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STEEEEEEEEVE HARRINGTONNNNNN

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JASON VOORHEES IS AN ASEXUAL ICON, CHANGE MY MIND

(on redbubble)

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tfw you spend your week binging Buzfeed Unsolved and playing Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

(check it on redbubble)

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Wishing // redbubble

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Hey folks. Like most of you, I've been absolutely horrified by the separation of families at the Mexican border this past week. I'm not in a great place to be contributing a ton financially right now, so I'm stealing this idea from someone on twitter.

***From now until this policy is reversed, I will be donating ALL profits from my redbubble store to RAICES to help with legal funds for these migrant families. Below is a link to the RAICES Family Reunification Bond Fund for anyone who'd like to contribute directly.***

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/bondfund

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Trinity // carly d schmidt

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Grace Jolene  //  carly d schmidt

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Hunter // carly d schmidt

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Poppy // carly d schmidt

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Goose // carly d schmidt

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Marjane Satrapi  //  trailblazers

When Marjane Satrapi set out to write about Iran, she didn’t quite know where to start.  Born in the city of Rasht in 1969, Satrapi lived through some of the most tumultuous decades in the country’s history.  It was a story that she felt she needed to tell, if only to have somewhere to point people who asked invasive questions about what Iran was like during her childhood. Not being a historian or a journalist, Satrapi felt uneasy about trying to tell Iran’s modern history.  Even if she did, she reasoned, why would anyone want to read it?  Readers connect not to big ideas, but to individual people.  That’s how she realized that the story she wanted to tell was really the story of herself.  “I’m a person who was born in a certain place, in a certain time,” she said, “and I can be unsure about everything, but I am not unsure of what I have lived. I know it.”  Satrapi’s landmark memoir, Persepolis, was published first in French in the year 2000.  The graphic novel with its minimalist style and monochrome color scheme became an instant hit, lauded by critics and readers alike. The story is one of dichotomies. Satrapi was only ten years old at the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution.  While the country was overtaken by an extreme, conservative sensibility, Satrapi was being raised by politically progressive parents who encouraged free-thinking and education.  She spends the book trying to find a balance between respecting her culture and remaining true to herself.  Under her mandatory tunic and hijab, young Marjane wears a jean jacket with a Michael Jackson button.  She juggles the everyday trials of adolescence – boys, friends, school – with the horrors of war.  To a teenager, everything feels like life and death.  In Iran, Satrapi is too Western, too educated, not religious enough.  When she leaves for Europe, she’s too Iranian, too backwards, too consumed by the darkness in her past and the worry for those she left behind.  There is perhaps no better way to humanize a people than through memoir.  Most of us have been taught that Iran – and the Middle East as a whole – is an extremist, oppressive, evil monolith that wants to destroy our democracy and our American way of life.  In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi shows us that Iranian culture is just as varied as our own.  There are conservatives, there are liberals.  There are those who practice religion devotedly, there are those who think of it as a fairy tale.  There are artists and soldiers, punks and prima donnas.  There is no “one” Iran.  Since its publication, Persepolis has spread its reach all across the world.  It hit America at exactly the right time, the year we invaded Iraq.  Persepolis gave a face and a voice to the nameless thousands that we were suddenly lumping together as “enemy.”  Satrapi co-wrote and co-directed the Oscar-nominated animated adaptation of the book in 2007.  Both the book and the film are, of course, banned in Iran.

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Sabriye Tenberken  //  trailblazers

