iparraisback - Tumblr blog

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this is romance

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circling back around to the issue of writers being expected to do all their own goddamn marketing via social media these days, because it completely nixes the possibility of writers being weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, or misanthropes. 80% of the literary canon was written by weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, and misanthropes. if you weed out everyone who’s the wrong kind of insane to maintain a twitter presence, who on earth is left

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This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.

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Having your main anxiety response be Avoidance is crazy cause you'll think you're chillin and then one day you're like waitttt I've been paralyzed with fear this whole time. Damn

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can you explain the post about catalan self-hatred

Centuries of occupation and being told we are useless, ignorant, and cringy and thus for our own good we should abandon our culture, language, accent, identity, everything that shows what our culture is (or was, if they succeed) except for very few isolated items that can be folklorized (isolated from our very alive culture, which give them sense, and shown as a curiosity or a relic of an old gone past, or simply as one isolated "fun" addition to Spanish culture, which didn't originate it and which doesn't understand it) and monetized to be sold as Spanish (see: Madrid restaurants selling something they call "paella" and which is really an "arròs de mar" but they have re-made it to suit the taste of tourists and that they will advertise with Spanish flags and sevillana drawings and commercialise as "typical Spanish", completely separating it from its roots and without even knowing what the word "paella" means, so that tourists can consume it without even knowing what culture it's from and what language that word is in), hearing how cringy we Catalans are vs how cool we would look like if we became fully Spanish (and fully Spanish means abandoning Catalanity), all of these happening for generations and permeating literature, TV, popular jokes, pop culture, laws, even church leaders speaking it in mass) etc. well, it does end up affecting you.

Generation after generation of this means that we have a very deeply rooted self-hatred. And it's so normalized that we don't even realise it. Self-hatred is a term used in sociolinguistics that means precisely that, having interiorized the bigotry against your own group. In our case, it means Catalan people who are Catalanophobic, often without realising it, or thinking that it's justified because it would be ridiculous to think otherwise. For example, when Catalans say that it's true that our existence is useless and it's a shame that we were born in Catalonia and that Catalan is still alive because everything would be easier if we spoke only Spanish, which they see as a superior and international language, or say that we shouldn't have Catalan written in public where tourists can see it. As you can see, this is very connected with imperialism. All of us are Catalanophobic. I don't think there is even one Catalan person who is not Catalanophobic, because we are raised in a deeply Catalanophobic legal, political, and social system. The difference relies on how aware of it are we and how much we are willing to rethink it. For most people, they're not willing to rethink it because they believe it's right, and that it would be nonsensical to imagine that we are equal to Spanish speakers or deserve the same rights.

That post was a screenshot I took of a comment on Instagram. It's a video of some Catalan people talking and joking around, everything very innocent and nice, and someone left this comment (in Catalan) saying "why do you speak in such a strong Catalan accent? It makes my blood boil, and I am Catalan, so imagine..." (implying that "if it bothers me, a Catalan, that you are so visibly Catalan, imagine how much it must bother someone who isn't Catalan. Thus you should correct it").

This is something that I have been told countless times in my life. In high school, my best friend always used to make fun of me when I said something in Spanish because I have a strong Catalan accent. She would repeat my words after me exaggerating the accent to make it ridiculous and laughable, and would laugh at how bad it is and how "rural" it makes me sound (note: I am not from a rural accent nor speak an accent of Catalan from a rural area, it's that having a Catalan accent in Spanish is seen as being uneducated and "from the provinces"). The thing is tho: she had the same accent. She does not speak any better than me. She also had told me many times about how much she dislikes going to visit her dad's family in southern Spain because the whole town laughs at her for having a Catalan accent and that some kids have insulted her for being from Catalonia, and even her dad (born and raised in that town of southern Spain but who has been living in Catalonia for decades) gets made fun of and receives hate speech for being Catalan now. But so many people always look for someone else, someone who is more visibly Catalan for whatever reason, and give them the same bigotry that they have received. As if that will redeem them somehow, or distract from their own "faults"— and I'm not using the word "fault" just because, that's what we feel but don't say out loud, except when someone slips like that Valencian politician who started a speech by apologizing in case she "slips and says a word in Valencian" because "sadly it's my mother tongue, I have this defect". (note: Valencian and Catalan are two names for the same language). Some people on the internet complained because she said the quiet part out loud, but how many of those people don't act like that in their everyday lives, simply refusing to state it so clearly that that's how they see it?

