivid.
“I thought, ‘Wow, their eyewitness descriptions are so clear it’s like you were there.’ I wanted to see if the archaeology fit their descriptions,” he said. “Every single detail matched this place.”
Kacie Larsen of Wichita State University shakes dirt through a screened box to see what artifacts may emerge. David Kelly / For The Times
Conquistadors are often associated with Mexico, but a thirst for gold drove them into the Midwest as well.
Francisco Vazquez de Coronado came to central Kansas in 1541 chasing stories of a fabulously wealthy nobleman who napped beneath trees festooned with tinkling gold bells. He found no gold, but he did find Native Americans in a collection of settlements he dubbed Quivira.
Today was definitely a bad one. I let the deployment crush me today. I let myself get mad and worked up about his unavailability. I went through our call log (mistake) and found he had only called me once out of the 20 days he’s been gone so far and that our longest conversation only lasted 17mins. I got so mad about it all. I didn’t take the fact that if we are both awake, then we are texting the entire time. I just wanted to feel bad for myself I guess. Pity party for 1 over here. And it’s weird for him. When we talk on the phone he is in a tent with 50 other people, most of who know both of us. So there’s not really room for intimate conversation, hence every conversation is ‘how are you’ ‘how was your day’ etc.
I am really lonely though. I don’t think he had taken that into consideration until I literally sobbed on the phone. I’ve had the hardest time making friends in this town. Like actual friends. I know plenty of people, but no one I would call when I get sad or to fill the time with I guess.
I feel like I’ve tried everything I can think of to find friends too. And just nothing. So many dead ends. Everyone is so cliquey or they are mothers of some large brood and don’t have time to be friends with someone else.
tbh I am so here for people with eating disorders that never actually recovered or got professional help but just kind of learned to ignore their feelings and hoped that it would work, and as a result have a weird ass relationship with food where they don’t really feel healthy but they don’t feel sick enough to seek help bc me too. Your recovery is important. You’re important.
Im just really fucking proud of myself for not binge eating my way through any holiday functions, including today. I stuck to my plan of healthy foods and no giant portions and I feel so good!! I even went for a post meal stroll with my sister. Normally holidays are so bad and so triggering, they can set off a down spiral that will last weeks BUT I NAILED TODAY YOU ED ASSHOLE.
LISTEN. You can be a bitch. Anytime. Be a big ol’ bitch. I have no issues dealing with your inner bitch, I actually prefer the directness that usually comes along with the inner bitch. So let her out and let’s party.
HOWEVER.
The minute, and I mean nanosecond, you become a DUMB bitch, we gonna has a problem.
I know it sounds fake but you really do have a lot of silent lovers on this planet who look at you and wish they had your smile or your hair color or your humor or your intellect or your intentions or your heart, your manners, your eyes, your ease, even just you. People who are too shy to tell you what they admire about you or what they wish for you or who they see themselves becoming bc of you & they’re too shy to tell you. even tho it isn’t verbalized, the universe has still heard and the universe has loved you for helping out on its creations. You’re that person. You’re you.
