let’s talk about a ptsd thing that’s called sense of foreshortened future. i don’t see anyone ever talking about it here and i think that it’s important that people know that what they experience is nothing but another symptom of their mental illness.
So what is it?
Basically, sense of foreshortened future is a feeling or a belief that for some reason you won’t have a long and fullfilling life. You feel like you will die soon – or sooner than expected – and therefore you shouldn’t make any long-term plans. You try to avoid long-term relationships, you don’t have any career plans, reaching your birthday – hell, sometimes even managing to surivive the week surprises you.
You feel like you’ll never have a normal life because you’re not only broken beyond repair but also can’t trust anyone anymore. It is an incredibly depressing feeling that makes you feel like there’s no point in… anything, really? Every activity becomes dull and pointless and you don’t know what drags you though life at this point.
I know it won;t make the feeling go away but I want you to know that this feeling is NOT a reflection of reality. You’re not broken beyond repair and you will have a normal happy life if you work on your recovery. making plans is not pointless. You deserve to be happy and you will be happy. Don’t let PTSD and its symptoms convince you otherwise.
Basically it exposes the American innocence, that we want to do these things in the world, but we’re not really willing to take the consequences of our actions, and sometimes we have to do very dirty things, and we have to hurt people, and we pretend that that doesn’t exist, that Americans would never do that. We dealt with issues like that and I don’t think… you know… the other shows really went as far as we did.
Andrew Robinson, about “In the Pale Moonlight” (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
> The college I attended was small and very LGBT friendly. One day someone came to visit and used the word “gay” as a pejorative, as was common in the early 2000s. A current student looked at the visitor and flatly said, “we don’t do that here.” The guest started getting defensive and explaining that they weren’t homophobic and didn’t mean anything by it. The student replied, “I’m sure that’s true, but all you need to know is we don’t do that here.” The interaction ended at that point, and everyone moved on to different topics. “We don’t do that here” was a polite but firm way to educate the newcomer about our culture. […]
> It turns out talking about diversity, inclusion, and even just basic civil behavior can be controversial in technical spaces. I don’t think it should be, but I don’t get to make the rules. When I’m able I’d much rather spend the time to educate someone about diversity and inclusion issues and see if I can change how they see the world a bit. But I don’t always have the time and energy to do that. And sometimes, even if I did have the time, the person involved doesn’t want to be educated.
> This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values. If I deliver this sentence well it carries no more emotional weight than saying, “in Japan, people drive on the left.” “We don’t do that here” should be a statement of fact and nothing more. It clearly and concisely sets a boundary, and also makes it easy to disengage with any possible rebuttals.
> Me: “You are standing in that person’s personal space. We don’t do that here.”
> Them: “But I was trying to be nice.”
> Me: “Awesome, but we don’t stand so close to people here.”
> Them: Tells an off-color joke.
> Me: “We don’t do that here.”
> Them: “But I was trying to be funny.”
> Me (shrugging): “That isn’t relevant. We don’t do that here.”
I really really do want to endorse this. Making a person’s behavior about capital-M Morality is a great way to get people to dig in their feet and escalate situations. By going “Hey, that behavior doesn’t fit in this context.” it removes a ton of the resentment and toxicity on both sides of the interaction.
When you divide people into “good people” and “bad people”, you will, inevitably, get three reactions:
“I did something bad a few times, so that means I’m bad”, which leads to a not-actually-all-that-bad person developing depression, anxiety, OCD, etc.
“I did something bad a few times, so let me be always bad”, which leads to someone plowing through life doing all sorts of terrible things with little to no remorse.
“I am good, therefore everything I do is good”, which leads to someone plowing through life doing all sorts of terrible things with little to no remorse and the refrain “it’s for your own good”/“it’s for the greater good”.
It’s important to categorize individual actions and behaviors as good or bad, but categorizing people as one or the other is… counterproductive.
The temptation to henna my hair rn is unreal. Wonder if I have any left…
so you know how some people use coffee to darken their hair? do you think that when you drink coffee daily, it slowly dyes/darken the hair on your upper lip?
Unless they’re sitting with their face buried in it I wouldnt think so. I know it stains my teeth like hell if I drink too much.
This literally reminded me to go get more coffee.
And are there henna dyes in pastel colors? I’ve researching, but either my skills are crap or I’m getting mixed results.
Henna (Lawsone) actually only comes in one form which is red/orange.
“Black henna”, the kind used for temporary tattoos, is fake dye, and has been known to cause fatal reactions in people years down the line when they use other things to dye their hair. (Especially anything containing para-phenylenedmine)
“Black henna” is often a term used to refer to red henna mixed with indigo to create a blackish blue hue, which is safe. (It’s one of Lush’s best sellers) Anything that is any color other than red however is not natural henna and is mixed with something else, like metal salts which are not always safe because henna doesn’t like metal. (Always mix henna with plastic or wooden spoon, yes even your Lush stuff)
You can use the leaves of walnuts to make henna a rich dark brown, but being walnuts, many people are allergic so the “brown henna” most people use is henna mixed with woad or something else. I think lush uses coffee grounds mixed with henna and indigo to get their brown mix.
