Marguerite Bennett's Blog, page 242
September 12, 2016
elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey:
squeeful:
rh0dey:
Fans: We need more mentally ill...
elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey:
Fans: We need more mentally ill characters!!
Tony Stark: *is mentally ill*
Fans: What the fuck
Fans: No, not like that. We meant in pretty, non-threatening, non-symptom-showing ways.
the most realistic part of these movies is tony stark being clearly mentally ill and everyone ignoring and blaming him
September 11, 2016
kainimuramonster:
THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU FORGET...
THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU FORGET TO RINSE THE TUB OUT AFTER USING A LUSH INTERGALATIC BATHBOMB!
He’s fine. He got a bath.
Lush glitter is made of seaweed.
"July 2, 2002, after a routine quarterly blood test, Javier learned he was HIV positive. He’d been..."
July 2, 2002, after a routine quarterly blood test, Javier learned he was HIV positive. He’d been living on the West Coast after college, before his parents got sick, hoping to find the growth he’d seen from his friends who’d left New York for somewhere else. Like a good New Yorker, he hated it out there. He missed that “grungy, rusty thing about New York that like makes sense to my soul.” But he met a man there, and they were in a long-term, monogamous relationship—I’ll let him tell it.
“We were in a relationship,” he says. “And it was an adult choice to not be safe because I was with my partner.” The man knew he was HIV positive, according to Javier, but didn’t say anything. That’s why Javier is so public about his HIV status; if it weren’t a terrible stigma to have HIV, the man might have told him instead of withholding it from him.
Javier spent three days in deep depression after he learned his diagnosis. But then he realized he had to take care of himself. He got up, he sought help, he found support groups, but also: He went home.
In New York he told his parents and let them support him emotionally. He found a doctor who gave him an aggressive course of medication. He took pills that tasted like rust and made him break out in hives. He itched so badly he had to stand under the shower to get any relief. Within six months, HIV was undetectable in his blood. Now, he says, he’s pretty sure his T-cells are better than anyone else’s in the room. He’s had long-term relationships since his diagnosis—not right now, no time for that now—but before the show, a lot of times when he’d tell a guy about his status, they’d beat it fast.
“There was such ignorance about what HIV even was,” he says. “I mean the fact that someone could say, ‘You have AIDS.’ ‘No. I have HIV. Do you know the difference? Right.’ The fact that the behavior that was permeating at the time was men would ask each other their status and one of them could easily lie and just say I’m negative and they would have unprotected sex. But here I am coming at you saying I’m fully HIV-positive and I’m letting you know that and there are ways to be safe. But you’re gonna shun me but then be unsafe with someone you’ve just met?”
But listen to what happens next. Two years after his diagnosis, Javier confronts his old boyfriend. Flies across the country and tells him that he’s HIV positive, that he’s angry and wants an answer. But the guy just sits there and says nothing—he says nothing.
And right then, Javier took a breath and felt overcome by compassion. He didn’t yell at him. “I realized how much pain he must be in.” And so Javier forgave him, with his words and with his heart.
“I don’t know where it came from,” he says now. “I can’t tell you where it came from.”
We’re done eating, and Javier asks if I’d like to see his garden. He keeps one on the roof of the marquis of the Richard Rodgers theater, so that he could be alone for a few minutes on performance days, and so that he could watch things grow. The rooftop garden sits on a balcony that faces 46th Street, and sometimes he walks to the edge and people scream that they love him, and he screams back that he loves them, too. But mostly he likes being alone, watering a big vat of soil and talking to his plants.
Late last year, just as Miranda won his Genius grant and began thinking about leaving the show, Javier found a lump on his body, and when he had it investigated, and learned he had cancer. After all that, cancer.
Just like the last time he got sick, he experienced all the things that come along with a thing that is plenty hard enough already, thank you very much, only this time he was a prominent figure. Organizations reached out to him, some really nice ones, but some with the obvious, unsubtle intent of binding his name to their PR emails. It happened so often that he has decided not to say publicly what kind of cancer he had, because he doesn’t want to be the poster child for a particular cause—just a general one, one in which you don’t keep secrets about your health because there’s no real reason to. There are still the people, he learned, that think you shouldn’t tell anyone if you have cancer. And there it was again, a stigma against the thing that is happening to so many people that literally no one benefits from keeping quiet about it. Patients don’t feel better, and people don’t know how to treat them. We don’t know what to say when we finally learn what’s going on. We don’t know how to help. “Say the damn thing out loud,” he says now. “Talk about the thing. We gotta talk about it. We gotta talk about it. It’s not gonna change. They’re not gonna learn. I’m not gonna learn. We’re not gonna grow.”
