thingswhatilove

This is a blog about domestic things, things what I love, admire, read and watch. It is a poor kind of blog collection of things what happen at our place. I live down here, in New Zealand with my children and cats and worries.

[thingswhatilove]

Life in the time of Covid

An update. What happened? We opened a restaurant, it turned three this past October. It changed everything, but not as much as Covid.

The children have grown ! Big Sister has finished her second year of University, living away at the bottom of the other island, studying Botany and Marine Science. She picked apples early this summer, thinning bushy trees in Nelson until her skin blew up and her eyes swelled shut, a reaction to one of the fungicides.

Her eyes have healed and so has most of her skin. Smallest Person and I flew down to see her as soon as the border opened, a small plane, a terrifying landing. 

“Lol, there was turbulence and Mum questioned life.” 

We hugged and cried in the arrivals lounge. Much too long, over six months apart. Stupid Covid. Luminous eyes, green, framed by dark lashes, she has freckles and a head of dark ringlets. A pair of chunky sandals, sun-kissed arms. She gave up cricket after high-school, satisfied with her last season when her team won another national tournament. She took four wickets in the final game. How she skipped and danced across the pitch !

I thought I would miss it more than I do.

But she is happy, and so am I.

Smallest Person is now the tallest person in the house after Stuart. She towers above Big Sister and I — we are in awe of how she did that, grew so high and long. Her hair is straight and bright raspberry red, a reaction to another lockdown. We dyed it together, her and I, in the upstairs bathroom. I was sad to see her natural colour go, but happy to help.

The colour makes her blue eyes pop. She is lushly beautiful. Sometimes we play scrabble together on the floor in the lounge. 

“Just let me live my life !” But I know that feeling and we laughed.

She, half-pretending to rage against me. We’ve been extra kind to each other. The pandemic has made it imperative.

We were allowed to open the restaurant in lockdown, but just a crack.

One of the large tables was carried across the doorway to block the front entrance, the contact-less point of exchange for takeaways and ‘finish at home’ meal kits.

It was something to do, not enough to save the restaurant, but it kept us busy and in contact with each other, something that became more and more important as the lonely weeks passed by. We tried to make it cheery. We played old jazz standards, swing tunes, 80s pop hits. Kept fresh flowers by the door every week. We lit candles on empty tables at night. Our team suppers were a highlight, we ordered in from our favourite places and laid steaming plastic containers of food along the kitchen bench.

Cracked open bottles of beer, good wine, ourselves.

The restaurant became our private oasis.

Now it is open again, public. We’ve had three weeks trading before taking a short break for Christmas. Hungry and thirsty, exhausted Aucklanders emerged from isolation in early December and sought out their favourite eating and watering spots. The city was alive again ! I am so proud of it — Tamaki Makaurau — all those vaccination passports at the ready. Only a few dissenters.

We went from zero diners to full-blown party season in a matter of days. Exhilarating, but alarming and distressing too. Watching people do normal things, that are now risky, ‘against the rules’ of this disease. People standing around at close quarters, unmasked, hugging and drinking together. I didn’t know it at the time but I held my breath behind my mask, jaw tight.

Days and nights, not breathing properly.

I went to bed after work and had my first panic attack in 9 years. The shock of emerging from isolation and into the noisy crush of dinner service too much.

We have a dog now, she has just turned one. A large, good-humoured cross-breed requiring two walks a day. In exchange for all this walking she gives us unconditional love and hilarity.

The bubble of love has expanded.

Cat continues, displeased.

It’s stupefyingly hot here. Our bedroom is at the top of this old 1970s split-level house of ours. It’s like trying to dress inside an oven, I tell myself to do it quickly and get out but the heat slows everything down and my face sweats, limbs heavy. Eventually I emerge from the room as if drugged.

We are okay, we are good.

Some things are awful, other things just fine.

Some days none of us can concentrate on much.

The restaurant is open again, we try to build back what we lost, one booking, one dish, one drink at a time.

We hope everything will be okay.

