#i am a white guy who was born in the mid 80s

[hichi842]

Requested by: @fakeanimefanntnt

Pairing: Midoriya x reader

Warnings⚠️: None

Word Count: 3149

S/o That Comes From a Quirkless Country

You stepped off the plane in Masutafu, Japan. A beautiful town known for the famous UA High School.

You looked around the airport, nothing seemed really out of the ordinary from what you were you used to.

No one seemed to being breathing fire or levatating in mid air, even the people looked exactly like they did back home.

“Well I guess they still do have laws restricting their quirks, huh?” You muttered to yourself. You continued to walk towards the exit of the airport.

You were pretty tense, looking at all the people around you knowing that almost every single one of them possessed some kind of supernatural power and could use it in a moments time.

You had only heard of quirks in passing. When you were young, you almost didn’t believe they were real.

Though as you grew up, it started to be discussed more and more in your life.

About how 80% of people had these abilities and how you were completely shut out from them all.

You see, the island you grew up on was one made of people who did not want to explore the extraordinary, who didn’t want to explore the world of quirks.

They all had different reasons for coming to the island. For some, quirks were against their religion, some just didn’t like the idea of quirks, others were born quirkless and came for escape from the constant torment that people would give them.

As for you, well you didn’t really have a choice to be there. You were born under parents who didn’t except what they called ‘freaks of nature’. They hated the idea of a quirkfull society and so they lived among people who felt the same as them.

Although, you didn’t have a quirk yourself, you were definitely interested in them. You just didn’t know whether you liked the idea of quirks or not.

It wasn’t that they were bad, but they could definitely be used for not so good things and if you went into a society where you were completely defenseless from those sort of things, you could loose your life within a second.

Nonetheless, you still wanted to see them, they just fascinated you from the first time you heard of them.

So you took the steps to be able to foreign exchange in a town known for strong quirks. It wasn’t much, but at least you could finally see what all the fuss was about.

Your parents were not happy with this, but you convinced them after years of begging and so now here you were, walking to the house you would be staying for the next few years.

As you walked down the street, occasionally looking down at your phone for directions, you noticed all the different buildings and places as well as the people you passed by.

Once again, you were met with nothing but what seemed normal.

‘For a place filled with super powers, you’d think there would be something a little more interesting.’ You sighed to yourself, continuing on your journey to your place.

Though after about a half hour of walking, you sorta ran into a slight inconvenience.

“Where the hell am I?”

Yup, you were completely lost. You looked at your surroundings to of course see unfamiliar buildings.

“Damn it, what purpose does a map app have if it only makes you confused!” You said under your breath as you started fidgeting with you screen, adjusting the map of your current area to see where you were.

“U-um... excuse me ma’am, do you need some help?” A stranger asked, standing in front of you.

“Ah! Yes, actually!” You looked up at the person to see a young man about your age.

He had green hair that was black at the roots, his eyes the same shade as his hair, and he’s had freckles which complimented his round shaped face.

His outfit was pretty plain. A white t-shirt that had the words ALL M on them. You guessed that was a reference to what you knew as the top hero in this place called All Might. He was also wearing cargo shorts, a pair of red shoes, and a yellow school bag strapped to his shoulders.

He was kinda... pretty... in a way. Though, you weren’t going to admit that to yourself.

“Uh...” you hesitated, realizing that you were staring at him. “I-I’m kinda new here and I’m just looking for my new place, but I got loss.” You chuckled at your own stupidity.

He told you it’s totally fine and that it could get a bit confusing navigating before asking you for the address.

You were a bit skeptical giving a random dude on the street your address, but you didn’t get a bad feeling from him and he overall seemed like a kind person, so you decided that it would be better to trust him then try to find the place yourself.

You gave him the address and he smiled. “I recognize that street name. It’s a about a twenty minute walk that way.” He pointed to your left. “Do you want me to walk you there or do you just want to go by yourself, I could give you more specific instructions?” He asked.

You considered the options. “Well if it’s not an issue, do you mind walking me their, I’m not very good with directions.” You smiled awkwardly.

He nodded his head enthusiastically and started walking while motioning you to come with him.

You immediately started to trail him, an awkward silence following you guys.

“So... what’s your name?” You attempted to start a conversation.

“Izuku Midoriya, how about you?”

“I’m (Y/n) (L/n), nice to meet you Midoriya.” You smiled at him.

“Same here.” He replied. “So where are from? You said you were new here right?”

You considered whether you should tell him or not, you had done quite a bit of research on the outside of your island and so you knew a lot about people from these countries, but you weren’t sure how they felt about the people where you are from. For all you knww they could hate you.

“Um... well.” You hesitated. “Do you know about those countries where people live without quirks and such...?” You asked, hopefully seeing how he would react.

He looked at you with shocked eyes. “Wait are you from one of them?!” He shouted.

“Well... yeah, I am. Specifically Hakosaka Island.” You looked away from him in fear of his response.

“Seriously!!! That’s so cool!” You turned to him with a shocked expression, a blush coated your cheeks.

Though to your surprise, he started rummaging through his bag and brought out a notebook and pen.

“Do you have a quirk yourself? Is the technology different there? Why did you decide to live there? Have you ever seen someone use a quirk? Why did you leave? Do you have certain rules of leaving the island? Do you get to see quirks on tv or in books? What are the people like there?”

One after another, questions started leaving the boys mouth and despite you not saying a word, he had already started writing something down in his notebook.

Although it was a bit sudden and overwhelming, it wasn’t bad by any means. You were just glad he didn’t hate you or anything.

You giggled a bit. “Uh... how about we stop by my place so I could drop off my stuff. Then we could maybe go to a teashop or something and I could answer your questions.”

He noticed what he started doing and immediately blushed. “Oh my- I’m so sorry, I have a habit of doing this.” He fiddled with his pen. “Though, if you don’t mind, could we please do that. I’ve never met someone from a quirkless society.” He smiled at you.

You nodded to him as you guys continued walking while making other small talk.

Once you had gotten to your place, you insisted on Midoriya coming in, but he refused and said that he’ll just wait for you outside.

So you made your way into the house, it was your first time there and the place was pretty nice from what you can see, but you made sure not to check it out just yet since you didn’t want to keep the boy waiting.

So you sat down all the bags that you were carrying and made your way back outside.

“You ready?” You asked him as you approached him. He gave a quick ‘yes’ before you guys started to make your way down the sidewalk.

“Do you know any cafes around here?” You asked.

“Sure! There’s one a couple blocks away.” He told you and you gave him an ‘okay’ before walking along side him as he led the way.

You had only met the guy about thirty minutes ago, but for some reason you felt oddly comfortable around him, like he was an old friend

He just seemed so caring and kind, like you could easily trust him with your life. It was just a warmth that you have never felt from another person and you could tell he was incredibly special.

You snapped out of your thoughts as the two of you turned a corner that led you to the cafe.

Once you guys got in the cozy looking cafe, you both sat down at an empty table before going to order. You got your favorite drink and Midoriya just got a tea. You guys then went to sit down again.

“Anyway, what did you want to ask me?” You asked and the boy immediately started asking you multiple questions about your island and you yourself, all while simultaneously writing the information down. By the time you guys were done, it had already been an hour and a half.

“I think that’s all I have. Thank you so much, you really didn’t need to do this for me.” He bowed his head slightly.

“It’s no problem, though do you think I could ask you a few questions as well?”

“Of course.” He replied.

You grinned at the beaming male. “I guess I’ll start with, do you have a quirk?”

He nodded. “Yup! It’s pretty much a super power quirk, I can enhance my puches, kicks, or jumps.”

“Wow! That’s so cool!” You beamed.

He chuckled. “Yeah, I would show you, but I can’t unless there’s an emergency of course.” He told you, you already knew this information, but there was something a bit off with it.

“Wait, what do you mean in an emergency? I thought you can’t use quirk in public at all. I mean, unless you’re a hero.” Maybe you were just over thinking it, but you needed to know this information if you were going to be living here.

Midoriya looked a little shocked about how much you knew on quirks. “Oh! Yeah, you’re right, but I’m actually a hero in training and I have my provisional license, so as long as there is an emergency, I can use my quirk freely in public.” He revealed, rubbing the back of his neck in an awkward manner.

Your jaw dropped for a second. “Hero in training.” Doesn’t that mean that he goes to a hero school. Wait, but if were in Masutafu and he goes to a hero school, does that mean that he’s a student a UA High. Like the greatest hero school of all time.

You shook your head lightly, for all you know he could be going to a different school and just was visiting here.

Even so, it was pretty coincidental that you met a hero in training on your first hour here. What’s the chances of that really?

“W-woah seriously, that’s so cool! What school do you train at?” You asked him.

