Mid-Lent Reflections

So I'm hoping that today's post will be a little bit different. I've been thinking a lot about this blog and I realised that I've been treating it like an obligation rather than a voluntary personal project.

Since I began converting to Catholicism, things have become rather complication for me. I'm changing as a person and feel very disconnected from my friends, who are all secular, as a result. Additionally, I haven't had a great deal of success in making Catholic friends just yet so I honestly feel quite lonely. During these times, I'm so grateful to God for my lovely fiance who has been the pinnacle of support during this struggle. So this blog gives me an opportunity to talk about those things that I'd like to talk about with friends and potentially connect with people online.

I'd like to try and be a bit more personal and engaging with these posts but I believe that is something I'll find with time. For now, I'll share what I can with you.

Well, right now I'm sick. Nothing serious, I just have a stuffy nose and am very fatigued. I've had to cancel some appointments and interviews and haven't been very productive these past couple of days as a result, which is completely understandable. What's less understandable, though, is that I've honestly been really letting myself down with my Lenten fasts. I haven't been consistent with them at all and the only one I can say that I haven't broken is my fast from meat. I've been on social media almost non-stop and it's been awful. I usually have a block on my phone that keeps me out of most apps from 8pm-9am but I haven't been using it lately. I've been so unproductive for weeks now and have done little to no cleaning around the apartment. It's getting pretty bad here and I'm disappointed in myself. I was hoping to get back onto things this week but of course, now I'm sick. My prayer life has been almost nonexistent. I'm not going to continue, it's not helpful for me to engage in excessive negative self-talk and I should be directing my focus towards improvement, not despondency.

On a more positive note, my early childcare traineeship interviews went incredibly well! So well, in fact, that I was offered the traineeship on the spot during my first interview! I have the contract with me, that I will be signing and returning tomorrow (assuming I'm not still sick) and I'll be starting the job two weeks from today! I've already handed in my letter of resignation to my current job and am looking forward to this new chapter of my life.

I also went to Great Vespers on Saturday night with my lovely fiance. We've just passed the Veneration of the Holy Cross so I have included photos of the Cross from St. Andrew's after Great Vespers on Saturday and St. Volodymyr's after Divine Liturgy on Sunday. This was only my second time attending Great Vespers. I sat near the choir and did my best to participate. Hopefully if I work hard enough, I might be able to join the choir one day.

Lastly, yesterday I spent the day resting and watching movies and anime with my fiance. We watched the first episode of part six of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. So far, I'm not loving it. This is the first part with a female main character and it shows. I don't appreciate how overly sexualised Jolyne is immediately. I'll keep watching it at some point but right now, I'm not super interested. I just watched Chicago for the first time and watching another piece of media about women in prison (even if they aren't there for long) is not capturing my interest. My fiance showed me an episode of an old anime he used to like so I showed him an episode of Ouran High School Host Club, which I watched back in year 7, and he liked it so much we watched a second episode! We also watched Mad Max: Fury Road together. Later on, we watched Josie and the Pussycats, which he highly enjoyed and I would highly recommend.

#there are two types of actors 😂💖

Valentin & Vanessa

Again, @pointdotiozao kills everything with this masterpiece ♥ second time he draws my wild couple with @draerian and that's always amazing !

I love the way they work together, their expressions, how classy and yet how natural they are ! Just a nice moment before fancy event ♥

guys, there’s something called ‘god state’ now….. it’s basically “ ” i saw a post where someone said i’ll teach how to reach that…

Buggy is such a The Archer girlie it's not even funny. How can every single line of lyrics in a song fit a character so well and how did I not realise this before????

A study by More Than Equal (which for some reason requires a company name to download, despite its importance to people who aren’t in a company) has found that commercial prejudice is the biggest cause of women not getting through the lower tiers of motorsport. It has also found that lack of awareness (with nearly half of motorsport fans surveyed not being sure if women were even allowed to compete in F1, let alone businesses) due to a lack of visible and consistently demonstrable trajectory into professional racing series were a big factor. Thus, some companies that weren’t being prejudicial were nonetheless not backing women because they could not see any chance of a return of investment. It’s worse in motorbikes: 81% of fans aren’t sure if women are allowed to race in World SBK, despite it having the best record for women of all the professional series questioned (in that Ana Carrassco has already won a championship in that series). For MotoGP only 22% of fans thought women were allowed to compete.