You can also mix henna with saffron to get golden tones, but to me it looks more brassy. Cassia is often misold as “blonde henna” when it’s actually just cassia which can tinge the hair yellowish gold and can help thicken the hair shaft, cause it coats hair the same way henna does.
So to answer your question, nope, no such thing as pastel hair colors that contain henna, and if they claim it does they’re lying and there’s a chance the metal salts used will make your hair brittle or damaged. That’s why so many hair stylists balk at henna, the fake stuff can really mess your hair up. And also you really shouldn’t dye your hair with conventional dyes after that until it grows out cause the metal salts can cause a reaction and burn your scalp or make your hair fall out.
Real henna is safe for most people. And because someone asked me already, yea the stuff at Lush is fine. Overpriced, but fine. It’s a good option if you don’t want to have to mix your own powders 🙂
Does henna tint your hair or outright dye it?
It’s technically a stain, and the resulting color will depend on your natural hair. I could mix a batch and due to my hair being white in places (thank you illness), I’ll have orange strands. Someone else with darker hair would get something closer to chestnut from the same batch.
How you prep it will change the color outcome too (using an acid like lemon or vinegar will make it develop quicker but it’ll be brassier)and you can layer it to deepen the color too over time, though some people will find that makes their hair “heavy”. I can layer my hair 3 times in quick succession to get a deeper color, but if I try for a fourth my hair loses all it’s bounce from the weight.
So it’s not like a regular dye that penetrates the hair shaft to color it, but it’s not an easily washed out tint either.
Thank you! I lost a lot of my hair natural reds and such do to illness. I wanted to bring it back, but I am allergic to //chemicals// in most readily available hair and skin products (and foods unfortunately). My mother managed to passes on some good funky generic Illness and we had to become
🌞🌞organic free trade natural hippies🌞🌞
just so we both stop literally dying so I thought I could never dye my hair. Thank you for posting this.
Lol i know that feeling well! Make sure you do a skin test on the inside of your elbow first if you do choose to try it. Reactions to authentic henna are not that common but not impossible.
I didnt even realise Lush sold henna. Go to an Indian shop if you want it cheaper.
Agreed. I think they retail at something like $30 per block that does only 1-2 treatments for short hair. The box of henna I have is $12 and I can get 6 treatments out of it over a year, but some people prefer not having to mix their own ratios.
can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept
Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”
I think this really an important post.
We’ve fallen into such a rut of “everything is right or wrong, no inbetween” that stuff that’s merely in poor taste is conflated with things that are actually offensively malicious.
this is so well worded like i been trying to say this for awhile thank you
Damn. This is the thing.
Good, yes. This is a valuable concept.
. . and while we’re at it, can “problematic” actually mean problematic again? As in potentially but not definitely bad. Imperfect. Difficult to assess. One person might find it hurtful and another might not. If you think something is definitely bad, ‘problematic’ is not the word you want. Basically can we just have the general concept of gray areas back?
and here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored
i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art
“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”
And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues – often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process – because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.
Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.
(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way – because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)
There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.
a couple of general points:
1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:
(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example:
and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced this
just, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea.
2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.
Many sculptures from antiquity were defaced during the early Christian period. During riots, Christian mobs would smash the noses off of ‘pagan’ sculptures, as they usually depicted pagan gods, or emperors, and depending on the sect, any depiction of a person could be considered ‘graven’.
The hotbed of Christian zealotry was Egypt. Throughout its time as a Roman, and then ‘Byzantine’ province during its early Christian history, the province proved practically unmanageable due to its Christian theological riots, with the majority of the population not following Constantinople’s doctrine and theological orders.
This Roman bust of Germanicus at the British Museum was defaced – nose smashed off – during a riot that would have taken place in late antiquity in Egypt, so, 400-500AD [also, note the cross etched into forehead]
Probably the most known example of this is the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum, a vast temple complex in Alexandria, Christian mobs tore the temple apart, destroying and looting, tearing it down brick by brick.
Another example, outside of Egypt, is the Nika Revolts in Constantinople. On its creation as a co-capital of the Roman Empire, an unfathomable amount of art and sculpture was brought to adorn the New Rome, and during the revolt, for the most part this cream of the classical crop was destroyed, again, by theological mobs.
After Egypt’s conquest during the Arab-Islamic conquests, this practice would have continued. In fact, theologically, many of Egypt’s Christian sects were more in line with Islamic theology than what became mainstream Christianity in both ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Catholic’ doctrine.
Basically, if you want to know what happened to sculptures from antiquity, Abrahamic faiths happened to them. We divorce classical and ancient sculptures from their meaning – we see them as history or art, but to the new faiths, they were graven images, they were pagan, and they were destroyed or defaced.
I like this version of the thread. It has actual history in it not just “Victorian assholes” did it (which this thread also seems to be the only thing I ever see about Victorians removing paint from statues).
I am really bad at this. A bit of digging turned up a fan-term “ba’ad” (from here), but honestly your logic makes sense to me.