I am trying to lighten up and cast off the seriousness and intensity of the past few months. It got bad enough for our business that it’s hard to feel optimistic again. Most people don’t understand how bad, and I understand that it’s not my place to tell them. Besides, it wears away at us all, the uncertainty.

But a worried restaurant host is no fun at all, so I’m working on it.

X

[thingswhatilove]

At The Restaurant, His Wife Is Watching:

“Thank you, although I only called you over here to be close to you.”

[thingswhatilove]

Very early

I am awake but he is not.

It’s 6:03am and too early to be conscious but here it is. Sleepy wakeful restless dozing. It’s 6:13 and he is still asleep. If I bounce the bed a little like this will he wake up and talk to me? Nope. It’s 6:27 shall I just go back to sleep in the curve of this heavy warm body beside me. I reach out my toes but he’s so long I only reach his calves, I’ll just scratch the back of them like this.

It’s 6:39, bingo! – Make coffee, he says but his eyes are still shut. Big ham hand is out of the covers and squeezes my shoulder. I’ve been fidgeting too much and he wants me gone so he pushes me over gently. Out you go. Slap on the back as I turn away and touch my feet down on the floor.

I’m not usually awake before him and I can tell that he is secretly pleased. I feel it in the thunk of his palm and fingers that squeeze me hello just quick yawning stretching out and now here comes the cat in from the night shift. She wants that place between his ankles or along the side of him when he puts his hands under his head on the pillow and she can lie down next to his heart and wash her ears.

It’s 10:27am and I am in the gallery cafe eating the remains of a cheese scone and drinking a café latté. The milk foam has stuck to the glass like a halo. The lecture is about to begin and I have to walk quickly through two rooms to make it in time. I am aware that I am being very rude to the art and the other visitors look up because it’s wrong moving at pace in here. There is a way to turn over in the bed and move through the gallery so that you don’t disturb another’s reverie.

Especially and above all you mustn’t let your shoes squeak. The quietest gallery is in Kyoto where no one makes a sound not even to breathe and my shoe squeaked with every step because it was hot out and my feet were sweating.

–I’ll come back and see you, I promise each thing as I pass now and; what are you anyway? A collection of cyanotypes floating in white frames catches my eye. That particular blue almost hereditary, something like a woman’s memory.

I see a scrap of linen, a patch or a pad or a section of sheet to swaddle a knee or a baby. Tuck their arms in and they won’t cry so much, see? I see a piece of cloth wrapped around a cut finger blue blood now red, salt and metal. The taste of sleep and storms. A teaspoon lick. I am too far away to see it now I am gone from there. I am finally here. In the room of the feminist archive, it’s the very last room at the end.

[thingswhatilove]

Email is weird.

It’s being a strange week. The stimulation from multiple writer’s festival sessions in the weekend has kinda tore up my insides somehow. My brain and my heart feel minced. A live poetry slam rendered me wounded but grateful, tears of relating, tears of trauma, tears of lost fathers and genders and Maori (af) conch shells. I lost my conch shell a long time ago and to be fair I didn’t really cry about it, not exactly.

It’s sometimes hard living in a cross-cultural multi-ethnic body, that’s all.

I unfollowed a guy on instagram and he emailed me about it. ”Why did you do that?” He asked.

I run a community art project and a woman emailed me four words: “I can’t log in.”

There’s such a fantastic ambiguity in that statement from a stranger. No other explanation, no context, it sounds almost existential.

Someone else the same day emailed and said; “I didn’t know I had to register boo hoo.”

I don’t know what to say to her in reply, except probably nothing.

It’s all pretty weird.

[thingswhatilove]

Woman.

There’s a woman, long tall fat short. Rushing reading talking listening.

There she goes – ordering coffee, groceries, one more lunchtime lager, those boots she likes so much. Ordering people and animals, take your place sit down stand up let me measure you. It’s not yet time for tea cat get away with you she’s bleaching the floor again.

There’s a man, waiting helpless in the doorway as if his arms are made of bread dough.

Can I help you?

An arch look but she’s not flirting she's thinking has he had a stroke.

