Check it out! These are my grandparents!
My grandpa fought in WWII and stole nazi clock pieces from the streets to hand-build all SIX clocks that still ring out in our house every hour. He was a soldier and a wood-worker who never got his high-school diploma but made an amazing life for himself and his family. He’s in a museum, actually, as one of the few survivors of one of the most dangerous battles in WWII, and he received a purple heart for his service.
My grandma was a typist/secretary who traveled the world with him during his time in the military after getting her Bachelors Degree (!!!!! In the mid 1900’s!!!) . They met on a blind date not long after the war was through, and they were married sixty-seven years. She’s the epitome of etiquette and an amazing hostess! She has two daughters, one born in Austria and one in the U.S., and I’m their only grand-child.
You might be thinking, “Artsekey, what’s this all about? This isn’t the usual content!”
Well, I’ll tell you what it’s all about! My grandmother just celebrated her 100th Birthday! She’s been alive since 1923! The same year the radio became commercially available!!!
She’s amazing, and I’d like everyone to know it!
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Which tarot card is your muse?
THE LOVERS
the bounty of your heart is abundant. warmth extends from your fingertips, and your smile has the power to light the darkest of rooms. your presence is a comfort– a gift– it is something to be cherished. just beware of stretching yourself too thin; a heart cannot be full if it is constantly emptying itself for the benefit of others. extend that mercy to your own heart, so you may continue to love and let yourself be loved. your chest is not an empty cavity. / NUMBER: 6 / UPRIGHT: love, harmony, relationships, values alignment, choices / REVERSED: self-love, disharmony, imbalance, misalignment of values
tagged by: @ka-go-me —thank you so much!!
tagging: @arrachnes, @inufangs, @inunisshoku and anyone who sees this!!
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assumes 4 likes from nice people is there to enable me 😂
some stuff about marriage (which I know can rub people the wrong way, so to disclaim this is not about personal choices, this is about an institution/structure/social construct)
I see posts on here about why marriage is important and they’re wondering why there’s queer pushback against it, and I think they misunderstand the politics and the philosophy behind marriage abolition, in the sense that they posit these hypothetical queers as young, naïvely idealistic, and/or uninformed
I’d say anecdotally most queer people I know who do get married are more pragmatic about it than many straight people, and I know a fair few straight people who are incredibly pragmatic about it too for that matter. hell, I generally am like “I’ll get married to any of my friends that need to get out of a country if that should happen” -- that’s about the only reason I would get married.
there’s some element of starry-eyedness-gonna-be-with-person-I-love, sure, but people know about taxes and healthcare and parenthood rights and inheritance and the like, they’re not ignoring those things -- the people who don’t get married (like me) aren’t not doing so for shallow understandings of what marriage is for
anti-marriage politics has been around for quite some time (literally every text I’ve picked up with political essays from the 80s-2000s has included some form of it, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it earlier) and it’s not technically at odds with individuals getting married because they have to -- in fact, the point is that this isn’t about individuals, it’s about systems of assimilation that force people to make choices to conform simply in order to survive, but also assimilation as something some people were going for the whole time:
(mostly white, middle/upper-class) gay people who were in the fight for queer rights, until marriage equality meant they’d gotten what they came for, and they stepped out of it. which also on some level maybe didn’t feel like a choice (I’m sure for some it was), so much as that’s what happens with the violence of assimilation -- you become the in-crowd and the idea of creating waves (after all, you’re married, what are you still complaining for) becomes a lot less salient. head down, live your life, forget the rest of the reasons the fight was happening at all
and suddenly the coalition of queerness -- fights for non-segregated healthcare, for asylum-seekers and refugees, assisting homeless queers, disabled queers, sex-workers rights, the rights of less clean-cut easily digestible queers, and rights for non-queers that were part of the understanding of many who were involved: unions and working class rights was a big one, all of the above encompassed people who weren’t queer, etc. -- that coalition was broken up into becoming about individual lives, it became a private thing, it folded into the idea of LGBT+ and never shall the letters overlap, you are now “allowed” this much leeway as long as you conform and melt away into individualism and consumerism. your family is now you, your spouse, and a couple of potential kids.
the people asking “why marriage” were/are asking why straight systems were getting to define when and how somebody is allowed access to basic rights. because while marriage can go from the “we’re deeply in love and want to show the world by shelling out so much money” to “we went and got a piece of paper signed with our friends, maybe ate some cake” it’s still structurally shutting out non-traditional wider coalitions of support, and wider family structures
marriage is the end-goal, pack up, go home (to your monogamous spouse, and your nice, clean house)
it’s not necessarily saying that there are fixed better new systems all ready to go (although in various places those systems are created out of necessity), it’s asking who is shut out of marriage as an institution and why, and if financially stable queers -- or heck financially unstable queers who need marriage to just keep afloat -- are so focused on this, then what and who is being forgotten about in return?
a lot of the texts point out that in America it was healthcare that was the big focus pre-marriage equality fight -- I cannot say for the rest of the world, but I know the UK is relatively similar in that regard, because AIDS highlighted just how vulnerable queer people were in these systems, and of course the UK also had Section 28, which while no longer in operation legally, is alive and well in discussions about what children “ought” to learn in schools (especially now that transphobia is really just the new cool way of attacking queer people en masse, despite what some LGB-transphobes believe, they are affected by this too)
I’m sure that there are people who are disconnected from the texts on what marriage abolition as a concept is all about beyond “I don’t want it on a personal level, because it’s monogamous and I am not monogamous” but I also think a lot of those people instinctively do get it, like I instinctively got it when I was a bit younger and only knew that it wouldn’t work for me, because, well... I simply don’t believe in its beliefs. and to get married would be as much a lie for me as a romantic relationship, as being cis was, as being heterosexual was -- you might as well ask why I fight for non-segregated healthcare, for non-binary to be recognised legally, instead of just living as a binary cis person. it’s all the same thing
I get that it’s a piece of paper that would give me the right to be supported by [insert person-whom-I-have-entered-into-an-agreement-with here] but it’s also a symbol, and a powerful social demand, and it is amatonormativity and heteronormativity and it’s a system that is used to cover up all kinds of ethical fucked-uppedness, while also having limitations of personhood within it that this post is already too long to get into -- but consider women were fighting to have rights outside of marriages and once those rights started to happen divorces rose astronomically (good for them).
I would never judge someone for getting married for whatever reason, just recognise that I’m one of the people shut out of that structure, and so I am more vulnerable, and instead of thinking that’s naïve of me, ask whether a structure that excludes so many people in its design and demands conformity to enter into it, can be a very powerful tool for violence
and now I need to make a list of those texts, because they do say it with more examples and contexts than I do
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You are a character in a story, what kiss trope is destined to be in your narrative?
The Kiss of Death
The primary instincts of all creatures — sex and death. If you can combine the two they become a bigger selling point. Though not exactly graphic, the Kiss of Death is still sensual, seductive, and very, very deadly. The Kiss of Death comes in many varieties, including: hypnosis, narcotic effect, and sucking out the soul of the victim, which may or may not result in death, depending on the story. Crucially it can also be a symbolic gesture — the kiss itself does not bring death or harm, but the person who receives it knows that his days are numbered.
tagged by: @ka-go-me —thank you so much!♥
tagging: literally anyone who sees this!
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