She is nearly 70 years old, with wonderfully brown gnarled, wrinkled hands and eyes that are creased from smiling. She hand-makes all of her own clothes and sews dolls for my little sister. Abuela is very lonely… her husband already passed and her kids live far away. She misses her grandkids. Abuela comes around our place for the company almost every other day.
So this morning, my little sister and I went to visit the Abuela to return the kindness of her vegetables with some homemade soup.
It’s a funny joke we have, that if you can make a perfect posole you are wife material. I was joking around with my friend beforehand to see if I was worthy of marriage, and my little sister thinks me failing is the best thing in life, so of course she wants to ask Abuela when we arrive.
We’re wearing masks and gloves and can’t give her the big hug like we want to, but Abuela is always happy to see us. We bring the pot of soup to her table. My little sis, the little shit that she is, immediately asks, “Abuela, is Reina ready to be a wife yet?”
And Abuela immediately shifts her entire mood. Her face literally becomes this:
Abuela’s look pierces through my heart.
“Who are you trying to impress? A man or a woman?” she asks, deadly serious. We have broached the topic of marriage. It is her domain now.
And I, Rei, gay as the fourth of July, cannot believe that either Abuela clocked me instantly or that she could possibly have a fascinating past of her own.
I thought about lying, but my little sister was there and I don’t like to lie in front of her. So I was honest and said I was trying to impress a woman.
Without a response, Abuela carefully tries the posole. The room is silent.
“For a man, it’s good,” she says after a moment. “But, you’ll need to work harder to impress a woman.”
All I can do is politely nod. I have so many questions.
Now Abuela is tired. She wants to eat and relax in peace, so she waves us away. We make sure she’s settled, and then my sister and I go home.
I can’t believe my 70 year old Abuela said BI RIGHTS
Anon, when I first saw this ask, I thought it was going to be one of those mixers of nice, traditional sounds, like rain or a coffeeshop. And it is! And there’s lofi hiphop, my favorite sound to write to! Which means this is legitimately an excellent tool for writers, and I love you for introducing it to me.
But I also want to say. There are some choices here. That I need to point out. Because they’re either fantastic or questionable, and I can’t decide.
Things like …
Couple arguing.
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Medieval battle.
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Beehive, where you can write to a fuckton of bees.
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Crime scene.
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And actually the perfect soundscape for NaNoWriMo.
Somebody found this last week and reminded me it existed, so I'mma bring it back to this blog because it’s about ten days until some of you will need that last one. :D
I’m never using any other noise generator ever again.
There are six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial, and Nick Hanauer, Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen’s new book Corporate Bullsht: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power, and Wealth in America* provides an essential taxonomy of this dirty six:
In his review for The American Prospect, David Dayen summarizes how these six lies “offer a civic-minded, reasonable-sounding justification for positions that in fact are motivated entirely by self-interest”:
As far back as the slave trade, corporate apologists and mouthpieces have led by asserting that true things are false, and vice-versa. In 1837, John Calhoun asserted that “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.” George Fitzhugh called enslaved Africans in America “the freest people in the world.”
This tactic never went away. Children sent to work in factories are “perfectly happy.” Polluted water is “purer than the water that came from the river before we used it.” Poor families “don’t really exist.” Pesticides don’t lead to “illness or death.” Climate change is “beneficial.” Lead “helps guard your health.”
II. Markets can solve problems, governments can’t
Alan Greenspan made a career out of blithely asserting that markets self-correct. It was only after the world economy imploded in 2008 that he admitted that his doctrine had a “flaw”:
No matter how serious a problem is, the market will fix it. In 1973, the US Chamber of Commerce railed against safety regulations, because “safety is good business,” and could be left to the market. If unsafe products persist in the market, it’s because consumers choose to trade safety off “for a lower price tag” (Chamber spox Laurence Kraus). Racism can’t be corrected with anti-discrimination laws. It’s only when “the market” realizes that racism is bad for business that it will finally be abolished.
now you know why I keep wearing mine out despite MRAs trying to ruin them
bringing classy back
also just in point of fact the thing donned by your standard mra is not a fedora but a trilby
Yep. This is a fedora.
The name “Trilby” also has stage origins; Daphne George du Maurier’s novel was adapted as a play, and one production featured the title character wearing a hat which was then named for her.
As for the photo, under that hat is the expression of a man standing in Butler’s Chocolate Café on Wicklow Street in Dublin, watching them fill the box of chocs he’s just ordered for DD, with the certain knowledge that he’ll get a few in due course.
The fedora is a Banana Republic Safari hat; now about 36 years old and in need of maintenance - like Bagpuss, “saggy and a bit loose at the seams”, but I’m hardly one to make comments on that score… :-P
Fedora wearers look like this (Trevor Howard in “Brief Encounter”):
Trilby wearers look like this (Trevor Howard in “The Liquidator”):
Same actor, different movies, different hats, difference is striking.
Some people have Opinions:
Others have Observations:
I wear a fedora and carry a fountain pen, so I Am Saying Nothing… ;->
No matter how many people have ever written their take on an idea… no one will ever write yours the way you do.
And when you’ve spent enough hard work on your idea, it’s entirely possible that your idea will be better than all the ones that came before.
We’ll never know until you write it.
If you’re scared that you’ll spend a lot of effort on an idea and it won’t be any better…?
Welcome! You’re now suffering the same uncertainty that every writer ever born deals with, every day.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll win. But until you start, it’s guaranteed that you never will.
Putt your butt in the chair, start working, and begin the daily challenge of taking the same gamble that all of the rest of us take, every day.
It’s all any of us can do. :)
I wrote a story for one of the Star Trek manga releases back in the early aughts.
