I Saw A Post Saying That Boromir Looked Too Scruffy In FotR For A Captain Of Gondor, And I Tried To Move

i gotta remember this

I read Stone Butch Blues when it was first published. I was 18, just barely out, and a sophomore at a liberal arts women's college 45 minutes from my parents' house. That would've been... 1993? Yup. 1993.

The book fundamentally changed my understanding of... pretty much everything.

My great-grandparents were all working class. On my dad's side (his parents were cousins), they were farmers. On my mom's maternal side, they were European immigrants and union bricklayers. On her paternal side, Jewish immigrants. Her dad and his sister were raised by their mom, who was not, I believe, religious, and didn't raise them in the faith. She was a shopkeeper.

My grandparents' generation were college-educated (possibly except for my dad's mom). My dad's father was a math teacher and my mom's father, educated at Caltech, was a civil engineer. My mom's mother ran my grandfather's business, including a real estate office for a while.

Both my parents graduated from Stanford and taught English (my dad, who had a Ph.D., eventually went into corporate management to make more money).

So... I grew up surrounded by both the privileged world of aspirational academia and the, much more resonant for me, family stories about immigrant lives, trade unions, and beautiful craftsmanship.

I can do the academic thing, and do it well, but I have always preferred making things to studying them. I have always felt a bit out-of-sync with my family’s "evolution" towards increasingly academic pursuits. I like using my brain, but I like to keep my hands dirty while I do it.

Leslie Feinberg's writing became, for me, the first place where my own queerness and my identification with my family’s immigrant and working-class roots, made sense to me as parts of a single whole.

The summer after my junior year, I went through a directory I'd gotten my hands on of lesbians working in the arts, and sent out letters to those who seemed interesting, compatible, and far enough away from my childhood in California to let me try my hand at becoming something more than my parents' daughter. I asked for an apprenticeship.

As such things do, the end result wound up being... very different from what I'd imagined. I got a gig in New Hampshire helping a musician and her trans partner, who made their living busking on hammered dulcimer. I was meant to go live in a tent on their land, help with the straw bale house they were building, help babysit their 3 year old daughter, and join the busking on my harp. As it turns out, I have absolutely NO musical improvisation ability and had no clue what to do when there wasn't sheet music. The harp spent the summer in its case. Also turns out that my social anxiety made not having my own, completely private, space to retreat to unbearable. I wound up renting a tiny apartment in a nearby college town. And then... well, it turned out that the weather wasn't great for house building, and my girlfriend, spending the summer outside DC with her parents, was miserable, and so she came to join me, and...

Well. Before my girlfriend arrived, I did a lot of hiking and lake swimming, went to Boston Pride and cheered on my busking "bosses," joined them and their friends for a summer solstice ritual at which I was introduced to the concept of herbed butter and the back-breaking problems of invasive blackberry, and rode in their decomposing old subaru wagon (it's fascinating to warch the road go by through clusters of tiny, rusted out, salt-holes in the footwell) all the way to New York, specifically to hear Leslie Feinberg speak.

I was the most awestruck, hero-worshipping baby dyke imaginable, the youngest person in the room by at least a decade, and I still remember the sensation of blushing for *three hours.* Because. I was. In. The. Same. Room. As. Leslie. Feinberg.

That summer broke me wide open. It was the first time I ever felt like I, as an individual being, might hold power, make something that changed things, in the world.

That feeling, of urgent, hopeful agency, swells and recedes in my life, but I never experience it without thinking of Stone Butch Blues and of Leslie Feinberg. And yes, I still blush. Every damn time.

Happy (early) Nov 15th! Remember that Stone Butch Blues is free now and always to read here

Leslie was a communist, a butch lesbian, a nonbinary and transgender activist, and the person who made me who I am today. Consider checking out Stone Butch Blues if you haven’t already 😘 Do it for Leslie, and for hir surviving partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt 💕

Things suck right now. Who wants to join me in making paper crane chains? You don't need any special tools or artistic talent, it gives you something to do with your hands, and you end up with a pretty chain of paper cranes that you can either hang up, or throw away without feeling too wasteful. And if you do join me, post pictures in the reblogs! :)

Tools you will need: needle and thread, a pad of post-it notes, and sharpies/markers/crayons/etc. of your choice.

WIRED

The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government Surveillance

Donald Trump has vowed to deport millions and jail his enemies. To carry out that agenda, his administration will exploit America’s digital

If you’re in the US (or in correspondence with people from there) and you haven’t been paying attention to this issue… it’s time to start.

Dutch longsword fencer Tosca Beuming

Photographed by Martin Philippo and Andress Kools

one of the deans in beijing dance academy rehearses with students

Share to save someone with nut allergies a hospital trip hoooly shit

Vivaldi played by the South African elementary school Goede Hoop Marimba Band

Turn ON the sound

MUPPETS!!!!!!!

Reblog if, no matter the size of the role, you would agree to work with the Muppets if offered the chance to do so, no questions asked