When you’re talking about a trailblazer, you’re talking about someone like Sabriye Tenberken.  Trailblazers are persistent.  They know exactly what they want and they don’t take no for an answer.  If there’s no known path to get where they want to go, a trailblazer forges their own.  Sabriye Tenberken was born in Germany in 1970.  As a young girl, her eyesight began to slowly deteriorate.  She was diagnosed with a retinal disease that threatened to take her sight completely.  A diagnosis like this could easily devastate a family, but Tenberken’s parents did not allow it to upend their lives.  Instead, they decided to use the next several years traveling, allowing their daughter a chance to see the world and build up her visual memories with whatever time she had left to do so.  By the time she became totally blind at age twelve, Tenberken’s parents had clearly instilled in her the idea that she had no limits.  She was already more worldly and more cultured than most people become in their entire lifetimes.  As she got older, her interest in the world’s cultures never wavered.  At Bonn College, she majored in Central Asian Studies. She learned Mongolian and Chinese alongside both classical and modern Tibetan, as well as studying philosophy and sociology.  This is where she began to run into uncharted territory.  The subjects Tenberken was interested in were ones that had never been studied by a blind student before.  Rather than giving up and choosing a different field of study, she decided to build it herself.  There was no Braille version of the Tibetan language?  No problem, Tenberken would just invent one herself!  She modified international Braille to correspond to specific Tibetan characters and sounds.  By 1992, she had completed a fully functional Tibetan Braille alphabet approved by native speakers and Tibetan scholars alike.  As the creator of Tibetan Braille, Tenberken travelled to Tibet in 1997 with the goal of evaluating the needs of Tibet’s blind community.  The situation as she found it was in dire straits. Because there had been no Tibetan Braille alphabet until this point, most blind children there simply were not sent to school.  The social stigma against blindness led many Tibetan families to effectively hide their blind children away from the world.  In 1998, Sabriye Tenberken founded the first school for the blind in Tibet.  The school started small with only five students enrolled and Tenberken – the only faculty member – acting as teacher, coordinator, and advisor to each of the children.  Running the school was no easy task.  Underestimated at every turn, Tenberken found little support from outside sources.  Many European organizations refused to send aid, believing too literally in the old adage of “the blind leading the blind.”  How, they asked, could a woman who herself was blind possibly succeed at the task she had set before herself?  Tenberken, of course, was undaunted.  She continued her work with the school, eventually training native Tibetans as teachers and turning over the school’s day-to-day operations to one of her former students.  Once she was sure that the school was in good hands, Tenberken moved on to her next big project.  She and her partner, Paul Kronenberg, founded Braille Without Borders, an organization designed to teach Braille to blind students in developing countries throughout the world.  As Tenberken did in Tibet, in any country reached by BWB that does not already have their own Braille system, the organization works to develop one.  They also provide vocational training to help blind members of these communities get jobs with the ultimate goal of helping them support themselves.  It’s easy to give up on a project when you’re told that there’s no known way to accomplish it.  When most of us come to a block in the road, we simply turn around and go back the way we came.  But for a someone like Sabriye Tenberken, that block is a challenge.  It’s just another new trail to blaze.  

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Ruby Corado  //  trailblazers

They call her Mama Ruby.  For more than a decade, Ruby Corado has been the matriarch of Washington D.C.’s LGBT community.  Today, she is a nationally renowned activist and motivational speaker who has won numerous awards for her work with LGBT youth.  But life hasn’t always been easy for Corado.  She was born in El Salvador in the 1970s at a time of deep strife for that country.  At just sixteen years old she fled to America to escape a civil war, choosing Washington, D.C. as her new home.  Things weren’t much easier in the U.S.  As a trans woman of color and recent immigrant, Corado faced persecution from all sides.  She came out as transgender in the 90s, well before trans folks had even the limited public support that they have now.  As a reward for her courage, she was promptly fired from her office job and forced to live on the streets.  Homeless and destitute, Corado spent plenty of time in shelters.  These shelters were, however, designed to first accommodate the most “deserving” members of the homeless population.  This did not include immigrants and it certainly did not include trans women.  Facing abuse even at her most vulnerable, Corado had a dream.  "I had a dream,” she says, “I was running a gay shelter, and in this dream I was putting these satin sheets on the beds, and it was so pretty, and it was very gay."  This dream stayed with her for years.  A place that she could call her own, a place where all would be welcome, a place that would support the most vulnerable members of society.  In 2003, she co-founded the DC Trans Coalition.  For years, the group operated as the leading force for transgender advocacy in the city.  Things were finally starting to come together for Corado.  That is, until 2009.  That was the year she was brutally beaten – almost to death – by an abusive boyfriend.  The trauma nearly took her down.  In deep physical and emotional pain, Corado was unable to work and was once again out on the streets and living in shelters.  She received a disability check from the government for $12,000 to help her get back on her feet.  Instead, Corado decided it was time to pay it forward.  She had carried her dream of a gay shelter with her all this time and, with the money she received for her disability, opened Casa Ruby.  The shelter became the first and only bilingual LGBT homeless shelter in the city.  It serves the most disadvantaged within the LGBT community.  As a bilingual institution, Casa Ruby welcomes immigrants who would be turned away by many other shelters of its kind.  The shelter has a particular focus on housing transgender and gender-non-conforming youth of color who are often the most in-peril members of the queer community.  Growing from a one-story drop-in shelter to a 40-bed shelter spread across multiple houses, Casa Ruby has become a haven for homeless, queer youth in need of guidance and a patient ear.  Corado doesn’t judge her residents.  She was once in their shoes after all.  She travels now, speaking throughout the country about her journey and her mission. She gives sensitivity training to help foster a more positive relationship between the queer community and their neighbors.  She gives speeches in both English and Spanish, bridging the gap and helping queer immigrants find their place in the queer community at large.  As Mama Ruby said when first opening Casa Ruby, “Dreams do come true.”