… you know I think there’s a chance they don’t have one, culturally—because of cooperative, clan-based raising of children rather than with family specifications? I mean, yes, parents (buir) and siblings (vode) are important, but you would raise children of the clan no matter whose they were, right?
I don’t have much to back this, tho, buir’tsad means family lineage and the note put next to it in the Mando’a dictionary says it’s specifically a reference to biological lineage, and rarely used.
that aside, tho:
bah is the dative form of ‘to’, so a grandparent might have the shortened form of ‘parent to [your parent]’, ba’buir.
it’s a little different with ba’vodu, because by the logic above, I’m trying to form ‘sibling to your parent’. …. now it’s more like ‘to [your parent] sibling’, which is interesting.
Actually that makes sense, because dative means giving, so your parent was given a sibling, or given a parent in the case of ba’buir. (it’s definitely within Mandalorian culture to be able to refuse/disown a parent, so I suppose while it’s expected that a parent will do their duty by their children, it’s also of term of respect for the grandparent who did their job right)
does the logic hold for ‘to [your child] children’ (i.e. grandchildren)? bu’ad: children are ade. The root of bu is likely buir, and most of that branch appears to imply responsibility (ex. buirkan).
Yesterday, I was trawling iTunes for a decent podcast about writing. After a while, I gave up, because 90% of them talked incessantly about “self-discipline,” “making writing a habit,” “getting your butt in the chair,” “getting yourself to write.” To me, that’s six flavors of fucked up.
Okay, yes—I see why we might want to “make writing a habit.” If we want to finish anything, we’ll have to write at least semi-regularly. In practical terms, I get it.
But maybe before we force our butts into chairs, we should ask why it’s so hard to “get” ourselves to write. We aren’t acting randomly; our brains say “I don’t want to do this” for a reason. We should take that reason seriously.
Most of us resist writing because it hurts and it’s hard. Well, you say, writing isn’t supposed to be easy—but there’s hard, and then there’s hard. For many of us, sitting down to write feels like being asked to solve a problem that is both urgent and unsolvable—“I have to, but it’s impossible, but I have to, but it’s impossible.” It feels fucking awful, so naturally we avoid it.
We can’t “make writing a habit,” then, until we make it less painful. Something we don’t just “get” ourselves to do.
The “make writing a habit” people are trying to do that, in their way. If you do something regularly, the theory goes, you stop dreading it with such special intensity because it just becomes a thing you do. But my god, if you’re still in that “dreading it” phase and someone tells you to “make writing a habit,” that sounds horrible.
So many of us already dismiss our own pain constantly. If we turn writing into another occasion for mute suffering, for numb and joyless endurance, we 1) will not write more, and 2) should not write more, because we should not intentionally hurt ourselves.
Seriously. If you want to write more, don’t ask, “how can I make myself write?” Ask, “why is writing so painful for me and how can I ease that pain?” Show some compassion for yourself. Forgive yourself for not being the person you wish you were and treat the person you are with some basic decency. Give yourself a fucking break for avoiding a thing that makes you feel awful.
Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.
The antidote, he says, is to treat yourself kindly:
For me, writing always begins with self-forgiveness. I don’t sit down and rush headlong into the blank page. I make coffee. I put on a song I like. I drink the coffee, listen to the song. I don’t write. Beginning with forgiveness revolutionizes the writing process, returns its being to a journey of creativity rather than an exercise in self-flagellation. I forgive myself for not sitting down to write sooner, for taking yesterday off, for living my life. That shame? I release it. My body unclenches; a new lightness takes over once that burden has floated off. There is room, now, for story, idea, life.
Writing has the potential to bring us so much joy. Why else would we wantto do it? But first we’ve got to unlearn the pain and dread and anxiety and shame attached to writing—not just so we can write more, but for our own sakes! Forget “making writing a habit”—how about “being less miserable”? That’s a worthy goal too!
Luckily, there are ways to do this. But before I get into them, please absorb this lesson: if you want to write, start by valuing your own well-being. Start by forgiving yourself. And listen to yourself when something hurts.
I keep veggie peelings, cuttings, herb clippings and all other veggie compost in a freezer bag in your freezer for up to a month. At the end of every month I dump this bag into my crockpot, add 6-8 cups of water and cook on low for 6 hours. I drain out the veggies and herbs, and viola! You have like 8 cups of veggie broth.
I save things from veggies like: celery, garlic, onion, carrots, kale, squash, parsnips, peppers, etc. Basically any vegetable that would go into a soup, I save.
I also save bits of herbs that don’t make it into other recipes, or veggies about to go bad I have no other intention for. It’s an amazing way to cut back on costs and food waste. This stock can make enough soup to feed a whole family, or you can freeze it if you are only feeding yourself and thaw as needed.
You can customize with herbs and spices now, or when you go to make your soups. I like to at least toss in garlic, onions, a bay leaf, pepper and rosemary to the broth itself.
I havent bought soup broth in years, and I can make sure my broth is salt free or at least low salt!
It’s such a simple thing to do, and its noticable in your food budget.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 