His face turned red by the pure admiration and curiosity in your voice. “I-I go to UA.” He replied.

“That’s incredible!!! You must be super strong then!” You smiled so wide in an innocent manner.

“Aha, t-thank you.” He was pretty much a tomato at this point with all the praise he was receiving from you.

“It’s pretty cool, though do to recent villain attacks, we actually have to live on campus.” He paused for a second, thinking about something.

“W-which reminds me that it’s almost time for curfew to end. I think I have to go. I-I mean, I still have time to drop you off at your place if you need me to.” He offered.

“Oh okay. If you don’t mind, that would be great!” You smiled.

After that, you both got up and made your way out the cafe and down the street.

You asked Midoriya a couple more questions about his school and such and he answered them happily.

Though, as you guys were approaching you house, disaster struck.

From a store that you guys just walked by, an explosion erupted from the inside. You saw people running from the burning building while screaming in fear.

You on the other hand, just stood there, completely frozen. You didn’t even notice Midoriya running into the store to help evacuate people.

You weren’t sure how to react to this, you weren’t even sure what was happening. All you could do was stare.

After a few moments, someone walked out of the store, the person was a middle aged man and floating right above his hand was a small ball of flames.

You knew this was a quirk, but actually seeing it with your own eyes was a whole other expirence and not a good one to say the least.

It was terrifying, thinking that a quirk can cause so much distruction and bring the fear out in so many people.

You noticed just how defenseless you were against these powers, how you could loose your life so easily in this world.

What were you doing here? You didn’t belong here.

The man turned to you and started making his way to where you were, a sinister grin on his face as his palm ignighted even more aggressive flames.

He started taunting you in some sort of way, but you couldn’t hear the taunts, all you could hear was your pounding heart beat and some sort of ringing in your ears.

Everything went so slow. You breaths were ragged and sweat formed on your face. You couldn’t move or say anything.

You were beyond horrorfied and as the man approached you step by step.

All you could think was how you wished you stayed home. How you wished that you never went out of your safe and secure island. How could people live like this?

“(L/n)!!!” You heard a shout from your side before seeing green sparks all around you as everything else blurred

In a seconds notice you were in Midoriya’s arms out of the villain’s sight.

“Are you okay? The Pros will be here soon so let’s get you out of here.” You heard the boy speak down at you, but you couldn’t process a words he was saying.

You just stared at him with wide eyes as a green sparks from earlier shrouded the two of you. Was this his quirk? Was that why you were moving to fast?

So many thoughts circled through your head, it was so overwhelming and you were sure what to do.

What did you get yourself into?

As soon as Midoriya saw the expression on your face, one of total fear and shock, he understood the situation.

This was your first time ever seeing a quirk and it wasn’t very pleasant experience either. No wonder you were horrified.

“It’s okay, you’re going to be okay (L/n).” He tried to reassure you as he started running with his quirk all the way to your home.

As soon as he made it, he set you down on the front yard of the house. You wobbled and would have fallen if Midoriya didn’t catch you.

“Woah there!” He steadied you and waited until you were in a stable condition.

“Are you okay?” He asked, looking into your eyes with concern.

“I-I don’t know.” You confessed.

“Everything’s okay, we’re away from the danger, can I see your keys so I could let you in?” He asked.

It took you a second to register what he said, but as soon as you did, you fumbled in your pocket for your keys. You handed them to him and he led you inside.

As soon as you got in, he sat you down on a unpacked box and went to go a glass of water for you.

You, on the other hand was finally getting out of your momentary shock and as soon Midoriya returned with water, you took it from him and gulped the entire cup down.

“I’m sorry.” You told the boy, ashamed of your actions.

He shook his head while crouching down beside you. “Don’t be, it must have been terrifying to see a quirk for the first time. Especially being used against you” You nodded to his phrase.

“But the Pro Heroes will handle it, he wasn’t a very strong villain anyways.”

“I-I just never thought I would be so weak against them. M-maybe I should go back home. I don’t think I can live here.” You stuttered realize just how scary this world is.

“I understand where you’re coming from. If you want to go back to your island, that’s all up to you and I have no right to say otherwise, but...” he hesitated before grasping your hands and looking into your eyes.

“Quirks are not just used for distruction, their is a whole other beautiful side to quirks and I think you would love it if you just explored it!” He beamed, sqeezing your hands slightly.

“So how about you stick around, you could meet my friends in school, and my teachers. We could go to all the quirk museums together and we could train together to get you stronger. Like I said, if you want to go home you can, but you could also stay here and I’ll make sure to be with you the entire time so you won’t have to worry! What do you say?” Midoriya’s eyes sparkled as he anticipated your reply.

You stared at him, all of a sudden your heart beat increased and you felt a flutter travel through you stomach as you stared into the boy’s emerald like eyes.

What was this feeling?

“I guess it wouldn’t be that bad.” Your words were shaky, but you smiled at him lightly.

He smiled as well and nodded. “Then It’s settled. How about I give you my number and we could hang out on my next off day.” He said letting, go of your hands and getting up from his crouched position.

“Yeah. Sounds like a plan.” You replied.

[uncannychange]

It's a heck of a thing to sit and watch a full-grown man dissolve like a candle in a frying pan over high heat.

However that's what Doctor John Cameron Ice and billionaire Marcelo Zucchero did years ago, and while frighting to watch the pair regarded the event with optimism as the start of what they hoped would be a world-changing discovery.

Dealing with impairments their whole lives, Ice having a badly curved spine, and Zucchero struggling with a congenital heart defect. Ice had come to the billionaire with a proposal for a radically new form of treatment that would cure them both, and offer the same for thousands of other conditions, up to and including old age. He financed it fully.

Until at last the first full-blown clinical trial was held and William-X became a puddle in a vat. And yet he still lived because as he was so reduced his every cell was rejuvenated and re-calibrated and most fantastic of all the mysterious substances known as Dark Matter and accompanying Dark Energy was made a part of him as it bonded with his Y chromosome turning it into a very special Neo-X chromosome.

Then the pair watched as the man listed only as William-X in their records started to reform into a human.

But what a human! No longer an elderly man in his mid-80s William was hale hearty and a woman who appeared to be in her early 20s.

Oh, and due to the Neo-X chromosome possessed of what could only be called superpowers far beyond those of ordinary mortals. While having the mind of his former self William-X was otherwise a whole new person. And frankly, she went more than a touch mad.

Deciding her only choice was to dash out and fight crime and or evil, unable to stop her the being what soon became known as The Indelible She-Funk (the name hints at her powers, but in case you're eating we won't go into detail) made quite an impression on the public.

At first, thinking that the experiment was going to be a failure. After all, it only worked on men (doesn't work if you already have an X chromosome) and there was no telling what weird powers the new women would have.

Then Marcelo's money-making instincts kicked in and so was born.

Supreme Ultra-human Genetic Augmentation Regimen Strategies, or SUGARS.

Housed in their all-white cube-shaped headquarters, The Sugar Cube, men without families go in, their identities are erased, and outcome a new breed of super-heroines for hire The SUGARS!

Led by Ice and Zucchero, who themselves have gone through the process, emerging as the telepathic super hypnotic powered Empress Bee, and Blizzardella the princess of polar powers.

Crime has never been more scared or turned on.

Below are some of the new Super Women.

Hector Hensley: The Starry Knight

Hector on finding himself turned into an attractive young woman exclaimed “Oh man! I am spacing out here!” and then she did... shoot out into space.

Seems she has the ability to teleport herself and up to twenty-two other people, animals, or objects anywhere in the world, after first taking them on a dizzying spin in outer space.

Impressive if you ignore the two or three people who always lose their lunch on landing at the destination.

Guy Bright: Good Knight Nurse

Gained the ability to control the body functions of other people. Blood pressure, blood sugar levels, temperature, etc... 

Which led to GKN's most famous way to take out the baddies, the orgasm blast. 

Which led to the Good Knight Nurse also taking special stealth training at The Sugar Cube to become sort of the de facto “dark knight” of the SUGARS, not so she could sneak up on others, but so she could better hide from people following her demanding “blast me! blast me!”

Marsh Marshall: Ballistic Ballerina

Marsh, an ex-motorcycle racier rose from the vats at The Sugar Cube with super-human agility, and the ability to run at super-speed (max velocity 444 MPH) on her toes!

However, she still insists that SUGARS get her the best bike they could find which she still uses to get around from place to place, saying “Hey, those damn toe-shoes are expensive!”

Jim Yates: The Transcendental Technician

Found she had the ability to “commune” with technology and machines. Said Neon, “when they said I was going to be a super-heroine I was thinking more along the lines of Wonder Woman smashing into villains, not going around and setting on copying machines to see what they had been used for.”