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Carmen Yulín Cruz  //  trailblazers  //  Donate to Help Puerto Rico

The first time most of us heard Carmen Yulín Cruz’s voice, it was being shouted through a megaphone by a woman standing waist-deep in fetid water.  It’s a striking image.  When Hurricane Maria began making its way through the Caribbean in September of 2017, it was like watching a train barreling toward a car that got stuck on the tracks. We could all see it coming, everyone knew the outcome, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Puerto Rico was absolutely battered by the storm.  Power was knocked out to nearly the entire island.  More than half the population was left without clean water.  The island’s infrastructure was so badly damaged that even those few supplies that were available could not be distributed. Before the storm even hit, San Juan’s mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz was the island’s most outspoken advocate.  Elected in a 2013 upset over the conservative incumbent, Cruz has long been known for her unapologetically liberal politics. Hearing her speak, it’s obvious to any listener that San Juan is more than just her home: it’s her everything. Its people aren’t just her constituents; they are her friends, her neighbors, her family.  When it became clear in the early days of the disaster that the Trump administration was not doing its duty to the citizens of Puerto Rico, Cruz was the one who spoke up.  In numerous press conferences she lambasted the slow response and minimal aid being sent to the island by the federal government.  How, she wondered, could a government ignore the desperate pleas of its people?  Puerto Rico is, after all, as valid a part of the United States as Florida or Texas. When other politicians were too afraid to criticize the Trump administration for fear of political backlash, Carmen Yulín Cruz held an emotional press conference, barely holding back her rage as she spoke.  “If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying.  And you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy.” When you watch this speech, you can hear her voice shaking with emotion.  “So I am done being polite, I am done being politically correct.  I am mad as hell because my people’s lives are at stake…and if we don’t get the food and water into people’s hands, what we are going to see is something close to a genocide.”  This isn’t political bluster.  It’s real emotion.  Cruz spent the storm huddled with her constituents in a hurricane shelter as the wind and the rain whipped through their city.  She has personally waded through floodwaters to hand out much-needed supplies to stranded citizens.  When fire erupted at an assisted living facility, Cruz herself showed up to help evacuate residents claiming, “That is my job.  My job is to make life better for people, and you cannot make life better if you are in a helicopter.  You can’t make life better for them if you can’t touch them.”  Cruz has seen firsthand the suffering of her people and she has seen firsthand the apathy of the federal government towards the Latino community.  She has become just one in a long list of women who have earned the title of “nasty” from the sitting President of the United States and she wears the name as a badge of honor.  As of this posting, less than 40 percent of the island has power, about 25 percent has clean drinking water, close to 500 Puerto Ricans are dead, and the United States federal government is doing nothing.

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Noor Inayat Khan  //  trailblazers

If you had asked friends and family to describe Noor Inayat Khan, they would have said she was a peaceful girl.  Quiet, timid, and sensitive, she kept her head in the clouds. Much of this came from her parents’ influence.  Her father was an Indian Muslim and prominent Sufi scholar.  Her mother was a white American poet who defied her conservative family when she converted to Islam and married her husband in 1912.  Noor Inayat Khan was their eldest child.  She wrote poems and children’s stories, she played the harp and piano.  After her father’s death left her mother in shambles, Inayat Khan took over the responsibility of running the household and raising her siblings.  Her father had been a staunch pacifist and a follower of the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi who took great care to instill these values in his children.  By the time Inayat Khan had entered her mid-20s, however, the Second World War had already seeped into every facet of British life.  Pacifism was a luxury she could no longer afford.  She and her brother Vilayat saw the atrocities the Nazis were inflicting throughout Europe and could not stand idly by.  Inayat Khan was very aware of her position.  She told her brother that she wanted to join the war effort, in part, because there had been no great Indian heroes yet in this war and that if there were, they might help improve public opinion on Indians living in Britain.  The siblings needed to act, but they still wanted to remain true to their values. Whatever happened, they did not want to put themselves in a position where they would be required to kill. Vilayat enlisted as a minesweeper, while Noor trained as a wireless operator.  To a modern audience this may not seem like much, but wireless operators had one of the most dangerous jobs in the war.  Because the wireless was the quickest and most efficient way of communicating orders from London to the front lines, operators had to be sent into enemy territory, concealed in attics, disguising equipment as clotheslines. If they transmitted for more than 20 minutes at a time, their signals would be traced and they would be caught and killed.  They constantly needed to move, carrying heavy machines concealed in briefcases.  If they were stopped on the road they were caught and killed.  At the height of the war, the average life expectancy for a wireless operator was no more than six weeks.  Though she was highly skilled at her job, Inayat Khan’s superiors constantly doubted her, claiming that she was too timid, that she did not have the disposition for such important work, that she could not be trusted to keep such highly important secrets if captured, and according to at least one disappointingly racist comment, would not be able to blend in well in a French crowd.  When it came time for her to finally be deployed, she asked only that her widowed mother be told she was being sent to the much less dangerous African front and that she not be told if her daughter went missing unless it was certain that she was dead.  In June of 1943, Inayat Khan was officially sent to France.  She spent the next four months operating the wireless, receiving and transmitting vitally important and highly classified information like orders, troop movements, and military intelligence.  That October, she was betrayed.  Sold out to the Germans by a member of her own team, she was incessantly interrogated but refused to give up any information.  During her imprisonment she made two attempts to escape and managed to convey her name and her mother’s address to a fellow prisoner by scratching it into the bottom of a dirty cup.  Eventually the Germans must have realized that she would give up no usable information.  In September of 1944, after nearly a year in captivity, Noor Inayat Khan was transferred to Dachau and executed.  Her last word was “Liberté.”