But Javier didn’t do any of that at first. At first, he didn’t say a word. He performed for six weeks, knowing he had cancer, not telling the cast yet, just trying to process it. He kept looking for the reasons—what had he eaten or exposed himself to? Was it where he lived? Was it his diet? He blamed himself for everything.
He took two months off from the show. He wanted to return, but what if he didn’t recover? “I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know.” He did his treatments, he meditated, he listened to his doctors. “I just focused my energies on it, and finally when I started seeing progress, I started to believe there was hope that I could be back.”
By the time he took the stage again, he’d lost so much weight that the costumes hung loose on him. He doesn’t doubt himself often, but that night he did. It was the rest of the cast, he says, who got him through the performance, who loved him and were lifting him somehow. He felt their hands on his back. “There was no one who didn’t believe in me in that moment.”
In the show’s final scene, Hamilton, now dead at the hands of Burr, reaches out to help Liza over the threshold of her own death 50 years later. He takes her hand and walks her to the front of the stage. Javier cried through the whole scene. He looks straight ahead into the middle distance as he tells me this with his forearms on his thighs and his hands folded; it’s the only time during our conversations that he doesn’t look me in the eye. Finally, he snaps out of the memory, and he looks at me and says, “How do you describe the feeling that you’re alive? That’s what it was. I was still here and…wow.”
You couldn’t seem to die, I say to him. But he shakes his head and tells me I don’t understand. No, he says, “I’ve died several times already.” That’s what it feels like to him. He is not the person he was when he went into that clinic to hear his routine HIV test results; the person he was died right there, in that chair, and he walked out someone different. He died again when the oncologist told him that, yes, the lump was something they had to talk about, and things were about to change once more. Another quick and irrefutable death. The human brain cannot keep on encountering and surmounting such things, and so each time, to survive, you become another person. And each night on stage you die again and you take a bow and you find out who you are again, because now you know what it is to live.
In his garden on the roof, there’s a purple orchid, a gift from someone who attended the show, and he potted it among his other plants a few weeks ago, and when he brings the watering can near it, he notices something new: a tiny bit of green in the purple.
“Look,” he says. “A sprout.”
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Javier Muñoz of Hamilton Has Been Reborn, Over and Over and Over Again (GQ)
(via @archaeologicals)
doodlesanddandelions:
allthingslinguistic:
ladysparklefists:
idk I just love how we Young People...
idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like
no = “No,” she said.
no. = "No,” she said sharply.
No = “No,” she
stated
firmly.
No. = “No,” she snapped.
NO = “No!” she shouted.
noooooo = “No,” she moaned.
no~ = “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.
~no~ = “No,” she drawled sarcastically.
NOOOOO = “No!” she screamed dramatically.
no?! = “No,” she said incredulously.
I’ve been calling this “typographical nuance” and I have a few more to add:
*no* = “No,” she said emphatically.
*nopes on out of here* = “No,” she said of herself in the third person, with a touch of humorous emphasis.
~*~noooo~*~ = “No,” she moaned in stylized pseudo-desperation.
#no = “No,” she added as a side comment.
“no” = “No,” she scare-quoted.
wtf are you kidding no = “No,” she said flatly. “And I can’t believe I have to say this.”
no no No No NO NO NO NO = "No,” she repeated over and over again, growing louder and more emphatic.
nooOOOO = “No,” she said, starting out quietly and turning into a scream.
*no = “Oops, I meant ‘no,’” she corrected, “Sorry for the typo in my previous message.”
I cannot express how strongly I absolutely love language and writing and communication but if anyone asks why I will be showing them this post from now on
sparkitors:
Why did Splogger Elodie spend the entirety of...
Why did Splogger Elodie spend the entirety of Hamilton taking careful notes and weeping openly into the shoulder of the stranger next to her? So that she could do a little recon mission and gift you beautiful people with Ht the next-best thing: A TEXT RECAP. It’s no live performance, but we think you’ll agree that it’s basically just as good.
sespursongles:
I like this article from The Economist about how het couples who have sons are more...
