i work as an actor at a haunted house and this little girl who was dressed as a cat came through she saw me and was like “no thank you please dont get closer i am already scared” and i was like alright i appreciate the good manners ill back off. so her dad picks her up and starts going down the rest of my dark hall and i just hear her yell “everybody wait! i dropped my ears” so i find them and give them to her dad and she goes “thank you but i hope i never see you again goodbye” and waved over her dads shoulder. i waved back and she gave me a thumbs up. honestly this kid has a lot of guts and props for being so polite when shes terrified i hope she gets a lot of candy this year
Story time:
In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.
Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.
What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.
The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.
So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.
the more i talk w/ leftist friends the more i start to realize that they think culture is only defined by food or "traditional" (i.e. "ethnic") garb and nothing else
mentioned how white americans do in fact have a common culture and they genuinely thought i was joking. culture isnt something only granted to the Cool People of Color. just feels like among progressive groups there's this dichotomy created in which only the virtuous oppressed minorities have culture and anyone who is privileged some sort of void cultureless being
When I visited Chicago, the very first thing to weird me out from the airport was… how almost everywhere had revolving doors.
I’m Australian. Sure, we do have those doors, but the vast majority of places in Sydney are automatic sliding doors or old-fashioned manual push/pulls because we don’t need to block out the cold and wind the same way here.
So every day I experienced a culture clash with something as basic as what doors were normal for me.
Americans who say they don’t have a culture are plagued with defaultism beyond belief. Culture isn’t just made up of costumes and language and the largest stuff, it’s constructed of a billion small things you do every day that you never even consider could be different because that’s just “normal” to your daily life. No one has no culture just because they’re not adhering to the biggest markers they can consciously recognise.
The iceberg concept of culture: only 10% of what most people immediately think of as their culture is above the surface, and the deeper you go, the more emotional depth it gets.
has anyone considered that it was probably her house too. where else was she supposed to put her chintz?
I like this question because I think it really gets at the power dynamics at the center of the poem!
The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.
This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.
The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.
There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.
I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?
Great poem, great discussion question, love everyone in this bar <3
Googled something about quick hydration and it suggested big jug of water, couple tbsp pickle juice, dash of lime juice.
Its surprisingly tasty????
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint
-Agua pepino: water, cucumbers, lime, sugar, optional mint.
I have been reminded of:
-shrub: vinegar, sida water, elderberry (or other berry), sugar.
I have now been informed of
-sekanjabin: honey, vinegar, mint, water.
"Wow, I wonder why this post was popular this week."
-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-
"... ah."
Look, sometimes you just need forty thousand words of comprehensively researched geopolitical worldbuilding in order to adequately contextualise a scene of two rival princesses angrily jerking each other off. That's totally normal.
Fuck it. I wanna see the two princesses jerking eachother off AND the 50 million words of geopolitical world building that props it up.
