@shikai-the-storyteller / shikai-the-storyteller.tumblr.com
I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!
“After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: if anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls from our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”
“does fiction influence reality?” fiction is part of reality.
real people write, publish, distribute, profit off, read, learn from, interact with, form communities around, use as a rhetorical device, project onto, and take action based on experiences with fiction. writing fiction is itself a real life set of behaviors that people do. fiction is influenced by and influences culture because fiction is part of culture.
there is no way to separate out what humans do (whether that’s writing stories or conducting scientific studies or having sex) from the culture and systems of power that humans do those things within. there is no behavior of humans that is isolated from and unrelated to our connections with each other.
It’s much more useful to discuss how our behavior relates to our places within existing power structures, our culture, our values and beliefs, and how that behavior impacts each other, and why.
I’m not interested in the question of “does it influence reality?” I’m interested in the question of “how is this piece of fiction impacting real people and why?”
ancient aliens by lemon demon
your tag “sometimes a historian is someone who etches marks on the wall to catalogue your growth” made me clutch my chest and sit down. yes. i’m literally going into a public history grad program next year and you just casually summed up the entire field and why i love it. thank you
here is a gravestone from ancient Athens, a young girl with her favorite pets.
here is a food-sharing scene from the Maya site Calakmul. when they remodeled the building, the people there packed this mural with mud to preserve it.
here is a child’s footprint stamped into clay in Mesopotamia more than 2000 years ago. many of these have been found, and some are inscribed with the children’s names.
we don’t want to forget each other. that’s history.
a chassidic tale- a young boy woke up every morning hours before he needed to be awake just to go into the woods before school. when he got home, his mother would ask him what he was doing awake so early again. he told her “i go into the woods to talk to Gd”, to which she replied “you don’t need to go to the woods for that. you know Gd is the same everywhere, right?” and the little boy said “i know. but i’m not.”
rb to save a person with anxiety!!
I’m in the middle of a panic attack and literally this video itself helped lmao. My brain went from 0 to 100 real quick 😂😂 this is the most chaotic way of helping I’ve ever seen
I thought this was going to be like,,, a joke or something but like this is some solid advise.
The last time I hate a panic attack I sat down and just. ate a raw radish because I didn’t like the taste and it was crunchy. My brain stopped thinking about the panic attack and went to “why the fuck are you eating a radish” and within a minute I felt so much better
Cut to me aggressively gnawing on lemons on an airplane
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
— ERIN BOW
physically stopping in my tracks in the middle of my midday walk because i took two hits, saw a flower and realized that gods cant love the way humans can because love is about survival
ok i was stoned what i should have said was that an immortal could never love the way a mortal can because the reason we love so viscerally is because of our own mortality. we’re born vulnerable and scared and difficult to understand and we only manage to get more so as we age. we need people to love us from the moment that we’re born or we won’t make it. we are constantly trying to understand each other, to love more and to love harder because otherwise we’ll die. everything is fake but love. love is the root of everything. take away capitalism and tear down the skyscrapers and throw away the internet and shit. you would still wake up tomorrow and need to eat, and you would still need someone to care for you when you’re sick, and we’d still need music and entertainment and CONNECTION to each other. and what would prompt anyone to do anything if not for the shared need to survive as a species and to fucking feel some form of being needed in the whole, of being accepted and protected by others. idk how you guys see it but the way we instinctively need to understand each other down to our basic survival instincts….thats pretty metal.
“no more after me”, a mini comic about the now-extinct golden toad. featuring lyrics from deuteronomy 2:10 by the mountain goats
Martha Crump was a biologist who studied the elusive golden toad extensively. They lived only in a four kilometer range in the Costa Rican hills, and spent almost all of their lives underground. However, once a year at the start of the wet season, the male toads would emerge and begin to sing for the females. It was described by Crump as a forest floor full of jewels; hundreds upon thousands of toads in a chorus of sound.
The 1980s saw a sharp decline in population. Whether it was human or climate driven is still unknown, but the mating pairs dwindled drastically. In 1988, Crump witnessed a singular male toad exit a burrow, climb onto a nearby rock, and begin it’s song. When the night was over, the toad descended back underground, alone. In 1989, Crump returned to the area, and again found the singular male. Again it climbed, sang it’s tiny song to a vast and empty jungle, and vanished back underground. It was the last ever sighting of the golden toad. Crump believed it was the same male from the year before.
The golden toad was declared extinct in the early 2000s. The story of the lone male toad helped usher in the species as a hallmark of modern conservation. It is gone, but not forgotten. May we do better with those that are left.
“This is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler…You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.”
Monkey teaches Human how to Crush Leaves
this changed me
“There’s a great Yiddish expression that says, “If I knew God, I’d be God.” In fact, I think that claiming that you “know God’s will” is an act of incredible hubris. Instead, what we say about God has much more to say about us than about God. There are, in fact, a whole range of different theologies within Judaism (you can find some of them in the terrific books “Finding God“ and “The God Upgrade,” both of which describe a whole range of differing, and sometimes even conflicting, theologies.) And while I can only speak personally here, to me, “God” isn’t really a noun at all — it’s a verb. Here’s why. The most common name that God gives Godself in the Torah is “YHVH,” a name that is sometimes thought to be so holy that no one was allowed to pronounce it. But that’s not exactly right — it’s not that “YHVH” was not allowed to be pronounced, it’s that it is literally unpronounceable, since it consists of four Hebrew vowels (yod, hay, vav and hay). By the way, that’s also why some people incorrectly call this name “Yahweh,” since (as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once said), if you tried to pronounce a name that was all vowels, you’d risk serious respiratory injury. But even more importantly, the name YHVH is actually a conflation of all the tenses of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God’s name could be seen as “was-is-will be,” so God isn’t something you can’t capture or name — God is only something you can experience. And indeed, when Moses is at the burning bush, having just been told by God that he will be leading the Israelites out of Egypt, he says, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God responds that God’s name is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is often translated as “I am what I am.” But it could also be translated as, “I am what I will be.” So God is whatever God will be — we simply have no idea. Indeed, for my own theology, I believe that God is found in the “becoming,” transforming “what will be” into “what is.””
— Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman,
I love how libs and conservatives are like, why not follow the peaceful examples of MLK as if he wasn't straight up assassinated despite of that
“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice abd humanity”
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?
someone said ‘the version of me you created in your mind is not my responsibility’ and wow
