when cecil g. palmer said, “are we living a life that is safe from harm? of course not. we never have been. But that’s not the question. The question is, are we living a life that is worth the harm,”
Accept the fact that you will grow apart from people you’ve had significant relationships with. Understand when someone no longer positively affects your life. Let them go. Don’t hinder your growth.
the cutest shit is when someone is actually interested in getting to know you and how your mind works instead of just wanting to claim you as a possession
In honor of 19-year-old Simone Biles being named Woman Of The Year by ESPN.
She won a record four gold medals at the Olympics. She’s untouchable!
Congratulations!
okay but she is just literally flying. She doesn’t obey the laws of physics. She is her own law. Biles Law. Coolest woman ever.
I AM SOOOO PROUD 😢😢👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
She is a real-life superhero.
She is so dominant that she took a year off, came to Worlds, was in the hospital for a kidney stone 24 hours before the all-around final, fell on beam, went out of bounds on floor, and still won by a mile.
She’s not just the most dominant gymnast in the world. She may be the most dominant athlete in the world.
I remember first learning that you can cry from any emotion, that emotions are chemical levels in your brain and your body is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. so if one emotion sky rockets, that chemical becomes flagged and signals the tear duct to open as an exit to release that emotion packaged neatly within a tear. Everything made sense after learning that. That sudden stability of your emotions after crying. How crying is often accompanied by the inability to feel any other emotion in that precise moment. And it is especially beautiful knowing that it is even possible to experience so much beauty or love or happiness that your body literally can’t hold on to all of it. So what I’ve learned is that crying signifies that you are feeling as much as humanely possible and that is living to the fullest extent. So keep feeling and cry often and as much as needed
SHIT WHAT
Also let yourself cry. It really is a biochemical release valve to dump out all the chemicals that make you feel stuff.
I honestly think one reason men in western culture have so many problems is that we don’t let them cry, and literally their brains get stuffed with all this crap that doesn’t have a release valve. Men, please cry. You’ll feel better. It’s ok. You are not lesser for taking care of your health.
This is why tears from different emotions look different under an electron microscope. They’re literally made up of different things.
Happy tears are structurally different than sad tears than angry tears than overwhelmed tears etc.
I looked it up, cuz that tidbit was dope to me and..
Some people threw white paint on it a few years back.
They want to be a victim so bad.
Fun Fact: That’s a statue of the fist which Joe Louis used to knock out Max Schmeling, Hitler’s favored heavyweight boxer in 1938. Schmeling won the 1st bout by knockout in round twelve, but Joe Louis came back in the follow-up match and laid him the fuck out in the 1st round.
Fun Fact: Schmeling was hated by the Nazis for losing to a black man and for having a Jewish manager, and he hated them right back, stating in 1975 that he was glad he’d lost the fight because the thought of the Nazis using him for propaganda purposes sickened him. He also personally saved the lives of two Jewish children and later became lifelong friends with Joe Louis.
So maybe don’t refer to him as “Hitler’s favored heavyweight boxer”…
Thank you for this additional info!
Reblogging this for the added facts and so people know that Schmeling wasn’t a Nazi or Nazi collaborator and was in fact a good man
Imagine hating Nazis so much that when you get beaten up your response is “Good, now they can’t use me as a role model.”
me, learning about the greek pantheon in elementary: wow, I love athena, so brave and smart
me, after reading about the story of medusa: athena is a spiteful, dumb bitch who can’t direct her anger at the right people! wack ass hoe
Me, after learning than Medusas head was used as a sign of safety and female autonomy in women’s spaces because it was seen as a gift from Athena, to allow Medusa never to be harmed that way again: oh dope, Athenas on our side. Kill a man who dares to look upon you with possession in his heart.
Me, after learning that Athena holds herself to the ‘not like other girls’ standard and usuallys sides with whatever the nearest dick-toting diety says: what the fuck what a fake bitch
Me, after learning that most of the media depicting Greek Gods by the ancient Greeks that survives today was commissioned, designed, and made by men, and therefore does not depict female interpretation or telling of the myths, and is probably extremely biased towards a misogynistic portrayal of a strong woman: the canon Athena was in our hearts all along.
I am typing this very late, so apologies for the rambling!
Medusa’s head was not used in women’s spaces!! This is a myth (ha) that originated on the Internet and has no basis in fact. The gorgoneion, i.e. the gorgon / Medusa head, was used to decorate public buildings because it was believed to be apotropaic, which meant that it had the power to ward off evil because it was so dang freaky to look at, but it didn’t have any particular association with women or women’s spaces - the association between Medusa and women’s rights is a more modern one. As for the idea of Athena giving Medusa her powers to keep her safe, it’s pretty clearly stated in the source (Ovid’s Metamorphoses) that Athena was punishing Medusa, not protecting her. The notion of Medusa and Athena being in alliance is a modern one, which doesn’t make it less interesting, but I think it’s important not to white-wash the brutality of the source myths. Women have been mistreated historically. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
As for Athena’s ‘strong woman’ thing, Athena was also a goddess with both explicit and implicit associations of masculinity. She had feminine (chastity, cunning, beauty) and masculine (physically strong, strategically intelligent) qualities - she’s what you’d probably call an androgynous deity. To explain some of that, it’s important to remember that she was the patron deity of Athens, a super patriarchal state, and she was often thought of as a goddess who came solely from man, because her birth story is one of those fucked up ones where a man (Zeus) chows down on a pregnant woman (Metis) and then births a goddamn baby right out of his fucking skull (Athena), negating the need for a female gestation and birth, so the idea of Athena being particularly pro-woman is… squiffy. She’s a weird one.
Think also of her appearance in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where Orestes is like “hey, so I killed my mum, but I did it because she killed my dad, so that’s cool, right?” and Athena is like “‘cool’ is stretching it, pal, but you’re right, there’s an imbalance here because your mum’s crime was way worse than yours, because she killed a man!” and then they do JUSTICE STUFF and bam, a functional courtroom system is born.
A lot of her mythology has her reinforcing gender roles (see her
punishment of Medusa), but in order to do this effectively, she has to
transcend those gender roles herself (i.e. she needs masculine authority
to enforce them.)
So yeah, tl;dr the reality is that we can’t really understand a lot of these ancient myths through a modern gender framework - or, more accurately, we can reinterpret them through a modern gender framework, but we should be aware that these are modern readings, with understandings of gender and identity that simply didn’t exist at the time, and it’s important not to erase the uncomfortable elements of history and myth. I have a paper published on this if anyone wants to read it; it involves Roman lesbians.
