Links – If then else

Quincy Blaque Trio: The Drunkening

This song causes me to rather desperately miss partner dancing. Which is its own kind of sick little twisted irony.

<a href="http://quincyblaque.bandcamp.com/album/uneasy-listening-music">Uneasy Listening Music by Quincy Blaque</a>

As quiet as a dead mouse
and as bored as a tick
And a thousand drinks later
We’ll take home anything that’s thick

Cause the secrets are dirty
As the heart is as pure
As the water is muddy
We gave up on a cure

Your punishments in heaven
Your rewards are in hell
There’s nothing you want that’s in between
As far as I can tell

Your smile is splenetic
Your blood’s like perfume
it’ll burn if you let it
we all own stock in this doom

You think you have to destroy me
To make us equal; guess what?
This thought just keeps rolling round my head
it’s beginning to suck

Compress this into little tiny pieces broken fixed and blinded vicious eyes that float ashore they don’t need them anymore
they lie
awake

Nothing can hurt me
except maybe pain
you’ll never convince me
of anything again.

On white supremist heteropatriarchy in America

“When White people made the rules hundreds of years ago, they never counted on us being free. This is what [Ferguson] is about.” – A Black Grandmother I’ve become very passionate over the last two years about social evolution, which means I’m paying a lot of attention to social justice. Racism and Sexism are my… Continue reading On white supremist heteropatriarchy in America

Why poor people stay poor

It’s amazing what things that are absolute crises for me are simple annoyances for people with money.

Because our lives seem so unstable, poor people are often seen as being basically incompetent at managing their lives. That is, it’s assumed that we’re not unstable because we’re poor, we’re poor because we’re unstable.

So let’s just talk about how impossible it is to keep your life from spiraling out of control when you have no financial cushion whatsoever.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/12/linda_tirado_on_the_realities_of_living_in_bootstrap_america_daily_annoyances.html

Bad/failed relationships? READ THIS.

Oof.

This AMAZING article is saying all the stuff I’m living but hadn’t articulated yet.

Preparing us for marriage is, ideally, an educational task that falls on culture as a whole. We have stopped believing in dynastic marriages. We are starting to see the drawbacks of Romantic marriages. Now comes the time for psychological marriages.

http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wrong-people/

The Pomplamoose Problem

This explosion of vitriol illustrates the absurd standard America holds artists to. It’s a dangerous, impossible standard that is repressing self-expression and killing culture. It’s not dissimilar in impact to the political arguments that keep so many living in poverty by voting against their own interests for politicians who take away services that were at least intended to make the middle class accessible to all. The American artist is expected to be both a saint and a martyr.

Operate outside the capitalist system and we’ll praise you for your creations, call your poverty a quaint kind of martyrdom that has nothing to do with us, and at the same time resent you for being holier than thou. Try to operate within the capitalist system and we’ll call you out as an imposter.

This resentment is something we have to take a long hard look at. We might think it comes from the idea that a tiny percentage of artists can get famous and filthy rich, or that others – despite financial struggles – have interesting and exciting lives where they perform and create while we’re stuck in a 9-5. But really, this resentment comes from the fact that when we devalue the arts, we devalue our own creative impulse.

http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-artists-cant-survive-as-saints-and-martyrs

These are the places rape culture starts

This is an amazing account of the very real corrosion and trauma that results in loved ones blaming the victim of sexual abuse/assault in the name of trying to make everything ok again. I related to this, and I am glad I got away.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/michelletea/my-stepfather-the-peeping-tom

Listening: The Secondary Trauma.

“If you are a man who is becoming upset/depressed/overwhelmed/hopeless/defensive when you listen to the women in the world/your life talk about their experiences, you need to talk about it. With another man.

I really, really mean this. You absolutely need to talk to another guy. A guy you are friends with and who you trust is ideal.

If you don’t have that kind of guy in your life- and, seriously, you are not alone in that area- then you have the very hard, critical work of figuring out how to make that kind of friendship ahead of you. If you are feeling a restless helplessness over all of this, that can be your challenge.

And if you are a guy who has already figured this out- if you’ve already figured out the circle thing and the male friendship and intimacy thing and how to be supportive of women thing- then my personal challenge to you is to go and find the guys in your world who haven’t totally made this connection, and pull them into your circle. Mentor them. Teach them how to do what you’ve figured out to do.

Seriously, I can’t do that. Your girlfriends and lady friends and moms and sisters and classmates and bosses can’t do that. But you can, and that is absolutely invaluable.

Women need men to learn how to be emotionally connected to other men. We need men to learn how to draw emotional support and nurturing from other men. Not to do that in absence of us, but in addition to us. Because men being isolated and lonely- it really, really is killing us.

Men and women, it is really killing us.”

Notallmen/Yesallwomen, secondary trauma and relearning everything for the sake of not killing each other

We need Allies, not Gentleman.

Learn to be an accountable presence working on your shit, not merely a non-rapist or a non-murderer. Because communicating ‘It’s/I’m not like that’ instead of ‘I’m so sorry that happened, what do you need,’ is being ‘like that.’

http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/norasamaran/30866