Joel Walton: Nun Better

Can force a confession out of anyone, has a flock of telekinetically controlled 12-inch rulers, and can cause elemental changes in small objects (if she tosses some small bland cookies or a glass of wine at you they might change into explosives or knock-out gas when they arrive.)

Says Nun “This is all so weird, I'm an agnostic!”

Paul Aaron Flynn: The Pink Avenger

Not only did his trip through the SUGARS process give his super-powers, but it also seems to have turned him into a Japanese woman... with pink hair!.

Her very unusual power is the ability to fire pink force bolts that cause anything struck by them to have their reality altered becoming feminized, eccentric, and leaving behind the scent of Shiseido Ever Bloom Fragrance.

Such as the team of bank robbers who found themselves turned into a middle-school cheer-leading squad from the '50s or the mad bomber who found himself turned into a living version of Betty Crocker and his bomb a plate of toll house cookies.

Alfred Ferguson: Puzzle Boxer

Alfred really, really wanted to be a knockdown taken `em out rough and tumble sort of super person. 

But the SUGARS process does its own unpredictable thing and instead, Alfred found she now had the ability to break any code, solve any puzzle and defuse any bomb or trap. She insisted on being trained in all the combat skills The Sugar Cube had to offer, and on being called not the Puzzler as PR suggested but the Puzzle Boxer so people would think she was mainly a fighter.

But as the SUGARS process had also turned him into a five-foot-one-inch cutie no one is really buying it.

Henry Hiroto Kazuhiko: The Clone Ranger

The only single person in the world that if she wants to talk to herself, has to use Zoom.

Maximum clones: 15.

James Jasper Mueller: Obsidian Rose

Turns into a shadow, walks through walls, phasing through a person knocks them out.

But that's not the important thing with Obsidian Rose. James on finding himself turned not only into a woman but a rather spooky one at that did not take it well.

Plus on being handed the bill for being healed by the SUGARS  process (talk about out-of-network NONE of it is covered by any insurance) with the only real way out to sign an exclusive five-year contract to work for SUGARS as a super-heroine for hire.

The former Mr. Mueller said screw this and went rogue founding a team with other disgruntled SUGARS that she calls Adventuresses, Mercenaries, Outsiders & Killers or AMOK.

Which is just as well, because what's a bunch of supers if they don't have another bunch of super baddies to fight? Pain in the neck, that's what they are.

And boy howdy does this ever help with the merchandising from The Sugar Cube.

[randomvarious]

James Harman Band - “Wake Up Call” Blues Harmonica Spotlight Song released in 1991. Compilation released in 1992. Harmonica Blues / Electric Blues

Not that many people can name more than a few blues harmonicists in the first place, but James Harman, who’s been performing since the 60s, is still probably one of the instrument’s longest lasting and most underrated players. To prove the point, Google the term “harmonica player” and go through the 50-name scroll that’s provided. Even though he’s very gifted, you won’t find him in there. 

From his website’s bio page:

JAMES HARMAN was born and raised in Anniston, Alabama-quickly picked up on the black blues and soul music being played on juke boxes and the radio. He sang in the church choir until age 16 when his family moved to Panama City Florida, where he found himself surrounded by like-minded blues lovers. Wearing a fake moustache, young James slipped into a still segregated black nightclub to see Little Junior Parker’s show [at no point does his bio mention that he’s white, by the way]. He was totally overtaken by the blues and soon became a regular, known as “That boy who sings like a man” by patrons. While still in his teens, he started playing juke joints and dance clubs throughout the South. His performances became legendary-he was “tapped” by talent scouts, signed and taken to Atlanta, Georgia in 1964 to begin his recording career at age 18. He had a series of nine singles (45 RPM records) released during the mid to late 60's on obscure southern labels. He tried several restarts in new home bases including Chicago in ’65, New York in ’66, Miami in ’68 and New Orleans in ‘69. During his stay in Miami Harman was befriended by fellow record collectors Henry Vestine, Alan Wilson and Bob Hite of Canned Heat, who persuaded him to move to California, promising to help him get re-started. Harman made his move to SoCal in 1970, and true to their word, Canned Heat insisted on Harman’s Icehouse Blues Band as their opening act on many big shows. Icehouse Blues Band became established at venues such as The Golden Bear, The Ash Grove, The Troubadour and The Lighthouse, which all booked real blues artists. James Harman was soon in demand for his own shows, as well as backing every living blues artist who was touring without a band. He also opened literally hundreds of shows for artist who did have their own band. Icehouse Blues Band was a real working blues band. In 1978 James tired of using band names and started billing his act as James Harman Band.

(Just as a small aside, and in an effort to promote my other tumblr, Dank Album Art, an alumnus of James Harman’s band is Phil Alvin, a guy who went on to front a band you might have heard of called The Blasters. Alvin has an awesome album cover that I posted on DAA a couple days ago...)

Throughout the 80s and early 90s, The James Harman Band would release a total of four albums and then land on the expanding, New Orleans-based Black Top Records in 1991. Upon signing with them, they released one of, if not their most, critically acclaimed albums, Do Not Disturb, which features a great, upbeat, instrumental ditty called “Wake Up Call,” an interesting choice to name a song that’s featured on an album called Do Not Disturb.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re listening to this song, you should be as bemused as I am. I mean, how does stuff like this fly so under the radar when it’s just so viscerally good? Harman’s produces some really soul-stirring sound with his overdriven harmonica as he trades scratchy and distorted leads with guitarist Joel Foy. A real eyes-closed, face-scrunching, head-bopping kinda tune. An instrumental soundtrack for hopping a rural freight train at the crack of dawn.

There’s just so much good, unknown music out there. My goodness.

[fandom-star]

Lou Sullivan

(Quick note: for most of this post, I use outdated terminology such as transsexual. This is because those are the terms used most frequently in the 70s and 80s. If that makes you uncomfortable, don't read this. If you can look past that for the sake of learning about an incredible transgender activist that shaped the history of the trans community, I urge you to read on.)

Lou Sullivan was born on the 16th of March 1951, and died of AIDS-related complications on March 2nd 1991.

He was the first transgender man to fully transition medically whilst being openly gay.

In his childhood and adolescence, Lou kept a journal. In this journal, he documented his thoughts of being a boy, his confusion growing up, his fantasies of being a gay man and his involvement in the music scene of Milwaukee, where he grew up. He wrote short stories, poems and diaries, which outlined his attraction to taking on male roles. 

When he was fifteen (in 1966), he wrote in his journal: "I want to look like what I am but don't know what some one like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think— there's one of those people […] that has their own interpretation of happiness. That's what I am."

In a special remembrance edition of FtM International's newsletter, one of Lou's friends in Milwaukee shared some of his memories of Lou. One of them was Lou's first haircut at a barber. After being told Lou wanted a 'male' haircut, the barber asked whether he was a boy or a girl. Lou told him, "That's none of your business! Cut my hair!"

[Photo: Lou, circa 1964. Black and white photo of Lou with shoulder-length hair, wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt and a leather page boy hat.]

By 1973, Lou identified as a female transvestite. This was when he first stepped into activism in the transgender community. He published an article called 'A Transvestite Answers a Feminist' in the Gay People's Union, followed by another article, 'Looking Towards Transvestite Liberation'.

In 1975, Lou began identifying as female-to-male transsexual. This meant he made the decision to move from Wisconsin to California to find more understanding and access hormones for his transition. His family had always been supportive of his identity, and also supported his move. He was given his grandfather's pocket-watch and a suit that his mother had tailored for him, telling the tailor that it was for her son.

Upon arriving in San Francisco, he was employed as a secretary at Wilson Sporting Goods Company. He was also employed as a woman, but he spent most of his time living as a gay man. 

The next year, Lou began seeking sex-reassignment, but was turned down by gender clinics. This was because of his sexuality, which meant that his gender dysphoria was not considered legitimate because he would be transitioning from straight female to gay male.

[Photo: Lou, circa early-80s, in a garden. He is wearing a white vest and dark trousers. He is holding a small book and a pair of glasses.]

In 1979, Lou finally received hormone treatment after finding doctors and therapists sympathetic to his case. 

The same year, he started volunteering at the Janus Information Facility, which was a gender dysphoria clearing house and referral service. It is now known as J2CP.

During this time, Lou also became involved with The Golden Gate Girls, a San Francisco area transsexual group, and managed to petition to add guys into their name, making them The Golden Gate Girls/Guys. From the July of 1979 until October in 1980, he edited their newsletter, which provided news and information for transvestites and transsexuals. It's been said that this transformed the group's network, because they could give support to people without them having to attend meetings due to the newsletters being circulated.

Lou had a double mastectomy in 1980, giving him the ability to begin living as a man full-time. He made this easier for himself by changing jobs, so that his co-workers would have no idea about his life as a woman.