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The Women of Salem  //  trailblazers

The Salem Witch Trials are one of the nation’s most enduring fascinations, and for good reason.  They represent the absolute worst in us: prejudice, fear, vengeance, mass hysteria. Deep down, we’re captivated by Salem because we know it could just as easily happen to us.  Each and every one of us has the capacity to turn on our neighbors at the drop of a dime.  And yet, there is something uniquely female about the Salem Witch Trials.  Of course not all of the accused or accusers were women, but the ratio skews so heavily in that direction that it becomes impossible to talk about the trials without discussing gender.  By the end of the trials, everyone was accusing everyone, but the core group of accusers that we associate with the events were young girls. It’s important to consider the world in which these girls lived.  In Puritan New England, young girls were nothing.  They had no rights, no freedoms.  They were made to believe that they were born sinners.  This was even more extreme for the teenagers.  As these girls underwent puberty, their parents drilled into their heads that their thoughts were sinful, the changes their bodies were undergoing were sinful, their very existence as young women was sinful. These girls’ entire worlds were centered around Puritanism, a religion which taught them that their every word and deed was an affront against God.  It’s really not so hard to understand how these girls lost themselves. Most accounts of the trials start the same way.  A group of teenage girls were playing with “magic” just for fun and, when caught, started to shift the blame to others in the town.  Had town elders looked more critically at the girls’ testimony early on, it likely would have stopped here.  However, the girls were immediately taken seriously.  They were questioned incessantly about other supposed witches in town, how they were operating, and who else was being affected. All of Salem was at a standstill, waiting with baited breath to hear what the girls would say next.  Imagine that you’ve been mistreated and ignored your entire life.  All of the sudden, everyone you’ve ever met starts listening to you.  People are practically worshiping the ground you walk on, fearing that if they cross you they’ll be the next accused.  Of course you’d roll with it!  These girls were finally being treated with a respect that no other girl in New England was afforded.  If you’ve ever been a teenager, you know exactly why this situation was able to get so out of hand.  Teens are not, after all, known for their decision-making skills.  How would these young girls have been able to anticipate the consequences of what they were doing?  To them, this was all a game.  It soon became clear to them that naming more names would not only keep them out of trouble, but gain them the respect and admiration of the most powerful men in Massachusetts.  Each time a suspected witch was hung at the gallows, the girls were lauded with praise. As others in Salem started accusing their own friends, neighbors, and even relatives, it would have been easy for the girls to convince themselves that the devil really did have a hold over their town and that what they were doing was admirable, even heroic.  The townsfolk fed off of each other’s fear, escalating the situation to become one of the most horrific tragedies in American history.  By the end of the trials, 20 innocent people were dead and 200 more had been accused. Relationships were destroyed, children were left orphaned, and the girls who had so briefly held control over an entire town were sent quietly back to their old lives so that Salem might begin to forget its scars.  The Salem Witch Trials were never about witchcraft.  They were, at their core, about teenage girls seizing their agency at a time when they had none.  They were about humanity’s unique ability to turn on one another when convenient.  But most of all, they were a mirror held up to our darkest fears and desires.  The Salem Witch Trials were, quite simply, human nature. 

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Drawlloween 2017  Day 30 - Cauldron Crones