Day 24093 This is my house. I won’t allow anyone to harm it. There should have been no more intruders after the last one. I do not want these people here. They will leave-

Day 24095 They are siblings. They are loud. Always singing and talking and stomping. As if they must be louder than anything else.

Day 24106 There are bolts on the door now. Bolts and hideous, gaudy new locks. How dare they-

Night 24112 I was going to fill the night with terrors. But he woke up screaming before I began. She came running from the other room. They sleep right across the hall from each other, with the doors on a crack. …they are young, are they not, to be living on their own. Was I ever so young?

Day 24129 She has fixed the squeak in the door at the top of the stairs. It never squeaked when I still lived.

Day 24121 The noise of the doorbell scares them. But they get so many deliveries. It is a good bell. It has worked all these years- I can see one of the men coming now with his packages, trudging up to the door. …perhaps if I knock before he is here, they will come and look before he can sound the bell.

Day 24114 He is planting flowers in boxes on my windowsills. I always wished I could have some flowers.

Night 24137 She is afraid of the dark. I could see it in her eyes when she got out of bed. …I lit the lamps for her.

Day 24142 They have moved the couch to the sun spot a little to the right of the window. That is where I used to have my armchair. It is the only sensible place for it.

Day 24163 Sometimes the noises of the world are suddenly too much for him. He winces and tries not to sway his head. This is my house. …I can keep it calm and quiet for a while.

Day 24178 She just got a phone call and now they are both laughing. Laughter is a good sound, isn’t it. They said this house has been good luck…

Night 24205 They are singing in our kitchen. He found my cookbook in the gap at the back of the kitchen cabinet and now they are trying to cook. They wanted to start with the soufflé. They don’t even know how to make béchamel! I turned the page to the casserole instead.

Day 24236 This is my house. These are my boarders. I won’t allow anyone to harm them.

I’m crying. This just hit all my emotions

i love this so much!!!!!!

Local Ghost Adopts Children

So, my university does a lot of outreach Classics work, trying to make it less of an elitist subject and more accessible to children, and as part of that, I went to give a talk to a class of 6 and 7 year olds a few months back.

And here’s the thing. Classics is really often portrayed as the last bastion of academic privilege, a subject that is only taught to rich white kids so that they can brag about knowing Latin and get jobs as Tory MPs. But these kids were OBSESSED. They had already done some stuff on myths, and they were so excited to talk about it. They knew all the stories, all the heroes, the gods, the monsters. I have never seen such an excitable group of kids as these 6 year olds shouting about Odysseus.

For the lesson, I asked them to think of their favourite myth and to consider it from the point of view of the monster rather than the hero. The end goal was to show that often the monsters and heroes are quite similar. We decided to do Polyphemus (the Cyclops) in the Odyssey, and so I asked them why they thought Polyphemus might have been so angry at Odysseus that he killed some of his men.

Because he came home and found lots of strange men in his house, eating his food, said the kids.

So, I asked them, do you think that was a good reason to kill people?

No, they said, but he was very cross, and he didn’t do it because it was fun.

And then this KID, this SIX YEAR OLD CHILD, put her hand up and said “well, it was very bad of him, but if we’re cross with him then we have to be cross with Odysseus too, because when he came home from his adventure and found lots of men in his house, trying to marry his wife, he killed them, and that’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

AND LET ME TELL YOU

I am a published Classicist! A PhD student! And I have never made that connection before! Not once! And this child was six years old! And she made the link! By herself!

And so I tried not to show how gobsmacked I was, and we talked more about other monsters, including Medusa, and at the end of the lesson a lot of them said that they thought the monsters were not as evil as we usually think, and then I went home.

But I honestly haven’t got over how excited and engaged those kids were, in a totally regular primary school. Classics, in that classroom, was not elitist or inaccessible. It was something they understood, could really get their teeth into and use to think of new ideas of good and bad, of why we demonise different people for doing the same things. And that’s how I like to think about Classics. Not a series of dry texts in ancient languages, but as living stories that you actually can’t help but love, just a bit.

There’s so much fascinating, wonderful stuff that goes unappreciated and unenjoyed because we put it behind an elitism paywall and sometimes I want to scream about it.

This is why I get so seethingly furious when people use elitism as an excuse to be flagrantly anti-intellectual.

Its true that academia is often inaccessible and elitistm but the way you deal with a body of thought being denied to people is to give them access to it, not to write off the subject either by saying that no one need it anyway, or by saying that made up.