It's to be expected to get these comments from Spanish people. When I was 15, I was part of a programme for students and we had to go to Madrid for a meeting of all the students in the state of Spain who were being given this scholarship, and I was the only Catalan and the rest of teens spent most of the time making fun of me and my accent. But what I remember the most is that one of them was nice to me, and he talked to me having normal conversations (the others only said bigoted things against Catalonia and against Barça team and tried to get me to talk about bullfighting, knowing that it's illegal in Catalonia, to make me feel excluded), but even this nice boy at one point said out of the blue "you really can't hide that you're Catalan!". It would be nice to answer "so? Why do I have to hide it?" but the thing is that I had tried my best, not to hide it 100% maybe, but to not make it easy to see. For example, when we introduced ourselves, everyone said our name and where we're from, I was aware that I should say Barcelona (even though I'm not from the city itself) instead of Catalonia. After that, I tried taking some online lessons I found on YouTube on how to have a Castilian accent, but I never managed. It would be useless anyway, just a few years later I was on Erasmus and when I introduced myself to the other students (I had literally only said "hello my name is Elna") the two Spanish students laughed and one of them said while laughing "that's a very Catalan name, like very very very Catalan, isn't it?", like it was a funny joke.

So yeah, it's whatever to get it from Spanish people and Spanish-speakers in Catalonia (I mean, to be fair, it's not whatever when it means you can get a harsher sentence for the same trial if you spoke Catalan in the court, that you might get arrested or mistreated by the police if you spoke to them in Catalan, that you can get kicked out of the doctor's office for speaking in Catalan, etc and believe me I have had my share of discrimination from doctors for this very reason) but it is so much more insidious when it comes from ourselves. And it's painted not as bigotry but as "common sense" or just "not being cringy". I'm tired of my existence being considered cringe! I'm tired that if I speak about what happens to us it's seen as cringe and "distracting from things that are actually important" (because we are useless to the world!)! Or if I say more autochthonous expressions that don't have a direct translation to Spanish to get told I'm like a grandma and I'm cringe! I'm even tired of the well meaning ones, some time ago a friend's Spanish-speaker friend heard me talk to another friend and said "aw that's cute, you speak Catalan, it's like you're grandmas". Or that children will get bullied for celebrating the Castanyada instead of Halloween because it's cringe. I love the Castanyada and I will say it now, I spent my whole high school years pretending like I don't celebrate it. I do! I eat panellets that my aunt makes, and sometimes I make them too, and I go with my family friends in front of the fireplace, and we roast chestnuts and we sing Marrameu torra castanyes, and we like it! And I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. And if that means everyone laughs at me and says I'm cringe and elderly, then so be it. I spent long enough hiding from my own people. I am so so so so tired.

I heard this sentence once: "what Franco couldn't manage to finish, we will do it ourselves". They couldn't eliminate us with violent force, but the long route of psychological war makes us be our own enemies and our own executioner. As has already happened so much more in the part of Catalonia under French rule, and all other nations still nowadays under French rule.

Here's what I did and helped me very much. Every time I have a Catalanophobic thought or I think as myself as lesser than for something related to being Catalan, I imagine a tiny Franco inside my head and I shoot him. This makes me take a moment to pay attention to what I had thought and that I don't want it, and do better in the future. Being conscious is the only way to learn self-respect.

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she asked me if i believed in god and i told her that when i was four i almost drowned in a public pool and in my panic mistook a stranger for my father. i clawed my way up his leg. four years later he’d send my parents a picture of the scars alongside a tin of cookies. he said, “i hope she’s still okay. i carry her with me. it isn’t every day you save a life. it isn’t every day you feel like you were here for a reason. when it does happen, you have to cherish that memory. for once, i had a purpose. just being there was enough. she tore me open but she taught me a lot about love.”

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This made my brain go brr, therefore it’ll make your brain go brr too if you’re following me <3

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Whenever a baby is registered as Ainoa, Ichiar, Arancha or Naia a Basque kitten dies.

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Hilariously funny that the guy known for wandering off without warning to look at birds was allowed to do this

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Yarn holder

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Help where’s my inhaler I’m laughing too hard I can’t breathe

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real life cartoon character

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Landlords provide housing in the same way that scalpers provide concert tickets. - a meme I saw yesterday.

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"I had a wife but they took her in the divorce" is a Groucho Marx level joke. pure vaudeville. it's semantically perfect, blisteringly fast, and completely efficient. just an unbelievable stroke of genius which was apparently a complete accident. you could tell this joke onstage at any period in history between probably 1500 and now and get a genuine guffaw