There’s a woman with her hands in her pants, blood on the floor, she’s sorting the laundry into the right piles she’s been doing this since she was a girl. Girl child, bleeding heart and hands child, don’t leave it in the toilet like that. Kiss of courage no grip stronger than a woman’s, dragging pulling people to their spot, get in there, go to school, grow the hell up and apologise, unplucking fingers from her skirt her hair, unplucking fingers we don’t steal put it back, unplucking fingers don’t touch me I can’t breathe its my body. Touch her now, like this she will show you.

But the man, there in the doorway.

Be careful how you answer her. None of that passive-aggressive shit here please. She waits for him, because he’s slow and he’s still on the first words his opening line, and in the chasm of time a day and a night pass by and she thinks about how middle-aged men are turning into antiques in front of her eyes. Polo necks and polished knobs, old-fashioned values which also mean old-fashioned judgements.

A woman in a box, a woman in her place, a woman just so.

Woman has, she concedes, got much of it wrong, she still lives and breathes and lets her hair, her mind, her tongue grow wild. She refuses to die, or calm down, she refuses to be mild or pale or suffering quietly because that was romantic when women didn’t complain so much.

If they were lovelier then they were lying.

She’s letting herself in or out depending, depending on where she started from.

Still, she sighs, antiques hold their value which is more than can be said for a lot of old things. What is it now? She softens.

He’s definitely had a stroke.

I think you need to come look he says.

[thingswhatilove]

A dusty corner in my favourite place, a slant of sunshine on the floor.

There’s progress outside, a new cafe called Lily’s Gelato or something. An alien thing in the rumpty old street. Moulded plastic chairs, gleaming white countertops and walls that are painted in wide purple and french vanilla stripes. It’s meant to be pretty, and it is in a way, although the overall effect is somehow repulsive too. It’s a fine line. Bottoms pressed into clear perspex seats, a shade of lilac too saccharine. Progress, I guess.

I tell myself that so that I stop obsessing over someone else’s design. I don’t want to critique it but now it’s too late.

Progress is good. I insist.

Might sell our house in the name of progress. But who are we if we give up our house? In this country where house ownership is a kind of identity. National past-time. There are neighbours who don’t talk to you if you’re just a renter. We had two houses once. Like others our age, we had a go at collecting.

– Have you read The Forresters? A friend asked me as I was trying to explain the theme of my own (attempted) novel. – It was very good. As if Perkins has already done the thing I am trying to do.

– Yes, I replied. And I asked her if she had read Hulme, Catton or Grace. A flash of anger. Fuck. Be careful who you talk about writing with, I realised. Too late. Frame, Smither, Knox. Stop it.

But they loom.

Which is why I am here. In the bookshop that holds itself up by books. The old floors bowing under the strain. And I stare at the H section for several minutes because I can’t find The Bone People, a copy of which I want to send to a friend in New York who said; – Just get your pages done.

Because I think of this book as a kind of anchor. A clue to the country of my childhood. Primitive and earthbound. Reckless and brilliant too.

I am about to give up. I have found Stonefish, and Patricia Grace’s Cousins. I make a pile on top of two other novels by our wahine. And then I see it. Tucked sideways, not standing, on top of the books in J. A 1985 edition, that faded pink brown cover I remember. He will like this I think, or I like the gesture of giving it and that is enough. It does have speech-marks after all, huh. I don’t know why I don’t remember that.

There is a penciled inscription on the first page;

Stolen from Roger.

It makes me laugh and I thank the thief.

I add it to the pile. Progress.

[thingswhatilove]

Tulum

Our last stop is another plane ride away and then a two hour drive south along the Caribbean coast. I wonder if we have pushed ourselves and our children just one stop too far on this epic tour of ours. All of us are once again up at some ungodly hour in the dark, stuffing our luggage to bursting and exercising some mild, groggy squabbling. Smallest Person is not coping, she instinctively knows she is meant to be sleeping for at least four more hours.