In 1980, he also published his book 'Information for the Female to Male Cross Dresser and Transsexual'. 

Also during the early 80s, Lou founded the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society (now known as the GLBT Historical Society). He helped to edit and publish the newsletter, leading him to start his own typesetting and word-processing business.

In 1986, Lou managed to complete his reassignment and received genital reconstruction surgery.

It was at this time that he also organised FTM International, a peer support group entirely dedicated to the support of female-to-male transsexuals and transvestites. It was the first of its kind, and is still active to this day, I believe.

[Photo: Lou, circa mid-80s. He is sat cross-legged on a bed, wearing suit trousers, a grey/blue shirt and a cream coloured tie. He is smiling at the camera.]

However, it was later on in 1986 that Lou was diagnosed as being HIV-positive. On the subject, Lou wrote:"I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a gay man, it looks like I'm going to die like one."

After this, Lou had himself and a therapist filmed having a conversation about his transition, his identity as a gay, transsexual man and his AIDS diagnosis, so that there would be documentation for people like him in the future. (I'll reblog with links to YouTube clips of this film.)

His work to make the process of accessing hormones and surgery for transition "orientation blind" eventually paid off towards the end of the 80s.

Lou dedicated the last years of his life to working with FtMs, the transgender community and the gay community. 

His last published work was a biography of Jack Bee Garland.

[Photo: Lou, circa 1989. Black and white photo. He is wearing a white shirt with the top button undone and black suspenders. He looks frail compared to the previous photo, however, like the previous photo, he is smiling at the camera.]

Lou Sullivan dedicated the majority of his adult life to educating about transgender men, and how gender identity is separate from sexual orientation. He helped to transform the way transgender men, specifically gay transgender men, are perceived in America. He was a great activist who could have done so much more, but had already done a great deal of work in the thirty-nine years he had lived.

Lou Sullivan deserves so much recognition that he doesn't seem to get. 

[janiedean]

(1) Can I just say I hate all this Freddie Mercury biopic wank with a passion? Like, this hellsite went from "Queen is one of those boring 'classic' bands all whites are obsessed with bc they won't even consider new music by diverse artists u.u" to "WWRY is clearly a song about rebellious queer youth, cishets don't touch Queen u.u" after someone pointed out Freddie's ethnicity and sexuality, to "why aren't they making Freddie gay in the biopic!!!11" and... whatever they're whining about now.

(2) And I HATE looking at all this bs and thinking "fake fans", bc I'm pretty damn sure that by most standards, *I* count as a "fake fan", too. I mean, most stuff I know about the band's history is actually stuff about Freddie, thanks to a few documentaries centered around him and my mom, the long-time fan with a big crush on Freddie who introduced me to Queen when I was a kid. Hell, I couldn't even name all their albums or anything needed to be considered a "true fan". But ppl on here... ugh. (3) It's like they're really embarrassed bc they were called out on mistaking "woke" stuff for "unwoke" stuff, and now they have this desperate need to prove their ability to discern wokeness by getting offended about something they don't even care all that much about, as loudly and dramatically as they can.

HAHAHAHAHA.

okay so, tldr: I hate this discourse and I honestly hope that it dies within two weeks out of the biopic for a whole lot of reasons amongst which the ones you said, but like, this discourse actually highlights a shitload of issues with the usual tumblr discourse which I will gladly go into now because I’m fucking tired and this movie isn’t out yet.

now, premise: while I don’t think that true fans are a thing - at most there’s casual fans or in-depth fans but I mean, a fan is a fan so I don’t believe in the *fake* fans thing..... the problem here isn’t that they’re fakes. it’s that they aren’t fans. period.

other premise: from what you’ve said you’re a casual fan which is normal and you DON’T count as fake I mean if you like them and listen to them and know something it’s basically being a casual fan same as I am with idk the rolling stones, I like the famous stuff, I have the fundamental records and I like them when they’re on but that’s it.

but, yours truly is a Not Casual Queen Fan in the sense that a) I got into them when I was seventeen and I’m thirty now so thanks it’s been a while, b) I own all the records, c) I own a decent portion of roger taylor’s/brian may’s solo records (and I have listened to all of them that I couldn’t buy), d) I went to see them live once (k it was with paul rodgers but nvm guys not my fault if I wasn’t born in time for freddie) and I love queen’s music and I’m also fucking cishet and you know what? these people Are Not Fans and they should stop pretending they are and just stop making themselves look like assholes.

SPECIFICALLY:

the movie’s not out yet and I’ve had to see FIFTEEN ‘FRIENDLY REMINDER TO ALL CISHETS THAT FREDDIE MERCURY WAS GAY (at least a couple said he was bi and they were less asshole-ish) AND POC AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOU’D BETTER LEARN NOW HAHAHAHA YOU THOUGHT HE WASN’T. spoilers: every fucking casual queen fan who has bothered to buy three records knows that. yes, also the cishets. like, as someone who went from VERY CASUAL (ie: I know three songs) to NOT CASUAL in the span of two months I can 100% assure you that before getting into queen the usual preconceptions are that freddie was gay and that queen = freddie + three other people. the first three things you learn when getting into queen are (more or less in order but it can change) that a) the band was actually brian may + roger taylor first, b) that roger brought freddie in because they knew each other already, c) that mary austin was a fundamental person in freddie’s life and that she was also brian may’s ex and knew him first before they got together, d) the members’s backstories including where freddie was born, so like...... this idea that CASUAL CISHET FANS wouldn’t know that freddie was a) not heterosexual, b) poc is just something a NON-FAN would say because guess what, most queen fans even at a casual level are 100% aware that freddie was a) not heterosexual, b) not ethnical british. and saying that OMG CISHETS DON’T KNOW it’s ridiculous because guess what, everyone knows and if they have no idea they do, though luck, we did;

(spoilers: I also am 99% sure that those ppl have no idea that roger and brian actually sing on the records and composed a shitload of the music and queen =/= ONLY FREDDIE but okay)

they have no idea that rock music in the 70s/80s was not so heteronormative and was not the cishetmalething they think it is. like, please look at led zeppelin (ie THE PEOPLE WITHOUT WHOM YOU WOULDN’T HAVE HEAVY METAL) and tell me they were heteronormative. like, you saw robert plant? yeah, me too. and the thing was that queen were revolutionary in the sense that they brought an operatic/theatrical approach to the music that no one tried before but guess what, the point is that they made it sell. the thing that I would like tumblr Woke People to grasp is that what made queen groundbreaking as far as Wokeness goes is that they managed to sell and become the monster-moneymaking group they were (while keeping things quality) with a frontman who was Not Heterosexual, Did Not Try To Pass For Heterosexual One Day In His Life and Never Shied Away From It. like, idk if people are aware that while the scene was way less heteronormative than they think it still wasn’t the most openly talked about topic around (I mean guys elton john did marry a woman at some point X°DDD), but going around in the seventies flaunting your non-heterosexualness around and selling millions of copies making your stage persona a selling point of your music wasn’t exactly common. like ffs one of the most famous queen songs has a video where for 3/4 of the time they’re in drag and the other part has freddie performing with the royal ballet (and guess what the song was actually written by john deacon and the idea of doing the video in drag was roger taylor’s and none of them as far as we know is Not Heterosexual, but never mind giving the rest of the band some credit when it came to Not Caring About Heteronormativity) and fine, that video was banned/controversial, but it still was a huge british hit and it’s in the top five queen songs Everyone Knows. and tbh I’m terrified of that video being shown in the biopic (which it should since the works was from ‘84 and they stop at ‘85) because I’m 100% sure that those people have no idea it exists and when they find out how long is it gonna take them to decide that IT’S PROBLEMATIC? I mean, Woke Kids on here think the rhps is problematic, I’m shuddering at the thought of what they’d think of the i want to break free video;

actually a lot of us cishet queen fans might have had a wake up call including, er, finding out certain preferences, thanks to either their music or their shows or their videos (*cough* I 100% assure you that watching roger taylor in drag was what made me realize crossdressing was my thing for good like I knew before but I didn’t actually put two and two together until I saw that video and went like ‘............. AH WELL SHIT THEN THAT’S IT FAIR ENOUGH’), and a lot of us cishet queen fans who weren’t, like, strictly playing to heteronormative rules back in the day found a lot to relate to in their music even without being queer ourselves and guess what I’ve never met a single queen *fan* who could give less of a damn about freddie’s ethnicity or orientation (as in: everyone was a-okay with it) regardless of their background. that was what made them groundbreaking and extremely important as well, because they managed to be that kind of record-selling records-breaking band while not shying away from having a Not Heterosexual frontman AND Not Heteronormative Heterosexual Band Members Who Also Didn’t Give Two Fucks About Their Lead Singer’s Sexuality so going like OMG NOW WE’RE GONNA TEACH YOU THAT FREDDIE WASN’T HETEROSEXUAL BECAUSE WE’RE WOKE is ridiculous because dearest susan, we already knew and we already were woke about that and to us he was the frontman of a band we liked for a bunch of reasons;

also I don’t think people realize that freddie was a role model/example for the entire next generation of rock bands frontmen even in genres that had zilch to do with him - I mean guys AXL ROSE had a hero-worship for freddie and sang bohemian rhapsody at the freddie memorial concert WITH ELTON JOHN and grn really aren’t the same exact sphere as queen jsyk, but if you look at axl on stage esp. when he was younger? guys. it’s obvious. like you can see the influence. but lmao, now ALL the very cishet(-ish) singers who OPENLY SAID FREDDIE INFLUENCED THEM DIDN’T KNOW ACCORDING TO TUMBLR DOT COM?