I like this article from The Economist about how het couples who have sons are more likely to stay together than those who have daughters, and the way fathers think of their sons vs. their daughters, because it basically provides confirmation and statistics for stuff we all notice anecdotally.
Gordon Dahl at the University of California, San Diego and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley noticed more than a decade ago that men are more likely to marry, and stay married to, women who bore them sons rather than daughters. In an analysis of American census data, they found that men were more inclined to propose to their partners if they discovered that a baby in utero was a boy, and they were less prone to getting a divorce if the first child was a boy rather than a girl. In the event of divorce, men with sons were more likely to get custody [ie to ask for custody], and women with daughters were less likely to remarry. […] This effect can be seen in data on households across a number of rich countries, which show that adolescent boys are more likely than girls to live with both biological parents.
Highlights:
“Results from the most recent poll, in 2011, were startlingly similar to those from the first [from the 1940s]: Americans said they favour boys over girls by a margin of 12 percentage points. This preference is driven mainly by men; women are largely agnostic.”
“Mothers usually lavish the same amount of time on their sons and daughters, at least when they are younger, whereas fathers devote more to sons from the get-go.” A study found that “fathers were twice as likely to take paternity leave for a son than a daughter”, and “married fathers with a child between six and 12 years old spent nearly 40 more minutes per day with sons than with daughters. In married families with two children of the same sex, fathers with sons spent between 22 and 27 minutes more per day on child care, and said they had less leisure time than those with daughters.”
“This extra help has a measurable impact on the quality of a marriage. When Giuliano delved into the reasons why more couples with a son stayed together after three years than those with a daughter, she found that fathers of boys were not only more likely to say they were excited to become a parent, but also more helpful around the home. Mothers of boys, in turn, were more likely to praise their husbands as fathers, and were happier in their relationships than those with only girls.”
“Sons also seem to push fathers to be more productive. Studies of Americans and Germans born after 1950 found that having a child of either sex spurred fathers to bring home more bacon, but the difference between a son and a daughter was considerable: nearly 110 hours a year for Germans and around 70 hours for Americans”, which suggests that fathers are “keener to provide for families with sons. Parents of sons seem not just to earn more but also to spend more. An analysis of American consumer expenditure data from the 1990s found that married couples with one son aged 18 or younger spent 4-7% more on housing than those with a daughter, and consumed more of everything from plane tickets to meals in restaurants. Intriguingly, families with sons also spent more on “women’s goods” such as jewellery and personal services (eg, manicures and hair salons), indicating that mothers benefit when there is a boy around.”
“Men are much more gendered in their behaviour, and in their expectations of the behaviour of their kids, than women are”
A dad saying “I’ve taken my daughter to ballgames, but she doesn’t really know the difference between basketball and baseball. If she was a boy, I have this feeling that it would’ve been easier to interest her in those things.”
Another dad saying men want a son so they can have a friend because men are incapable of making friends? and women can’t read the newspaper over breakfast? (”The possibility of shaping [my son’s] preferences to match mine is attractive. It’s why we play sports together, why we read together. I’m already envisioning trying to get him to read the newspaper over breakfast. I think that there’s a very significant desire for friendship that’s heightened for fathers with sons given how few other outlets we have to create friendships.”)
One man was relieved to have a daughter because having a son would have made him nervous about having to “constantly prove his masculinity around him” men are honestly such a joke
A mum saying “I have two daughters. When I asked my husband if he thinks this made a difference in how much he helped out, he said, ‘Yeah, I probably would feel more of a sense of responsibility if we had a son.’ It actually hadn’t even occurred to me before.”
September 10, 2016
Germany's vice chancellor gave the finger to neo-Nazi protesters. He regrets he wasn't ruder
They accused Mr Gabriel of betraying the memory of his father, who was a Nazi supporter. “Your father loved his country, and what have you done to it? You’re destroying it,” one protester said.
Mr Gabriel has previously openly condemned the fascist beliefs of his father, who he says denied the Holocaust until his death in 2012.
In an interview in 2013, Mr Gabriel said he severed contact with his father at the age of 18 after discovering his Nazi sympathies.
After being confronted, the politician laughed and raised his middle finger at the far-right group before walking away.
He said his critics should think about what they would do if faced with a group of "young, aggressive, swearing and ready-for-violence Nazis".
“I made only one mistake, I have not used both hands,” he said in the interview on German television.
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