Absofuckinlutely

@the-thingwithfeathers

Just a girl, trying to find her place in the world.

9,317 posts

When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".

It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.

It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".

Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.

When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.

It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.

That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.

That's how you process cattle.

It's fucking disgusting.

fandomsandfeminism

Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?

Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.

All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)

But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.

But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.

I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?

It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.

Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.

Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)

tiktoks-we-like

Just girls being girls

Science.

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

canthinkofaurl-deactivated20221

5 i am a disgrace im calling bs on anyone who claims they read ulysses tbh

22 full reads. I have read more, but I just didn’t finish them, ex. Dracula and Count of Monte Cristo

that-bookworm-guy

I’ve read 13 so far

bubblesandpages

I’ve read 10

10 complete ones, didn’t finish Count of Monte Cristo and Catch-22

10 :33

33.

I am OBSESSED with people telling me how they met the love of their life. Just found out my director met his wife through a misdirected email - that’s fate right there.

“I saw her last name was Jewish - and I’m Jewish, so when I corrected the email I told her Shabbat Shalom with a smiley face — this was the very beginning of the emoticon era, you understand. She had a watermark of a dog rescue at the bottom of her email, and I love dogs, so I found her website and there she was — all these videos of her rehabilitating dogs and talking about the organization. I fell in love with her just from those videos.”

😭😭😭

“I asked if we could meet for coffee, told her I was looking for volunteer opportunities — which was halfway a lie — and she said ‘okay, but just so you know I have a boyfriend, so this is strictly business,’ and I was so disappointed, but I did want to meet her. We sat in that coffeeshop until they turned the lights out on us, and she broke up with her boyfriend the next day.”

MULTIPLE people in the notes have told me how important these tags are to them so here’s to keeping it in the main post.

Im sick with flu so naturally I picked up my newly bought copy of Howl's Moving Castle which includes DWJ interviews in the back.

And im in love with the way she tells these stories feels like a part of her books.

And my favorite:

The magic in the mundane :)

anais-ninja-bitch

she roasts us howl girlies for loving his loser ass, and she based him on her husband and son smh

if I was matt murdock and I found out the same chemical spill that blinded me and lit the world on “fire” turned a bunch of turtles into pizza loving ninjas I would lose it actually

I’m not going lie the thought of matt finding out he’s radioactive ooze brothers with this particular version of the tmnt has me in tears

matt, trying to recount his childhood and ignore the smell of turtle, three day old pizza, and sewer: …..so yah, after my dad died I was basically on my own.

the turtles, already planning on buying their radioactive waste brother a shirt that says “I fell in radioactive waste and all I got was these glasses”: cowabummer dude. our dad’s a rat

morganbritton132

I love the thought of older rockstar Eddie Munson becoming popular again for being on Tiktok , but I think it’s funnier if he’s kinda bad at it. Like Eddie’s definitely pulled a Mark Ruffalo and went live without realizing it. The first time it happened, you could sit in his pocket and listen to him work on a new song for forty-five minutes. The second time reminded the world that he was a huge D&D nerd. There were a few times where you’d hear just the most banal conversations between Steve and Eddie. Once you could stare at the ceiling in Eddie’s kitchen from where he sat his phone down and listen to a brief conversation that included ‘King Steve’ and ‘big boy’ and then what is very clearly two people making out. Before it could get further than kissing, you hear another phone ring and then a very loud voice exclaiming, “Damn it, Eddie, turn your phone off!” Eddie Munson’s almost sex tape trends for a month.

insane-sociopath

Transphobes horrified: British national anthem to change pronouns

tami-taylors-hair

Oh?? My?? GAWD???

mr darcy lived in derbyshire so he sounds like. lizzeh. ah lov yew moost ahhdentleh

wait the places in pride and prejudice are real?

england is indeed real

Crying

fucked up if true </3

smallhero-for-hire

8 page short kids book class project on important/current/difficult topics! Covered the topics of change, sibling relationships and the subject of having a transgender family member (in this case an older brother!)

Was made with trans and non-binary art students!

lucystillintheskywithdiamonds

❝I’m obsessed with Mr. Knightley because, I mean, I think everyone has had that best friend where you just argue, you do everything together, and years go by and you wonder if you should have kissed that person. And I think that’s why ‘When Harry Met Sally’ exists, because of Knightley and Emma—and ‘Reality Bites’ with Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. That’s a totally Mr. Knightley/Emma relationship.❞ — Autumn De Wilde

EMMA. | 2020 Emma & Mr. Knightley ft best friends to lovers trope

This had me fucking screaming at 2 am

intheicyairofnight

the funniest parts of midnight sun

with spoilers obviously

when Edward first smells Bella it takes him two pages of inner monologue before he thinks of holding his breath

apparently vampires can run so fast they don’t leave footprints in snow just like LotR elves and this is physics nonsense

Edward listening to a CD of “violent music”

“a word I’d never said before in the presence of a lady” ajlskdflj

Alice to Jasper: “I know you love me. Thanks.”

“And then my conscience smote me.”

“She was offended by my teasing. I must have done it wrong again.”

the “dazzling” moments from the original book are Edward fruitlessly trying to frighten people by baring his teeth I can’t deal

when Bella points this out he thinks “I’m losing my edge”

Edward worries about whether Bella thinks he’s pretty

Bella wears a shirt “cut low enough to reveal her collarbones”

Edward literally thinks the sparkling will horrify and disgust her

“I avoided the word ‘sex’ because she did” OH GROW UP

“It was enlightening and alluring to watch her in her element” IS THE INTRODUCTION TO A PARAGRAPH OF HER MAKING CHEERIOS

the book. includes. a car chase.

during the car chase they knock off the side mirrors and EMMETT AND JASPER LOOK OUT THE WINDOWS SO EDWARD CAN READ THEIR MINDS AS REPLACEMENT SIDE MIRRORS this isn’t stated in the book but I like to imagine they stuck their heads all the way out like happy dogs

mariaalenkoshepard

Credit where it’s due, that last fact is actually clever and also the funniest thing I’ve ever read

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