LIKE, fuck’s sake, one of freddie’s major accomplishments in that sense was to ending up being a role model for younger singers in a genre where heteronormativity is way less common than everyone thinks BUT where not many people esp. back in the day would be open about their sexuality because it still was a taboo-ish thing -- like, gender roles were a lot more blurred but you wouldn’t hear many of those people admitting openly they were bi or gay or Not Heterosexual and the entirety of the rock scene especially mainstream but also not was entirely fucking aware of it, do these people think THE FANS wouldn’t?

also, we will rock you was WRITTEN BY BRIAN MAY AND IT WAS ABOUT A FUCKING ENCORE WHERE THE FANS SURPRISED THEM AT ONE SHOW IN LIKE MID-SEVENTIES which already shows that They Know Nothing because if they think freddie wrote all the queen songs then it’s already obvious they have no fucking clue about how queen worked as a band because all the members contributed something (guys john deacon wrote at least two of their major hits, roger taylor sang on all the records along with brian may and if you hear the back harmonies on ‘39 he goes way higher than freddie and a part in seaside rendezvous has both him and freddie mimicking other instruments with their voice and you wouldn’t know if no one told you first, brian may wrote a SHITLOAD of music for queen and it was an all-four effort, not just freddie + three other generic british dudes for fuck’s sake) so like, anyone saying that is already giving ample proof that they have no idea;

now of course you can interpret it as whatever the hell you want, but assuming that all of queen’s music that might relate to queer issues was written by freddie ABOUT QUEER ISSUES (this when freddie’s main topic of interest was... not really discussing his sexuality especially in the seventies like again, I want to break free is one of the queen to-go songs everyone brings up when it comes to that topic and IT WAS WRITTEN BY SOMEONE ELSE and the video concept was THANKS TO SOMEONE ELSE) just shows that a) you don’t know shit about the band’s history, b) you’re not a fan because you didn’t even bother to look it up on wiki, c) you’re trying to look woke at all costs;

they have NO FUCKING CLUE that most people in the 70s/80s/90s in the business were NOT politically correct according to their standards LIKE LITERALLY NO ONE WAS;

goes unsaid they probably haven’t listened to one full queen album from beginning to end not even the greatest hits.

tldr: I hate that they don’t seem to realize that things existed before 2005 and that music in the 70s/80s COULD and WAS diverse and *woke* already before they were even born, I hate that they decided that ALL CISHETS DIDN’T KNOW when thank you I think even my damned parents know and they don’t listen to rock music, I hate that they decided that queen APPARENTLY DIDN’T HAVE A FANBASE BEFORE THEM (lol) or that that fanbase didn’t understand them (triple-lol), I hate that they’re reducing freddie to his sexuality when he didn’t want that in the first place, I hate that they’re falling into THE MAIN MISCONCEPTION AROUND ABOUT THIS BAND as in THAT IT WAS FREDDIE + THREE OTHER PEOPLE and not an all-around group effort of people who were friends and deeply loved/respected each other and put the same share of work into it, I hate that they moment they see the movie and are introduced to the actual music/the actual story they’ll MOST LIKELY find problematic things to wank about because like hell they wouldn’t and I hate that they’re basically pretending to give a fuck about a band that I love and have loved dearly in a very non-casual way when they actually fucking don’t.

fucking hell please never let anyone make a biopic about either springsteen or led zeppelin or other people I actually like because this is bad enough, I don’t even want to think of what tumblr ppl would say if they knew anything about any rock artist of medium-large fame back in the day. peace.

[nataliesnews]

A white South African on her experience during the apartheid regime  12.10.2010

'For us, Mandela was just another terrorist'

A white South African on her experience during the apartheid regime, and the moral failure of progressives to challenge the racist system

Yuli Novak | Oct. 12, 2021 | 1:56 AM |  1

On the southern edge of Africa, facing the ocean, with Table Mountain behind us, she tells me: “I only heard of Nelson Mandela years later. You probably wonder how it’s possible for an educated and socially involved South African woman to have never heard of one of the people who, at the time, in the mid-1980s, was one of the most famous people in the world. Well, the truth is that for us, the whites in apartheid South Africa, he was not much more than one of the many terrorists serving a prison sentence."

“You know, I often think about life experiences – mine, those of my community – under apartheid. Nobody focuses on us, the working and lower middle class liberal whites in apartheid South Africa, and rightly so. After all, we didn’t do anything special to oppose it or to end it. Back then we just tried to live our lives, and to be the best people we could be, at the same time. We always knew we were nothing like the racist Afrikaners who hated Black people. On the contrary: My parents, for example, both of them Holocaust survivors, always taught us to treat people everywhere with respect, regardless of their skin color."

“In hindsight, I think that being progressive in apartheid South Africa was mainly a matter of consciousness and less a practical thing. In our house we had a saying, which was said half in jest: We vote for the Liberal Party, but thank God the National Party is in power. They, the Afrikaners in the government, were ultra-nationalists and racists, but at least they had a clear program as to how to keep a minority of whites alive in a mainly Black continent."

“The Liberal or progressive Party, for which we voted in elections and which reflected our values, had no alternative political program that sounded realistic. The possibility of living together, in one country, in which everyone would be equal? Don’t make me laugh; that wasn’t an option that anyone took seriously."

“You have to understand, the story we were born into was that if the Black people took over it would be a disaster. In the ‘80s it even got worse: Those were terrible years in South Africa, with violence and hatred everywhere. Mainly, the areas in which the Black people lived, the townships, were on fire. So imagine this situation, for example: We’re sitting in the living room in the evening and listening to the news about the riots in the townships. And then someone from the family remarks: ‘Look how they’re killing one another and burning the schools we built for them.’"

“You understand, the whole story was that the violence of the Black people is always unfocused and irrational, and the conclusion was that that’s just how they are – violent. We didn’t think of it as racism; there simply was no other way for us to understand what was happening around us. We knew that if the Black people rose to power in South Africa they would probably throw us into the ocean. And the truth is that as a progressive – what you today in Israel would call a ‘leftist’ – I couldn’t blame them."

“I think that in terms of politics, my strongest experience of apartheid was of ‘knowing and not knowing.’ This was like living in a kind of gray area of consciousness: a situation in which knowing and not-knowing clashed, and you had to navigate between them, to push aside what was impossible to comprehend and to integrate the things you were capable of dealing with."

“So we, as liberals, were the opposition to the National Party. And yes, we definitely considered ourselves to be the good guys, the good side in the system. But we never thought about the possibility that the entire system was bad, and that the fact that we were part of it was what enabled it to exist. Those were overly radical thoughts, which were reserved only for those who came out against the regime, who were imprisoned."

“Ah, you actually asked about Mandela, didn’t you? So I think that even the political prisoners – whom we didn’t call by that name, and didn’t think of them as such – were in a sense part of that same knowing and not knowing. For us, the only way to think about all those who were imprisoned for decades was via the discourse of terror. That was also backed up by laws, because it was forbidden to express identification with the African National Congress, Mandela’s organization, which was considered a terrorist organization.

“So that’s how it happened that over 20 years after Mandela was imprisoned, and after he had already become a symbol of a freedom fighter – across the world – for us, he was just another terrorist, whose name didn’t even deserve to be remembered. I lived in a very liberal environment, and still, I didn’t know anyone who supported terrorism. We were good people, really. There are simply things that are outside the boundaries of our thinking. I believe that most of the people who live under regimes of that kind, the privileged ones, are good people."

“Sometimes I would like to reinvent my biography, to say that I was one of those few who realized already then that apartheid is evil, who joined the struggle, who were imprisoned, who went into exile. But thinking about it now, perhaps there is also importance to this unheroic experience, of ‘knowing and not knowing.’ Because it can teach us something profound about the way in which such regimes shape the daily perceptions of all the good people, so that they can continue to exist – without understanding that we are in effect those who enable evil to flourish.”

