Okay, so having a panic attack because I was caught at a Mexican restaurant in a storm that led to a fucking tornado warning and 80 mph winds with my teacher besties on a teachers only day was not the vibe.

okay i'm gonna say something and you all have to give me a chance. ready?

we need to stop making fun of poor american southerners who distrust the government. it's real easy to call them all conspiracy theorists and dismiss them, but half the time, its built off of a genuine feeling of being abandoned by the infrastructure meant to keep them safe.

in appalachia, a lot of people lost their homes because of coal mining operations. a lot of people worked in those mines, and then when the mines stopped being profitable, they got tossed out with the bathwater. a lot of appalachia is poor, malnourished, and i don't blame them for not trusting rich politicians who dismiss them as stupid and lower class.

if yall actually listened to half the things poor southerners say, you'd realize that a Lot of common leftist complaints are virtually identical to the rural grandma who doesn't hold with electronic money and politicians. it stems from a genuine feeling of abandonment and ostracization by the people who run the country. functionally, someone living paycheck to paycheck in the city in a tiny apartment has infinitely more in common with someone from rural appalachia than a politician. high rent, high taxes, food insecurity, feeling lied to by those in power, a general sense of frustration. it just sounds fancier coming from a city mouth than one with shitty teeth and a southern accent.

tl;dr stop dismissing southern people as stupid. they're absolutely right not to wholeheartedly trust politicians, because they've been fucked over by them time and time again, and honestly, id rather talk to a southern person who openly distrusts their representatives than someone from the city who wholeheartedly believes that Frederick Jamestown OldMoney III genuinely cares what people think and can be convinced to change his ways.

grace made tangible

aot reincarnation au but levi is from texas for some reason. he has freckles. n a cute drawl that's just BARELY mixed in because he's lived in the bigger cities. of course everyone underestimates him but he's doing the work of like a dozen farmhands in half the time or something and so he becomes a local celebrity OR SOMETHING ITS SO FUNNY TO ME IDK

and the letters you wrote me they were written in shame

and know that your conscience still echos my name

Nothing quite as restless as stick season as I’ve come to learn the hard way. I don’t think I could’ve made it through another winter like this. I’m back to being a visitor again - for the better.

January road trips--Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia. mostly pleasant drives except the inbound trip through Virginia at night, when the fog was so low and thick in the mountain valleys that visibility was limited to one car ahead of us and one car behind us. At one point an extremely bright light appeared directly over our car and blinked periodically; was difficult to capture except in the ambient brightness on the ground in the last pic. Never figured out what it was. 

(more photography)

The Captain and her First Mate.

Instagram

ngl considering the increasing focus i see in leftists on walkable cities, public transport, and other urban features, im... really not surprised people keep thinking "rural" just means south. rural folk really are invisible huh

...

A few (primarily Southern) superstitions I found while doing an Antrho project. Most of these are from my family's history, but a lot of them are also just very common Southern superstitions that I thought were cool.

The first male to enter the house after the New Year has to give the family a dollar, which has to be taped above the front door indicating that money will flow throughout the house for the new year. According to my mother, this comes from a side of the family that she believes was Polish. She's not sure if that's true or not, but my grandmother on that side did this every New Year's until she died.

Eating black-eyed peas, collard greens, and pork on New Years brings good luck. This one's very common and my family does this every year (my parents cut out the collard greens, but my grandmother keeps them in. She also uses hog jowl instead of regular pork). The peas are for luck, the greens are for money, and the pork is for prosperity.

Putting a mirror on your porch can prevent the devil from entering your home. Basically this comes from the idea that the devil can only enter a house at night and must return to hell at sunrise and by placing a mirror on your porch, his vanity will cause him to spend the entire night looking at his reflection until the sun comes to banish him.

If you plant a cedar tree and it grows to be six feet tall, you'd lose someone close to you. This one comes courtesy of my grandfather and was honestly one I'd never heard of before.

To prevent spirits from entering your house, paint the entryway/porch of your house with haint blue to confuse them since spirits can't cross water. You see this a lot here and mainly it's the porch roof that's painted haint blue, but I've seen doors and shutters also painted this way.

If you have cracks in your house, a boo hag (a trapped spirit that kind of acts like a vampire) can use them to enter your home. Boo hags mainly use a person's breath as sustenance instead of blood, and it's believed that if the person being fed on by a boo hag struggles, the hag will just take their skin. The hag also has to return to their own skin (as when they feed at night they have none) by morning or else they will be trapped forever without skin.

Having a bottle tree can ward off evil spirits. This is the same thing as painting your porch haint blue, except you hang blue bottles on a tree instead. A lot of people have these regardless if they believe the superstition and they're honestly really beautiful.

Yes, Vale feels sooooo guilty about. About a lot of things actually. But is it religious guilt specifically?

I feel like there’s a difference.

ah sorry dude when i think of catholic guilt i think of it as like. the excess guilt catholics tend to have where always think that they’ve committed some (real or imaginary) wrong/sin in ANY context of their lives like i don’t think of it as solely defined to hyper religious acts. my lapsed catholic friends still feel it to this DAY as like, a cultural specter that lives within them to the point where one of my buddies in school said they lived in the jesus panopticon and they didn’t even believe in jesus anymore anshshsg

I went to the Old Gods of Appalachia live show last night, and *sigh* okay I get it now. I get why the Railroad Man is a sex symbol. But I’m not happy about it.

My dad and I decided to watch the Hunger Games movie (I read the book a long time ago) and it's interesting watching something filmed in the Appalachians. Especially a survival movie since I'm familiar with the type of terrain they're in.

Growing up in a run down half abandoned coal mining town that looks eerily similar to Katniss's hometown there wasn't much else to do besides run around in the woods.

someone: how can you say local Appalachian context makes Katniss being Indigenous make sense, WV has one of the lowest percentage populations of Indigenous people

Me, half Egyptian, living in Appalachia, eating candy I bought from one of the three locally owned Thai grocery stores near me, contemplating grabbing lunch at one of the dozen also locally owned Mexican restaurants: you ever heard the saying there's lies, there's dammed lies, and then there's statistics?