This young girl uses “los,” “las” and the gender-neutral “les” — watch her explain why. —from REMEZCLA on twitter.

to all the cowards who whine “how will i explain it to my kids??” i say: how about you shut up and let your kids explain it to you.

Guys, you don’t understand, this isn’t the same thing as people complaining about “they” in English! This is a huge deal in Spanish. Spanish-speakers are much less forgiving of new colloquialisms or loan words from other languages (god forbid you say “slide” for a slideshow instead of “diapositiva”; you’ll get burned at the stake). To explain, I have to give a bit of background:

There is a very old organisation called La Real Academia Española (the Spanish Royal Academy or RAE) whose sole job has been to maintain strict grammar and language rules for the entire Spanish-speaking world. Whenever someone is unsure of a word or rule, it is very common to consult la RAE, but it’s a much bigger deal than just Googling something on Dictionary.com or Webster’s in English-speaking countries. You know those old-people minion Facebook memes people like making fun of? There are some for RAE-approved grammar and language. I’m completely serious. I’ve had Spanish literature professors fucking email RAE officials when teaching some obscure grammar rule to make sure they’re up to date with RAE standards. I’ve had them scold students or dropping points for using a new or loan word in class because “it’s not RAE-recognised”. It’s the biggest deal.

Even if a word is widely understood and used, there are people who refuse to recognise it because “La RAE” doesn’t either. La RAE’s word is law for many Spanish-speakers, and it very rarely adds or changes words. They would never dream of adding “selfie” or “muggle” to the dictionary the way it has happened in English.

Spanish is a gendered language, so it’s hard to make things gender neutral without drastically changing centuries-old language rules. For example, the Spanish word for child is “niño” for masculine and “niña” for feminine. The correct gender-neutral way according to la RAE is “niño”, but lots of people use the “@“ symbol in the place of the gendered vowel to make it more inclusive, giving you “niñ@“. And RAE-thumpers get pissed about it. It’s impossible to make something widely recognised without RAE approval, which sucks because the people who manage RAE are a bunch of stubborn and elitist old people. To be fair, using “@“ is a bit cumbersome and only good for written works, and it’s always been a struggle to find a spoken gender-neutral equivalent. That’s where this sweet girl’s solution comes in.

Using a neutral vowel “e” instead of the gendered vowels “a” and “o” is an incredibly elegant solution to this problem! It’s easy to say and it’s easy to write. But for the average Spanish-speaker to accept “les” instead of “los” or “las” is a huge feat we’re undertaking. Standing up to her teacher, who most likely adheres to RAE rules and regulations, is a huge deal. These rules are centuries old and haven’t changed that much this whole time. What she’s suggesting is making a lot of people irrationally mad.

It’s not like in English where people whine about “they”, and yet you can pull up hundreds of examples of it in older literature. This has never been done in Spanish before. And it’s gonna take a lot more work to make this a thing in such a tightly-regulated language as Spanish.

there is no medical component to a trans kid transitioning

if a little trans boy comes out to his parents & is like 4 all youd do for his transition is cut his hair, buy a new wardrobe, & switch pronouns & possibly change names

no one is gonna put a little 4 year old on testosterone OR puberty blockers until theyre actually about to start puberty & then they give them a few years to really decide if they want to start hormones

a trans kid existing isnt “child abuse.” child abuse is refusing to let your kid live their lives as they truly are & forcing them to present as a gender they arent

radfems who interact with this post will be blocked & your argument will not be read or even considered. i do not care about the opinion of a transphobe & my original post still stands.

I disagree that Millenials were never able to gain traction in any movement. Occupy was a huge movement, marches drew thousands of people, there were camps in every major city in the US for months and some in smaller towns also.

The problem wasn’t traction, the problem was that we weren’t able to control the narrative because it was an issue that was easily dismissed by people who didn’t live in our world. It was easy for people to paint us as entitled whiners who wanted everything handed to us because they’ve never personally experienced having a job that doesn’t pay for a degree, and having a degree but not being able to get any job related to it and having to take five part-time minimum wage jobs just to barely get by. And those people who have struggled with money and being able to get a job just think, “Well I did what I had to to get by, why can’t you?”

The difference between this and something like Occupy is that this is something people can’t ignore as a matter of life and death. There’s no painting this as children whining about not being handed free money and high-ranking management jobs with no work. There’s no claiming “Well I got shot at in school and I was fine” because they fucking weren’t.

Also, just talking directly about Occupy, because that’s the one I know the most about since I got super personally invested in that one:

Just because the camps emptied and people aren’t carrying around “We are The 99%” signs as much any more doesn’t mean that the Occupy movement died, it just evolved, and it did actually make some really important strides and continues to have influence today.