The writer is a political activist, the former executive director of Breaking the Silence. Her book, “Mi At Bikhlal” (“Who Do You Think You Are?”) is forthcoming.

[mommydropthemic]

What does love look like: My Birth Story

Uncomfortable, scared pregnancy = Uncomfortable, scared birth.

 THE SHITTY PREAMBLE

I ate a “strata” at church made of cheese, hamburger, and breadcrumbs. This was the birthing cocktail I needed, apparently. I had a ton of loose stools, just like last time with the birth of my first child, around 12 pm when I returned home. Like last time I kept wondering: Is it early labor? Is it cheese? Is it both? I have a way, a knack, of alienating Western/ polite/civilized? people with my love/non-fear of discussing the body. Foreshadowing the momentous coming of our second child, reminded by our best man Jeff at the wedding, that I introduced this knack to my future husband the first night we met by showing him my foot corn. (According to Jeff who introduced us, Jasen’s response was of compassion). I’d not kept it 50% then in matters of body, and the thing about birth is, especially home birth, you have no choice but to keep it 100%-120%. So a big memory for this birth is shitting all over the place. On the couch, on the way to the bathroom, perhaps a little bit made it into the toilet?

 Everything’s a blur, but I do remember this birth being more painful than my first. Samuel has a bigger body than Ruby (though she had a larger head). I had also alienated my kind stay-at-home white-guy-writer-dad-neighbor Jeff, because the last month of pregnancy I was so damned hot and uncomfortable — the day Sam was born it was about 90 degrees (which is anathema to any typical Seattleite and I’ve been one since my birth in the mid-80’s)—I would lay in bed, pregnant as all hell, naked in our room which is adjacent to neighbor Jeff’s house separated only by a few feet, a chain link fence sparsely lined with trees. In my mind, he was an innocent white guy enjoying the side of his house, walking and whistling as he might, then the sight of my distended-bellied, uncomfortable naked body splayed out right next door made him uncomfortable. You might note that I didn’t exactly intentionally do this, but we are cash-poor and lazy with completely ineffectual heavy blinds that are perpetually hanging halfway open, the cord tangled on one side, the other cord half-cocked—it’s a damn mess.

Anyhow, I think we both noticed each other, him uncomfortable with my naked pregnant (Asian-- does that factor in?) female body; me uncomfortable with being caught naked by my neighbor or uncomfortable with his uncomfortableness.

All this is to say, WHAT DOES LOVE LOOK LIKE?

My patient Jasen wiped my shit-pouring ass without hesitation. Be it the garbanzo beans I’d had just before I was sure it was labor-labor and not pre (that is “false”) labor, or leftover strata hanging out in my gut even after the 12 pm loose poops.

Love looks like...

Jasen wiping my bottom and throwing away the pee pee pad.

Wayne, Carol, Caryn, Cate, Ed, Mom, and Dad watching Ruby while Jasen rushed home to fill the tub.

Dana and Melissa telling me between my confused afternoon poops to call Midwife Jenn.

Midwife Jenn and her husband Don ditching their anniversary plans to see the Terra Cotta Warriors to go home and be on standby for labor. Of course it was their anniversary; last birth was my midwife’s son’s birthday, the only day she took off all year, and also Thanksgiving. I make auspicious children.

Jasen fighting me tooth and nail (“you’ll take control of house organization out of my cold, dead hands”) to work against my scattered frugal instinct to present the clean, organized house of my dreams. This is still a work in progress, naturally (it’s out of my cold, dead hands).

Brandi, supporting and videoing and being present for the birth.

Ben sacrificing his pay so we could have more.

Alice with her surreptitious gardening and then being able to watch Ruby; looking for castor oil in my disorganized ass house while I just laid my fat naked ass on the couch; purchasing a curtain rod to protect Ruby from her playful self; and a sustained hunt for apricot juice.

Nate being available to watch Ruby

Vicki bringing delicious food when I was starving.

Emily, Charles, and Michaela making pre-celebratory beer with me for Samuel’s arrival.

Jess, Porter, Harper, Etta, and Patrick watching Ruby during the birth and being willing to watch her overnight.

Alpha insurance broker from heaven!

In summary, an army of love for a successful birth.

And, Melissa. Dear Melissa. You set up the birthing tub with Jasen; gently chastised Jasen to go be with me when he was not; and carefully took down the tub—full of poo, blood, baby-birthing-juices, it was tinged red with floating debris, ah, the floating debris. By the final pushes I was definitely disturbed by said floaties in the tub. Based on Ruby’s birth, I thought there wouldn’t be shit, but following a pregnancy of weird shits, and a new baby with weird shits, it is not a surprise.

1) IMMANUEL CHURCH STRATA. Uncomfortable as fuck. Moving from pews to the back of the church with carpeted stairs. Pastor asked if baby dropped, she could tell the baby’s position had changed. Whoops, we couldn’t tell.

2) LOTS of uncertainty. For weeks, I’d been thinking, it’s gonna happen early, it’s gonna happen, I have uncomfortable contraction-like feelings, but they go nowhere. We wake up, no baby, womp womp. So what was to make this day any different?

    hottest day on record

    Jenn and Don’s anniversary

    friend Beth’s daughter Evie’s birthday

    two days before due date.  

 3) After much consternation looking for apricot juice (Alice tried PCC, nope), we had a lemon verbena, castor oil German-midwife-induction-cocktail ready to go and I was trying to decide what was a more auspicious day to coax my baby into existence—6/27 or 6/28, but we didn’t need it. Huzzah!

 4)  On the one hand, the birth was harder, scarier, uncomfy, I was more tired (from taking care of Ruby). On the other, we were MORE PREPARED THAN EVARR.

    A) Therapy

    B) Supplements-nutrition-visiting the doctor

    C) Acupuncture

    D) Birthing class, though we were snooty about it—I was sad for our culture begetting scared women afraid of their bodies, Jasen was snooty about our first birth.

    E) Talk to peers

    F) Talk to Ruby. A LOT. Every night.  

    G) Relationship class

    H) Total Pelvic Recall

    I) Massage. Vag therapy advice + massage

 Based on our most trying year and a half, mine personally and also as a couple with a postpartum mood explosion of some sort (a total-mama-meltdown) I needed to ensure this time around, that the insanity, and post-insanity HAZE of the first and second years of Child One’s life was not repeated or at least not as devastatingly so. So far, success.

 This time:

our finances are less stable

    we are delinquent on rent

    we were fighting about the tub. The $250 tub (my vag, not yours, homie).

    we almost lost our insurance.

    we almost had our water shut off.

an anonymous donor stepped in and helped-they covered the global midwifery fee, the tub, all of it. Ho-ly-shit.

I didn’t do my kegels as much--first, benign neglect, second, on purpose (on advice of my white Vag lady, i.e. vagina guru physical therapist).

my goal of Sammy not fucking up my periurethral area: MET!

birthtub: MET!

confronting J with my shit (though not in the tub): MET!

I am one lucky lady. And my children + hubby are lucky motherfuckers.

I was nervous that the coochie pads weren’t made—we had several, but not many—didn’t need ‘em!

We are at 6.4 weeks post-birth, and my vag + bod, other than being too hot and too stinky, are feeling on the up and up.

GOD BLESS IT. GOD BLESS ALL THE LOVES. IT WORKED OUT. Out of $? My mom shows up with $20. The credit card. (Countless) people feed us. People are patient. People understand.

*The End*

[fatbadjah]

To those whom I’ve disappointed and to those to whom I am disappointing...

On Monday I demonstrated that common sense, good judgment, and I are not always the best friends.  I learned about a social event that I was not involved in, and I felt hurt, left out, emotionally neglected and replied out of pain.

I hurt others in a moment of weakness, and for that, I apologize and ask forgiveness.

For me, one of the most iconic images of the 90s was a clip from Blind Melon’s “No Rain” video. In it, a little girl in a bee costume is ridiculed after a dance performance, and spends the song wandering the street…again facing derision and ridicule from strangers. Then, at one point in the song, she sees a gated field. In it, she sees others in bee costumes, dancing around. She pushes through the gate and joyously cavorts—having found “her” people.

I’ve come to define these moments of social connection “bee girl” moments. Most of us have them—especially in the furry fandom.

Like most, I was interested in anthropomorphic animals since I was a child. After reading The Wind in the Willows in third grade, I wanted to join that created family of Rat, Mole, Toad, and Badger. In the mid 80s, I saw Animalympics on HBO until I knew the songs by heart. Likewise, seeing Rock and Rule on the Movie Channel in early 1986 not only furthered my interest in anthropomorphics, but expanded my musical palate out a bit. I started collecting comic books in 1987, as quarter bins were bursting with remnants of the Black-And-White boom—many of which were anthropomorphic attempts to become the next TMNT. When I played role playing games or video games, I gravitated towards any animal-themed races, classes, or characters.