My idea was to show one of the events that could have helped move the Klingon Empire from its warlike posture in TOS to its membership – and subsequent bureaucratic in-fighting – in the Federation.
The idea was to put Kirk and a Klingon commander in a situation on a planet where they had to work together, and at a moment when Kirk could save himself or risk his life to save the Klingon, he makes the ethical, moral, Star Trek choice to save him.
They get out of danger, and the Klingon commander’s crew beams down to rescue him. When they see Kirk there, they are like “FUCK YEAH! JAMES KIRK IS OUR PRISONER!” But the commander relates the story of Kirk saving him, and wonders if maybe not everything about humans and the Federation is true. Some other stuff happens (I forget what made the final draft) and the last couple pages are this Klingon commander facing a tribunal, and hoping that, somehow, his very public execution will not be in vain.
I had such a good time working on it, putting the guys in a collapsing dilithium mine (CAVES!) and treating it as if it were an actual episode where they only had the budget to work in the caves on Stage 16, and maybe one day on the bridge. From limitation comes creativity, they say.
About 2/3 of the way through my second draft, I realized that I was essentially writing Enemy Mine, which I have not seen, but know enough about to recognize the similarities. I called my friend, Andrew (may his memory be a blessing) and asked him what to do.
“You’re writing two men on an island,” he said. “It’s one of the seven stories. Just make it your own and have fun doing it.”
When I was younger (I did this in my 30s), I was terrified to make mistakes. I was convinced that everyone would know that I was the fraud and failure my father made me believe I was. I was so certain that I would be excoriated for stealing an idea, I almost sent the (very small) check back and bailed on all of it.
But I found a way to listen to Andrew, and keep my dad out of the room and out of my head while I told my version of two men on an island.
The book went on to sell about how they expected. It’s been out of print forever, but I still have a couple of my contributor’s copies on my shelf.
My long-winded point, OP, and my “yes, and,” to Diane’s post, is that there’s no such thing as a totally original story, but nobody else will ever tell YOUR story the way you tell it, so that doesn’t matter. Truly. Nobody who matters cares, because everyone who matters knows this.
So when you feel uncertain, please remember that the way you tell your story will be special, unique, and entirely yours.
This is a lesson one can also learn from reading fanfiction. If you doubt what these good people have to say about all this, just go look at the comments on a popular fanfic. Any fandom, any pairing or none, it doesn’t matter. A well written fanfic is the absolutely Platonic Embodiment of this concept. It’s all been said before? There’s nothing new under the sun? Originality is dead? And yet, a thousand people have squealed with joy over this re-telling of an old trope with characters someone else invented.
May fanfiction writers be blessed by all the gods, old and new!
I miss when library books used to have little paper pockets inside with a list of all the people who borrowed it and when… I hate that this is now exclusive knowledge of librarians. I do care that a miss Mariana borrowed this book in 1985 and then Dario in 1997. They’re my brothers and sisters
but really, there’s a million reasons why it’s an issue for users and staff of the public library to have immediate access to a record of who has borrowed a specific item and when.
and that’s not even about keeping the information “privileged” to the library staff, these days they don’t even keep a digital record of an item’s history of borrowers; once you return a book, there isn’t a list of everyone thats ever taken that book out that your name gets added to (though they probably take a tally of how many times it is checked out for circulation statistics).
i think the card system is a remnant of a culture that could only exist in the world before the internet as it exists today, where this identifying kind of information wasn’t always readily at your fingertips, even for those at the “information professional” level.
don’t get me wrong here, i do understand the nostalgia factor to it as being part of a different time, but i think it’s always important to understand why this kind of system has its flaws and has been (at least in north america) taken out of practice
bear in mind that US public libraries spent most of the past twenty years fighting off lawsuits that they were prohibited from disclosing to the public because when 9/11 happened the federal government wanted a list of every person who read certain books and the librarians had a really bad feeling about where that kind of policy would end up going, for some reason.
not keeping the records in the first place is a way for the libraries to protect themselves when they stand up for your privacy.
tbh shoutout to the over 40s on tumblr, sorry the internet acts like yall belong in the retirement home when ur literally just regular adults with hobbies
I was going to leave comments in the tags, but I decided this was important enough to put on main.
In college, my friend group collectively got into the SCA - Society for Creative Anachronism. They’re the people who get really into medieval reenactment, the fighting and crafts and cooking, they have kings and queens and knights and events and a good percentage of them (but not all!) work or have worked at Ren Faires.
I am forever grateful my friends dragged me into that, because it was my first introduction to fandom in older adults. Middle-aged dorks. Elderly nerds. Absolutely as intense and weird and hilarious and fun as any fan in their teens or 20s. I started getting into fandom already knowing there was a road ahead for me as I got older, full of handmade costumes and late night movies and shelves of pewter dragon goblets and mixed-aged road trips to meet ups and conventions.
And it kills me that so many people don’t know that sort of community even exists. On both sides, even! I went to Philcon a few years ago, which tends towards older fans, and an older woman I was talking to sadly told me that she thought fandom was dying out, because she never saw younger fans any more.
Over the past decade, there’s been a really toxic movement towards keeping different ages strictly separated, both in and outside of fandom. There’s this strong implication that if an older person wants to interact with a younger person, there is something inherently predatory about that.
Yeah, that attitude sucks. That drive towards separation and puritanism sucks. Declaring that younger people should have nothing to look forward to and that older people should stay separated and lonely sucks. It sucks and we are all worse for it.
Don’t fear age. Don’t put an age limit on having fun. Give yourself a damn future.
Beverly passed away in 2019, but she was one of many of my favorite, elder cosplayers that frequent DragonCon and remind all of us to keep playing as long as we can.
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