Only Stuart has the weight and strength to close the big suitcase now, sitting on it in his short shorts, his bare feet on the floor, pressing and zipping inch by inch until everything is absolutely squeezed shut.

Now that I have finished reading Zadie Smith’s ‘Swing Time’ it has to stay behind. It’s a big book you understand. I touch the beautiful cover and wonder if she’ll find a reader here, no idea if Mexico has such a thing as confused neurotic half-castes like myself and the book’s narrator.

We need two cars to take us from the Coyoacan neighbourhood to the airport, and what with having just got up, both Stuart and I head to the wrong side of each car and open the driver-side doors in unison. The real drivers watch us from the footpath, raising their arms in the air and (probably) yelling out “Hey! What the hell are you doing?!”.

They think we’re crazy, which we are.

When we touch down in Cancun it’s midday and we are all at the same time starving and full to bursting. Big Sister and I stand in line for the toilets trying not to clutch our own bladders and watch a beautiful woman fiddle with her perfect hair for fifteen minutes in the mirror. There’s an issue with the way it is falling across her face. She’s meeting someone important or sexy. We think she already looks pretty great and probably shouldn’t worry so much. She is wearing a crochet top, her skin is smooth and her bottom is a generous, spandex-clad expanse – everyone but her seems to understand that she is a kind of heaven. We cannot believe how long it takes for some people to finish peeing. We look under the cubicle doors again.

Mexico has a relaxed chaos that I appreciate, and when we finally emerge outside into the warm tropical air we all sigh down into our sweaty socks. A crowd of drivers are waiting to offer their services, and not for the first time here I think of the chaos at the airport in Apia. Except there they have a live band welcoming you to Samoa. Here under the Mexican sky and the rolling chatter of Spanish we find a friendly-looking man in a bright pink shirt holding a piece of paper with one of our names scrawled across it in ballpoint pen. We promptly pile all of our things into his truck and hope that he is our driver. He has shiny black ringlets that he has applied some heavy product to, and like many of the Mexicans we meet he has the familiar look of a pacific islander. From the back of the cab I study his profile, watching his neat brown hands steer, negotiate a few calls and find a bottle of juice in the console. Because he is an excellent driver he makes some very light conversation with us in English, before falling into the silent rhythm of the road.

I find that I can’t help making all of these references and associations and I wonder if all tropical places are like this – they each serve to remind you of the first tropical place you knew – the dense low jungle that lines the roads, the square concrete-block buildings, grass-roofed fales, white-washed plaster; it all feels so wonderfully familiar. Our driver offers to stop so that we can pick up supplies. We buy wine, beer, shampoo and Pringles. When we eventually hit the open road south, the girls and I fall asleep.

We’re finally learning how to be travelers – sleep where you can, ignore everyone, use your bag as a pillow. Don’t worry about how bad you smell.

[thingswhatilove]

What you see when you spend 8 hours at the park

For starters you see a lot of grass, and many trees and wind and sky.

The sun burns down. I’ve not waxed my legs in weeks, so it heats up the black denim of my jeans and burns hot in that way that is succour to skin and nerves.

A dog chases a ball;

“my ball, my ball, get it get it get it. Got it!” and, (frolicking);

“Look at me! Aren’t I glorious!? My ball. Delicious.”

Snuffle.

He has that broad athletic girth, two directions of hair meet like colliding black oceans and form a shiny tuft in the centre of his chest. Pectorals. Bowed legs. For a moment he runs at me, reveling and wondering. *sniffs the air*

“…well? Aren’t I, magnificent?” Chew.

“Indeed. You are, quite.”

Satisfied he turns, is gone behind a tree. Something there, more pungent.

–

I turn my attention back to the game, hunch down low in my folding chair and spread out my toes to massage the grass. Special grass. Soft green threads. No prickles. Cars zoom by on the main road, but the wind carries the sound away.

Big Sister is taller than me now, striding among other giantesses of her game. Strong girls, broad shoulders, spikes in their shoes. Arms like whips.

Arms, like, whips.