Every series has a lot of work to do

Also note: given that 80% of fans think there will be a woman in F1 in the next 10 years, about 30% of fans think that the FIA is going to change the regulations to allow a woman into the series to make that happen. This represents a pretty spectacular fail on the part of the FIA, given that women have raced in F1 in the 1950s and 1970s, and attempted to qualify all the way into the early 1990s. Note the latter date is just before the really big sponsor money started to become compulsory for teams to compete in F1 - 1992 had some teams racing solidly in the midfield on a $15 m budget, but by 1998 that wouldn’t be enough money to keep a F1 team running for a whole year. Other reasons women struggle to become professional racing drivers: - women get less track time (thus less practise) then men - lack of role models (hampered by women being particularly sceptical about existing and previous social schemes like #WeRaceAsOne. Also note: over 80% of male fans and over 90% of female fans believe the racing is automatically worse in enforced single-gender series, which prevents people in F1 Academy and the former W Series from being seen as role models in that context) - lack of gender-specific training available (i.e. the specialised training expected of racing drivers is all based on male models) - rampant stereotypes against women (about 20-25% of men, and 5-20% of women, believed each of the stereotypes surveyed. Note that even one stereotype by the wrong person can be enough, and no data existed on what percentage believed at least one stereotype, as data only displays on a per-stereotype basis) - a culture that is unwelcoming to people not exactly like those already “accepted” - a culture that is sometimes discriminatory against women in terms of microaggressions - lack of research into whether mechanical biases exist in the cars in terms of suitability for anyone outside an unnecessarily narrow range of physiques - a perception that motorsport is extremely discriminatory by sporting standards (perhaps to a greater extent than is warranted even by the above statements) - unsurprisingly given the above, a smaller pool of talent to pick from at every stage

The consequence is that the gender imbalance becomes about 40% worse between FIA karting and lower-tier non-karting series, and another 40% worse between lower-tier and professional-tier series. This despite Hintsa, arguably the best organisation in the world at preparing motorsport competitiors physically, noting that women are as capable of hitting the physical and psychological benchmarks required as men. Be warned: there will be backlash if more women enter motorsports. Yes, over 40% more women will deepen their attachment to motorsport - but between 8 and 18% of men will reduce it (probably in a very noisy and nasty way, given the other findings). The report is not close to perfect - the way it’s presented shows its own biases and weak points in terms of communication equality - but it sheds a light on how far motorsport hasn’t come since 1997. 26 years ago, the first major research about women in motorsport identified four main obstacles to women competing: - Sponsors refusing to back women - Stereotyping - Peer pressure, primarily due to lack of understanding - Over-scrutiny of results Compare the two lists and see the similarities.

Girl who's only played games seeing the sunset for the first time in half a year: “I'm getting some real raytracing vibes from this“

shady courtyard (smoker)

How many days does January have?

I feel a bit stuck in this boring routine, feel unproductive and tired.

DAY 916 - LAST SWELL

IG: @futureselfbeats

Had a really fucking rough 2023, and first week of 2024 (curse you stomach flu)

But I keep looking back at this photo of the sunrise over the beach and the Atlantic I took right before Christmas at 7 am fresh off an airplane

And it just makes me reflect and be thankful for giving me an opportunity for a new day every morning.

I made it through 2023, and I’m looking forward to more sunrises in 2024.

Alllllright, a quick and dirty late review of the BELOVED show, Bed Friend, episode 8, which I referenced yesterday as getting just BETTER and BETTER with each ticking minute. A warning in advance that I am dizzyingly jet-lagged, so this may be non-sensical at times, but just roll with me, because:

IT WAS A GREAT EPISODE. Like I said in the comments of the post linked above, god, this episode had so much! I love the beach-vacay-and-temple-shots trope. I love that King jetted to see Uea. I love that they reconciled. I LOVE THAT WE GOT TO SEE FAMILY THAT LOVES UEA. I love King’s thirst for revenge -- we didn’t even SEE Krit in this episode, buh-bye! I love King’s desire to continue to make things right for Uea vis à vis the private investigator.

King didn’t just say that he’d take care of Uea. He is showing the hell up and doing the job, and damn. Yes, yes, he’s gotta channel that repressed energgyyyyy somehow, heh, but no, seriously. 

King’s in love with Uea. And I love how this show showed that development, and shows how committed King IS to Uea. While the plot is complicated, and full of STUFF -- King’s commitment to Uea is UNCOMPLICATED. It’s piercing through our hearts. He’s a man in love, and he’s gonna do shit for the man he loves, period. 

Geez. I so didn’t expect this from this show (as @wen-kexing-apologist noted in their review of episode 8 -- the seriously complicated plot at the start of the series made me wonder if this script was going to weakly solve everything with Uea just falling in love and being like, ooooh, everything’s great now). I didn’t expect that the very uncomplicated DRIVE by King to dig into Uea’s issues and help him problem-solve through his past would be the ultimate anchor for this series. 