Frankly, I thought I was weird and the only one.

In December 1993, I saw a clip of an event called Confurence on the then-new Sci-Fi Channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iodRjbBKB0k). For the first time, I knew that there were others out there like me…that I wasn’t alone.

Florida State University, like many universities in the early 90s, restricted their student Internet access to engineering and computer science students. If you weren’t in one of those disciplines, the assumption was that you didn’t need to access the Internet. Of course, once I’d seen the Internet, that didn’t stop me. I’d learned a little UNIX trick that allowed me to access a raw Telnet in 1992, but I didn’t know what USENET was until January of 1994, when FSU began selling Garnet accounts to students—a basic Internet account with Telnet, email, a few other early 90s goodies, and USENET access. One Friday night, as I was diving through the sea of alt and soc groups, I found one called alt.fan.furry. The group was buzzing about an event called “Confurence” which was happening that weekend in Orange County, California.

I had my “bee girl” moment. I soaked up every zine I could find. Alt.fan.furry was my new hangout. I had an account on Furrymuck and explored more.

I felt like I belonged somewhere. I made a trip in January 1995 to Confurence Six and soon connected with virtual friends.

I wanted to get more involved. I wanted to give back. I didn’t want to just be a passive fandom participant. I put my art out there—though I knew I would be mocked and ridiculed for my lack of skill (I was). I started the first openly gay furry zine, Ten Furcent, in 1995.I published a comic book, Milikardo Knights, in 1997. In 1999, when Ed Zolna’s Mailbox Books folded, I was one of several who tried to open a zine distribution business to fill the void—mine having been Bronzebear Media. And in 2001, I founded Florida’s first furry con, Furry Spring Break, which folded after an internal coup in late 2001 and became an event you may be familiar with today.

Yet while most (sane and rational) people would have denounced the fandom and moved on, if not taken up ranks with folks like the Burned Furs (whose ranks were pretty much filled with fandom failures who could not adapt to the growing and changing nature of the fandom and began pre-Trump cries of “take back our fandom!”) and becoming toxic and bitter fandom saboteurs, I stayed in to help how I could. I involved myself with the staff of events like Mephit Furmeet, Furry Weekend Atlanta, and Midwest Furfest.

In 2011, I took a break. I finally realized after a social breakdown that I was grinding metal and stepped away. I’d moved to North Carolina in the wake of the Great Recession, and I decided to focus on my career. Thus, for years, I was the guy at the Triangle Area Furries meets who stood off to the sides and only chatted with one or two trusted friends, as I licked my metaphorical wounds from the 90s and 00s.

But I never quit, I never left, I never got bitter, and I never tried to sabotage the fandom. For me, furry fandom was my family. You don’t abandon family because of a few toxic relatives. Like the odd cousin at the family gathering, I just stepped away a bit because the obnoxious aunts and uncles had finally taken their toll.

In 2015, I finally got some forward motion on my career and returned to fandom activities, with MFF 15 being my first con back since 2010. In the summer of 2016, I thought about the fact that there were no cons or large “destination” events in or around Raleigh, in spite of the large community. I talked to an old friend, and in early July 2016, Tarpaw Furmeet was born. We staged a “practice” event in November 2016, which then gave way to events that grew in May and October of 2017. As they grew, we eventually had a staff, with whom I started to bond.  People were friendly to me at the Triangle Area Furries events and actually started to talk to me.

I actually thought that I was “in,” but got blindsided by my social eagerness, as several of you now know.

To really get this, you need to understand a little of my history and romp through some trauma baggage. I was in a family with two emotionally abusive parents. I not only heard the constant barrage of how I was “not good enough” from both, but during their divorce, each specialized their skills by projecting their spousal loathing onto my brother and I.

My mother played the diehard Christian card, completely modernizing the “spare the rod, spoil the child” concept by making my brother and I draft up “contracts” that opened with “PAIN + FEAR = RESPECT” then laid out multiple violation clauses. Usually, the clauses in these contracts varied by my mother’s mood and often had a bad habit of doing so when she’d had a bad day at work.

My father, meanwhile, decided to simply deploy a forever-scarring tactical nuke on a school morning in early 1981. As my mother was helping my brother and I dress, my father came downstairs, looked at us all and said simply “bye guys, have a nice life” before walking out the door. We knew our parents  were divorcing, so my brother and I spent five minutes trying to persuade him to stay—and by “persuade” I meant that my mother held one sibling while the other sibling laid behind the tires of Dad’s Corvette, then swapped places when she would pull the other one from behind the tires. A few hours later, when I had a hysterical breakdown in my third grade classroom, neither my teacher nor principal believed me. I was sent to the office, and the principal called my father’s office to follow up on the “lie.” Upon calling my father’s office, I was told that he’d flown to Acapulco to holiday with the women he was (then) leaving my mother for. My mother at least intervened to back up the “have a nice life” story, because I had to go home since I was a basket case. Dad came back tanned and whored, and acted like nothing had happened—not even an apology.

Since then, I’ve had a nagging fear of abandonment and all purpose fear of letting people get control over me. I’ve tried to address it by simply not letting people connect to me emotionally and living a life of fierce self-sufficiency. I’ve heard “aloof” pushed on to me so many times in my life, I’d have assumed it was my name if I didn’t know better. After all, I figure, everyone leaves me eventually…so why attach to them? Likewise, my other coping mechanism is to just quit when things turned bad—a trend in my early relationships. Imagine that Kermit/Dark Kermit meme: “Things going bad in the relationship… Bail on them before they get to bail on you!”  I tried to not quit a spiraling situation once. I made the mistake of entrenching on Furry Spring Break when the coup’s instigator began to get out of control in mid-2001 and fought suicidal urges for most of 2002 once I’d been ousted.

I’ve been used to being left out of things. It was the hallmark of my adolescence. When it wasn’t a point-blank, mean girls style rejection (no seriously, I got “you cant sit here” in the school lunchroom), the reasons were a bit softer on the blow. “Sorry, we just didn’t think you were interested” or “Sorry but there just wasn’t enough room for you” were the popular go-tos.

Once, when I was fourteen, I let my guards down. My father went to the “country club” church in Flint Michigan, First Pres—the one where the shi shi white people went to escape the lower classes. One afternoon, I got a call from one of the students in “the Pipe,” their Wednesday night youth group. “Hey, can you come to the meeting tonight? We’d love to have you there!”

I was beyond elated. Someone called me to come out. They wanted me out there.Me, worthless, stupid me. When my father got home from work, I told him in no uncertain terms that I had to go to church that night, for the Pipe. When I got there, people were friendly towards me. Then the meeting started. Eventually, one of the leaders came out playing “Sasha Cashachek,” a taunting (yet Christian) Russian femme fatale (it was 1986. Russians and Iranians were stock bad guys then) who was gloating that the Pipe wouldn’t make their ski trip. Eventually, we stopped for snacks, and a few people came up to me during the break.

“So we know you like to ski, and we’ve got a big weekend ski trip scheduled to (some shi shi place I can’t remember) in a month, but we need a few more people to help pay for it! Want to come?”

I told them that I’d already booked with my high school ski club on a trip to Killington, Vermont, and my dad was tapped.

“Oh.” No one talked to me as soon as I’d announced that. Not even a “goodbye” when I left.

Remember that scene in “A Christmas Story” when Ralphie learns that Little Orphan Annie’s important “secret message” was nothing more than an Ovaltine ad? I got the 80s church group version of it.

When I said no to the ski trip, I went back to either being invisible in that church group every Sunday (I never went to another Wednesday night meeting), or I existed only when I wore or did something worthy of social mockery. I never got an invite back to the Pipe.… After that, I shut down. I stopped trying.

Given that I’d taken to emotional avoidance since late childhood, I was used to it. I took jobs in college that kept me working Friday and Saturday nights, so I didn’t have to worry about feeling slighted from collegiate social events, and I always had an excuse when people felt crazy enough to ask me to do something. And as an adult, I became a hermit who spent most weekends alone, playing video games or working. I never kept friends because I didn’t think friends wanted to keep me around. I feel emotionally uncomfortable when people press me into social conversation…unless I’ve been drinking or that weird cluster of neurons has fired that say “we can trust this person Lighten up, badger.”

But I thought that things were going differently in the Triangle. I felt my guards dropping. I didn’t feel that “fuck! Fly now! Flee, fatass! Get small or invisible!” reflex when I talked to people.

So on January 1, 2018, I became aware of a New Years party via Twitter. I saw friends names. I saw friends pictures. And I didn’t even know about it. In a split second, I was caught off guard.