They’re chasing a ball. White leather, flying, then skidding across the grass. She sprints after it. *Get it, get it, get it.* We watch her striding, then turning, one arm down on the run – the ball a magnet to her open hand, she plants her feet *Got it!* and turns and launches it with force, her body arched with the effort – fires it all the way back to the keeper.

The other girls clap. “Fielding!”

She turns away, paces back to her spot.

Gets herself ready to chase the ball.

This goes on for many more hours.

I take a nap on the ground, curl myself up and use my collapsed chair and jacket as a cushion. Hide my face in my hat, shift my straw basket to block out the wind.

After some time, softly;

“She’s going to have a bowl.”

It’s Poppa, waking me gently. He has an elder’s respectful reverence for afternoon naps. Get them where you can.

Any park will do.

–

Quote of the day (Overheard in the car)

Smallest Person: “R’mber, don’t go around telling people we’re sisters. We’re Business Partners now.”

Big Sister: •Guffaws*

–

Other things you see: A male cricketer peeing behind a tree. Mid-game. Eew.

[thingswhatilove]

Well, hello there.

In my mind, I write prolifically. I get it all down in random spots like Pulling The Car Into The Drive, and Picking Up My Clothes Where They Fell Off the Bed. Some days it feels like I’ve written a lot – but it is only getting inked into the grey folds of my mind. In-between the crevices there.

Today I wrote a short piece about the guy in the car with the L plates. He was parked at the lights waiting to get onto the motorway, smashing life, and perhaps himself soon too. He had headphones on and his phone was mounted on the dash in front of him. He punched at it with one hand and sipped at a takeaway coffee with his other hand. What a fucking scary idiot. He drove away, and I saw that next to his L plates on the back window was one of those cartoon-family stickers, which suggested he was in charge of at least three children. Goddess help them all, he’s got a lot going on.

I wrote it as I watched him, folded it like a prayer and tucked it away.

The children have taken to reading my blog. This does introduce not a small amount of consciousness about writing about me and them and us. What is so nice and unexpected is that they find a lot of it delightful, and Smallest Person hunts down any mention of herself, reveling in past things said, all those domestic hilarities. She likes to sit and read them to herself, giggling and relaying my own chapters back to me. Even she can’t remember what she was wrapping up that time in the toilet with the masking tape. “What was I doing?!” She demands. “I never found out.” I reply. Big sister sits at the table and chuckles that deep, quiet laugh of hers. “I remember that.” She says.

Oh but I love them so.

Tomorrow I go north a bit to a dear man’s funeral. His passing is a shock. I am stunned by another’s mortality. I remember how he carried himself like the salt of the earth itself, like a farmer, fisherman, artist. Quiet, gentle, feminist. Husband, partner, father, friend.

Best we keep writing eh.

[thingswhatilove]

When.

When you take off your earring to answer the phone and realise you’re becoming your grandmother.

When you’re old enough to feel good about becoming your grandma and you know she’d be so pleased that you were continuing that small etiquette of care so that callers didn’t have to endure Clanking On Call.

When you can only find single earrings, and none of them match anymore.

When you’re watching Home by Novogratz and they’re designing Suzanne Vega’s bookcases and art, and you look at your bookcase and see that there is an unplugged smoke alarm in it.

When you go to the gym again after a reasonable hiatus and discover they’ve moved around all the gym equipment and you can’t find anything anymore so you just walk on the treadmill, because you found it, and also you don’t need to be shown how to walk.

When you move house and have no internet for several days and instead play card games with the kids and everyone is incredibly happy and relaxed. But you still can’t wait for the internet to come back.

When.

[thingswhatilove]

Three confessions. A pain in my heart.

Justin Bieber’s new album is ACE. I still can’t operate Twitter. James Corden. That thong, singing, babies...the whole jam. Each morning I wake up with a friend of mine looming large in my heart and mind, hoping it were all just a bad dream. Fuck cancer.

[thingswhatilove]

Drunk in a tiny apartment in Hong Kong.*

My friend Liz had earned herself airline tickets to Hong Kong by winning a waiters race in Auckland one summer. I might have this completely wrongly-remembered so I’ll make the rest up.