I fucking LOVE that this show spun me for a loop. In a little bit of a Bad Buddy-ish way -- it took a player trope, the image of a player, and totally spun it on its head. King is weak for Uea. The kind of power that we think a player would have -- welp, King is using that kind of power instead to help Uea resolve real and tangible issues. 

I love that Lampang serves as a place of respite for Uea. I love that he has that, in physicality, and that King met him there. I love that it becomes, through Uea’s aunt and Uea, a place of love for Uea. We know he fucking deserves that.

I love seeing Uea fall for King. The corner smiles, the teasing, the silent giggling. The intimate confessions at the table near the kitchen (love all the implications of sitting at a place that means so much to making a HOME together, à la Kinou Nani Tabeta). 

I FREAKING LOVE LOVE LOVE THE COMPANY TEAM, Y’ALL. JADE AND GUN AND THE LADIES, come awn! Jade = MVP, one of the best.

This isn’t so much of an analytical review (I can’t muster the energy right now) as it is more of a love letter to how this show has fucking just held. its. own. against a tremendously complicated plot line. In particular, as many have mentioned, especially @bengiyo‘s stray thoughts, it was SO IMPORTANT, SO SO SO IMPORTANT, to see Uea take meds and talk about how receiving mental health care is helping him get through his days (@bengiyo, I’m also curious about the question you pose about survivors being offered mental health care at their companies -- as someone in the social services, that strikes me as a good idea, but I wonder if survivors have other interpretations, particularly related to privacy and labor retention, and the company avoiding harassment lawsuits).

In other words, this episode simply had everything. It doesn’t reach the Bad-Buddy-episode-10 echelon by way of both acting AND writing, but damn, did it ever close a hell of a lot of loops in a very convincing way.

And we get more next week. With all props to @wen-kexing-apologist: #pransdaddarktimeline edition looks like it closes out (and I HOPE that fucking mom GETS HERS TOO, pardon my franche). And a new guy in Uea’s life... this show keeps throwing curves, but now I trust that it’ll be handled well. 

The Chosen One

Soldiers kill sheep in the streets and I see bison skulls piled high, the bullets are made in the United States.

Trees are set ablaze by tanks and I see Moses kneeling in fear and reverence, God does not speak from these flames.

The people starve and I see seaweed gathered in baskets on Irish shores, Dutch tulip bulbs boiled with rabbit bones.

When they said ‘never again’ it was never for love of the hundreds of millions murdered, nor fear of the systems that allowed such evil to rise. They said ‘never again’ to shipping lane inconveniences, to stock market woes, and to being seen for cowards.

At least a coward would sit in quiet fear, content in inaction. Now they sign over billions, condemning millions to the total destruction. Where is the shame? Where is the apathy? At least in that I can call them mere cowards. What else am I to call them but the evil they so long taught me to revile?

God have mercy on their souls. God have mercy on ours. For the body is doomed - the bombs will still fall, the blood will still spill, the graves of thousands will fill.

(How long is the queue to the pearly gates? Is St. Peter agrieved to see so many young faces? Are wives rejoicing or grieving the reunion with their husbands? Does the brother laugh or cry when he finds his sister among the crowd?)

From Carthage to Auschwitz we were warned. From Roman roads to shipping lanes we watched the weapons trade hands. And when we cry out to the powers that be, they turn away - unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling. Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts.

But the horror is in knowing they are not machines. This is not their nature. They are men. Born with a love for humanity in their hearts, a desire for community and companionship and art. How did they lose such a fundamental part of their being? Was it beaten out of them by bitter men before them or did they discard it themselves, as though it were a cancer to be excised? Does it matter when they so zealously jump knee deep in blood and bone among bomb shattered homes?

And while it is troubling to consider that, being human, we too can have our hearts hardened, it is far more uncomfortable to consider that, being human, they may one day revert to natural compassion. And what does one do when the machine becomes man again? When he proves it was a choice all along? A choice he refused and snubbed until the bodies cooled and the graves grew grassy with age?

God forgive what I cannot.

X.x

chisaki apologizing to eri and he just got proshetic arms and is still getting used to it so when eri wants to shake hands as a first step he feels awkward and says “sorry, i bet it’s not very pleasant to the touch. they’re cold” and eri just smiles big and goes “don’t worry. they become warm when other people touch them” and that single handedly changes chisaki’s perspective on physical touch