Occupy brought police violence back into the mainstream conversation. Everyone remembers Pepper Spray Cop, right? Those students were Occupiers and that guy became the poster child for unnecessary force against the movement. Lots of Occupiers went on to throw their full-hearted support behind the Black Lives Matter movement partially because of the police violence they witnessed through Occupy, because it opened their eyes to just how disgusting the police force in this country truly is. (To be clear I’m talking about us white Occupiers specifically, who, had we not been following those multiple Twitter live-feeds of police raids and seeing all of the pictures coming out of things like Pepper Spray Cop, lets be honest, would have probably been on the same “Well [victim] must have done SOMETHING to deserve it #notallcops” side our brethren have been.)

Occupy started the conversation about raising the minimum wage. Part of the dialogue from the beginning was pointing out to critics that inflation and tuition increases are a thing and that a minimum wage job in the ‘70s could cover more tuition than a minimum wage job now can. People started actually looking at the numbers and seeing this huge discrepency and realizing that there aren’t just college students taking these jobs trying to pay for school, it’s adults just trying to live their lives and provide for their families.

Occupy also started the conversation about free secondary education, since it started in NYC and one of the college’s in the city had famously been free up until very recent to the start of Occupy. They not only started that argument, they were able to convince several schools to set up free tuition policies.

Basically everything you know about economic inequality in the US, the unfairness of college tuition and loans and minimum wage and unpaid internships is thanks to Occupy. The minimum wage getting raised and colleges starting to be held accountable for excessive tuition is thanks to Occupy.

Hell, Occupy basically write the rules of successful protesting in the 21st century. I haven’t been to a protest or demonstration since that hasn’t utilized techniques that Occupy solidified. Which isn’t to say that Occupy didn’t take techniques from the movements that came before it, but that’s the whole point. These movements don’t end they just evolve.

I just hate to see those people who essentially made themselves homeless to bring attention to the severe social inequality and the profound impact that it’s had on Millenials and younger generations be written off as a movement that “didn’t get any traction.”

And that’s to say nothing of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has ALSO been largely Millennials, and I genuinely welcome people more involved with it than I am to talk in-depth about how it’s brought police violence into painfully sharp focus in the mainstream, how the violence has been inordinately weighted against black people, and how the mainstream coverage of it tends to ignore black women and particularly trans women.

Like, how can people genuinely say that Millenial protest movements haven’t gained traction when the most high-profile movement in the past five years has been Black Lives Matter?

I don’t understand.

Don’t let the mainstream media color your image of what Millenials have been fighting for and how successful they’ve been. For the sake of everything we are fighting for, for the sake of the younger generations after us and after Generation Z, for the sake of their movements and their protests, for the sake of not fostering a culture of Millenials vs Generation Z.

Proud parent moment

Can’t remember if I wrote about this already, but recently my 8yo NT daughter roped my 10yo ND son into playing restaurant with her.

Sister spent hours creating a menu, rearranging our porch furniture, picking flowers for tablescapes, creating fake food and drinks, making a hostess stand and cash register. She was so invested and proud.

Bubby either rode his bike or played inside while he waited for her grand unveiling ceremony because he quickly got bored with the game. After seeing the results of her hard work he immediately asked, “how would non-verbal people order?” (I guess he overheard me ranting about an Autism Mom not wanting her small daughter in a classroom with “scary, non-verbal boys” who would damage her daughter’s progress… :::RAGE::: …sorry for the tangent).

Now Sis could have gotten pissed about his seemingly unappreciative rejection of her hard work. Disabled people and other minority groups get treated like ungrateful shits all the time for simply asking that their needs be considered and met.

But instead they put their heads together to work on making their restaurant more accessible. They ended up redesigning the floor plan for wheelchairs users. They drew pictures on their tablet drawing programs for non-verbal people to order. They added menu items for people with allergies. And this time my son got really into the imaginary play too. They spent 2 days playing restaurant and serving all the stuffed animals in the house, which was just adorable AF.

I just found it to be so humbling and sweet, and a really good example of how people should treat constructive criticism. Build bridges. ❤

reblog this and tag your least favorite neurotypical™ social rule, mine is having to smile and look people in the eyes to seem polite

so, the notes of this post are already pure gold

On Election Day, hoards of students from Arizona’s North and Maryvale high schools staged a walkout to campaign against Donald Trump and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. A local ABC station captured the stunning moment in a Facebook live video Tuesday afternoon.