I imagine my friend barreling down her aproned competition with a huge smile and long thumbs expertly securing the glass vessels atop her serving tray out on an Auckland street that summer. Either that, or she won the tickets in a spot prize. No matter. She was tall, and a great runner I am sure. All I do remember properly is that I had been to Hong Kong before, loved it, and offered to go with her. We didn’t have accommodation, and couldn’t afford a hotel, so another mate - also a waiter - asked his mates in Hong Kong if they’d put up with a couple of girls for a few days in that smoking city.

From Thursday to Sunday Liz and I were wined, dined and hosted by this excellent couple - whose names I can no longer remember. We strolled hot, damp, stinking streets by day, ate faux-croissants in Parisian-inspired coffee shops, tried and failed to order authentic street-food in a tent by the edge of the sea (later figured out it was a workers lunch tent on the reclamation project). We bought silk pyjamas, trinkets, ate delicious pork buns, slurped alcoholic fruit schnapps, eyed the healthiest, beefiest rats I’ve ever seen, and only got lost once – down a pungent street where kitchen workers cleaned pots, pans, and sharpened their knives on the back steps of grimey doorways. Until this day, the smell of a restaurant dumpster brings back the vivid recollection of that man eyeing me carefully over the shining blade of a machete. A polite, but pointed way to communicate without a common tongue, You. Girl. Do not belong here.

We were fairly drunken those four days, we met more friends of friends, a bearded-journalist whose colleague in LA had just interviewed Tarantino and had emailed through a choice revelation from the man himself (email! none of the rest of us waitresses/students had it yet, this was circa 1996). He passed around a printed copy of the email which detailed what was in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn’t believe we had lucked in just 3 degrees from the band-aid on Marsalis’s neck. These worldly people took us to a restaurant on the top of the mountain, where they ordered bottles of dusty wine, and we ate jalapeno pickles wrapped in prosciutto. Liz and I were astute enough to know we couldn’t fucking afford this dinner, but drank our fair share – as good kiwi girls are wont – ate the pickles, and then gathered together under the folds of the white linen tablecloth to hold hands, panic, and drunk-whisper-count out all of our monies into a salty pile. “Shall we all just split the bill?” Journo, suggested. Jolly good.

We couldn’t find Liz shoes or clothes to fit anywhere, she having the giant size 8 feet. Tiny Chinese shop ladies tut tutted everywhere we went, crowds on the street parted ways to stop and ogle these big boned, well endowed, foreign-beast lady-things, with our flowing skirts, sandals and double-down tank tops. Eventually Liz lucked into a pair of exquisite patent burgundy heels from Spain. The last pair. No one in all the island but Liz could rock those shoes, I was bitter with jealousy and heat rash.

The second to last day ran over from the night before – had we been awake all night? On the floor of this tiny apartment, with that strange-but-nice man hovering hopefully in his underwear? We settled into vodka and watched the Star Wars trilogy on giant laser disks - pausing only to flip the silver tray halfway through each movie. It felt like the future; Emails from Tarantino, pickles & bacon, patent-red Spanish shoes, and laser beams with movies on them.

I had never seen Star Wars before, nor ever thought to really – but together with this bunch of strangers, we hunkered down in the heat, high above the hawkers, urchins, steaming yum char houses – and felt the force.

It was weird, it was brilliant.

*Where did you first see Star Wars?

[100goodthoughts]

Sets of 6 Christmas and holiday cards with swears and mild feminism are now available from big cartel! Link to shop in bio - go on, for the badass bitches and pudding lovers in your life ❤️ Limited sets available, ships anywhere.

http://emmarogan.bigcartel.com

[thingswhatilove]

Sentencing.

Perched at the edge of the green again.

How long has it been? The girls are so tall now, long white-trousers loping in and out with the overs. Now she can see them from miles away. Straw, russet, ebony-coloured ponytails swinging the gait.

Arms like whips.

Words have been bubbling up, coming unannounced not unwelcome after months of nothing.

Not nothing, but jumbling things, lists, tasks, nothing she can thread together. She has felt herself becoming quite stupid. Time was an illusion, it really wasn’t there at all and in the gap left by time a floating chaos, fragmented scramble of ideas and duties held just so by coffee in the morning, petrol in the car, and wine in the afternoon.

She has, for now, cut all of that loose. Lay down in a section of sunlight on the porch and didn’t move, not for days, weeks, months, not until her face, ankles, sections of her arms were quite brown again. The children, animals, came to join her. The whole family lay prone on the hot cedar boards. Together they accumulated. The cat, pleased at this small proof of human evolution - did her best to lead them by her own excellent example.

The woman struggled with her new duty of care. To imagine and then manifest an evening meal every night, at thirty nine this was an unwelcome burden! Stupidly, she hadn’t expected it. Husband came home early to enjoy his claim to wifely, maternal care, excited at the idea of his own stay-at-home-woman.

Of course, she railed. Weeks of negotiations followed. She blended him green smoothies out of kale, love and mint leaves for his breakfast, watched him grip the edge of the bench with one hand and stare down the barrel of the glass.

For your liver, she said.

He retched, squeamish, until finally it was time to iron his own shirt and kiss her affectionately goodbye.

And she? She took her bearings, found time, then went for a walk in the park.

[thingswhatilove]

School Camp's over, pass the sauce

Small Person just got back today from camp. She’s exhausted, her eyes are bloodshot, puffy, and she’s a bit delirious. Just before she fell asleep we had this exchange: “Next year I’m BEGGING dad to come on camp.” “Yeah?” “Yeah….Because the chicken was dry and the packet gravy was disgusting.”

[seebster]

So, I ask to the women who are still not sure about rape culture, patriarchy, or male supremacy, if you see the problem behind a culture in which “no” is punishable, but where failure to say “no” makes any violation of your personhood your own fault. When you sit back for a moment and think to yourself that surely you can say no to men, and that I am blowing things way out of proportion, then at least do this test within your own life: Start saying No more often when No is what you really want to say. Establish firm boundaries with men and do not let up. See if the male you are saying no to immediately stops and respects your boundary, or if his automatic response, reflexive—as though he’s been learning how to do this since he was a boy, as though he sees no other response more logical than this—is to attempt to do what you have just asked him not to do to you. Notice how you feel when telling a man “no” as well. Do you feel butterflies in your stomach? Do you feel guilty (denying him his right of access to you)? Do you feel mean? Do you feel unsure at all as to whether or not you have the right to tell him no? It is very easy to feel that men are not so bad when you are still making sure to give them what they want.

Looking Male Supremacists Dead in Their Dead Eyes (The Boner Busters Takedown)

“IT IS VERY EASY TO FEEL THAT MEN ARE NOT SO BAD WHEN YOU ARE STILL MAKING SURE TO GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT.”

(via froelich)

Excellent.

[thingswhatilove]

One time we went to Samoa. Found my grandmother's village. My cousins, our heritage. Threw my children, my palagi husband, off waterfalls and into deep clearwater trenches. They went willingly, those loons. Sat with my aunties and heard of true stories, terrible memories, untimely losses. Looked everywhere into mine own brown eyes, watched my skin darken and find its rightful hue. We acclimatised to the heat, the food. Ate breadfruit dipped in pulesami in a fale on the beach, the clearest water lapping at our stoop. Smallest Person walked into the sea at sunset and fed the silver fishes her crumbs. A frenzy of grey things churning up the water around her. Huge turquoise breakers crashing out on the edge of the lagoon. Heard Taumaia's name for the first time. Great, great grandmother. How Kasini Ah Kiau - Great great grandfather - lived in the bush for a year to escape deportation. Heard that was probably a lie. Bought coconuts from roadside stalls, watched locals open neat holes in their tops for us with huge machete. Swam in the morning, swam with fish, turtles, crabs, cousins. Nothing was ever the same again. I want to write it down, tell you all about it.