And I felt stupid. I felt like I’d been left out. Knowing that people there were talking about con plans, I had fears of another Furry Spring Break style coup. But most importantly I felt worthless, like I did in childhood and adolescence because I wasn’t good enough to get invited. I felt like I’d made inroads, that people liked me and wanted me around, and I felt foolish for letting my guards down. It was like finding out that the people at the Pipe only wanted me there to make a ski trip happen, and threw me aside as soon as I couldn’t help them do it.

So I made a nudging reply that my invitation must have been lost. I later vented because I felt like all I was good for was making the con happen. Then the messages started piling in…

“No one owes you anything!”

And they were right.

And that was my mistake. I own that. No one has to be my friend, and no one owes me a damned thing. I had thought that because we had bonded as a staff, because we had broken meals together at staff meetings, that I was more important than I was in the collective zeitgeist —namely, that I’d finally gone from beyond being the “creepy” guy to someone that people actually wanted to know and interact with. Again, my mistake.

As our event has grown, I’ve been mulling over the #FurryOver30 hashtag from Twitter—the reaction to an ageist movement that suggested that anyone over 30 should leave furry fandom. As of 2017, I’d been a formal part of the fandom for almost 24 years, and at 45 years old, I’d more than outlived my socially-decreed “time” by the claimants standards. Likewise, as I was pulling locals together to build this event, I remembered a friend telling me recently that I’d been described to him as “creepy” by at least one local furry in the early ‘10’s, before I stepped forward to begin building things. Despite groups in fandom who told me I didn’t belong, I actually felt like I did here—like I wasn’t just “buying” my way in by making a convention happen in the area.

I had gotten a little comfortable and let my guards down. I had thought that I’d had my “Bee Girl” moment and found my community, and that being excluded from the party was a harsh reality check. So I got angry on Twitter. I apologize for any assumptions made, and I assure folks that I’ll maintain my social distance as I keep looking for my “bee girl” moment elsewhere in the fandom.

For four days now, the people I've hurt told me how I disappointed them.  That happens a lot, believe me.  Just ask my parents for the last fourty-five years, so it's nothing new.  If this is your first time, I'm sorry I hurt you.  I'm not always going to be able to be the unflappable badger, or an unmoveable rock.  I'm broken.  I've been broken most of my life, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm on my way to being whole.  Only to be reminded of just how very far I have to go.  I'm not convinced I'll ever be whole?  But I'm going to keep trying.  And I'm hoping to keep trying with the those around me.

Once again, I apologize.

[stevefromitreviewsgameofthrones]

The Long Night / S8E3

Ok took a bit but here it comes… kinda clinical recap as it is a fight recap mostly…

The dead has arrived and our forces are standing at the ready

In Comes Mellisandre not the most popular gal but she lights all the Dothraki swords on fire before they charge into battle… the fire did not seem to help them but when it went out we knew they all died

Death Toll: All Dothraki

Kinda expected that no matter how good they are they rode into a no-win situation.

Now it is the undead armies turn they swarm over the Unsullied. All forces join in and it is a massacre when they realize they are losing they retreat to the keep and the unsullied stand and fight. At this point Jon and Dani join the battle and burn as much as they can. Until a sudden snow/cloud forms blinding them from everything including each other ..few mid-air collisions. The dragons were to light the pit but well blind as I said after some futile efforts Melisandre is brought out by Greyworm and company to light the pits. Greyworm also drops the bridge keeping the undead on the other side and trapping many unsullied. Once lit we retreat to the keep.

**undead do not care about dying so make a great body bridge don’t ya think?**

Death Toll: Most of the unsullied Ed Many wildlings Many Northmen I’d say Wights but they just get back up

The battle proceeds in the castle attacks on the walls and the door. Sansa is sent to the crypts with a dragon glass dagger and Arya joins the fight.

Soon a Giant breaks in and is fighting the Mormont clan at the door. ..

Arya gets swarmed and flees Lyanna Mormont gets her body crushed in the hand of a giant the **sound was sickening** but not before she kills him with a stab to the eye

Beric and The Hound Pursue

Death Toll: Lyanna Mormont House Mormont More Northmen and Unsullied More wildlings

OK thus far this is really not going well… moving on

Arya, stealthy girl she is, flows around avoiding all undead and slips out a door only to be attacked and trapped. In comes Beric and the Hound to save the day, they pull her away and the Hound leads her out while Beric tries to buy them time. They finally make it to a room with Melisandre. Beric dies…. He has fulfilled his mission for the Lord of Light Arya has more eyes to close … specifically Blue ones.

What do we say to the God of Death? Not Today.. unless you are Beric in which today might suffice..

Death toll: Beric

We then find Jon on a Dragon battling the Night King who falls from his Dragon Jon crashes to the ground and Dani flies in to burn the Night King.. who does not burn. Would have been good to know that upfront. He tries to attack Dani and misses. The Night King raises all dead.. god damn we were almost there. Dani swoops in and cooks the undead attacking Jon who then chases the Night King… Dani makes her mistake she is on a dragon she should be in the air instead she sits on a battlefield, the dragon gets attacked and flies to try to shake the undead off.. in the process he shakes off Dani. Jorah comes out to protect her and acting as her shield dies for her.

**special note here**8 anybody else notice when the dead were raised all had blue eyes except Delores Ed who’s eyes were white?

So we find Theon and the Iron born in battle in the godswood protecting Bran all Iron Born die except Theon..

Back to Jon running through Winterfell in pursuit of the Night King to end this fighting his way through ignoring friends who may or may not need help. Heading to protect Bran and kill the King.

Meanwhile down in the crypts… uhhm who exactly thought putting people who can’t fight in a crypt while fighting a guy who can raise dead needs their head examined… anyway must have been fun for Sansa being attacked by long gone relatives.. so battle ensues in there and it appears like Tyrion and Sansa either made a suicide patch or just a ok lets go run out and die brave pact so off they go. Anyone else think they will re-marry?

Where the hell is Arya??? Oh NM we’ll come back to her…

Back to Jon still making his way but runs into Vyserion ok man vs undead dragon.. not an easy fight I think Jon will be a bit late… hopefully Theon can hold out..

Back to the Godswood the Night King and his entourage has arrived but Theon is a good man… so instead of running as is his usual tactic he fights and dies immediately and the Night King heads slowly to Bran guess he wanted to Savor this moment..

Suddenly Here’s Arya diving down on him out of nowhere which is a great tactic for no one he catches her and in an extreme badass Arya move our favorite assassin appears to drop her knife but only to swap hands and stabs him in the chest with Valyrian steel… all undead cease to be including Vyserion.. the north survived… somewhat..

Special note the knife that started this all ended it

Mad props to Arya my favorite little Assassin.. shame though she could not score a face from the Night King

Upon the morning Melisandre walks out to the battlefield to die.

Death ToLL confirmed: Beric Ed Dothraki – all 10,000 Unsullied – most 8,000 Wildlings most All house Mormont Many Northmen Lyanna Mormont Jorah Mormont Theon The Iron Born Night King All White Walkers All Wights Vyserion

Pre answers to questions

Yes Jon is Aegon Targyrian 6th of his name blah blah and has had his staredowns with the Night King. But every time they faced off the Night King ended up on top and Jon ended up making it out alive. Why think it would be different. Plus every standoff the Night King just raises an army and shows Jon he can never win. As much as people feel Jon should be the one..

What was all Arya’s training for? Just so she can slit Little Finger’s throat? Nah she had a purpose and as Mel pointed out her own prophesy and she was the one the Night King would not see coming. So her purpose in all this has been realized there is no real shocker here. I was pleased not disappointed.

All the Wights and White Walkers died because he controlled them all so once he died they died simple.

Whereabouts of Gendry and Sam So last we saw Gendry was on the wall and then not again. Somebody was pulled over the wall to their death I rewatched and the person’s hair was too bushy to be Gendry so his whereabouts are unknown but all things I check on the internet has him among the Living. Last we saw Sam he was on the ground fighting and looking to be losing when Jon ran by. We do not know the outcome and when all survivors were seen after the dead were gone he was nowhere to be seen. Still no confirmation of death so likely still alive. Neither were shown in the preview for next week either… in all fairness we never actually saw ghost dead but he never returned either I have less hope for him Direwolves do not live long in the Stark family.

I myself am wondering about next week.. from what I saw Cercei is now mobilizing, and while Dani seemed loaded with confidence they lost almost all their armies so… does not look good unless dani just takes the armies out with the dragons but lets face it who will respect her as queen if she does..damn it I keep forgetting I don’t think there are any families left north or South.

And now my watch has ended

*******************

A note on Arya killing the Night King

For starters way back in Season 1 Arya was taught the only god is death and what do we say to Death? Not today

Melisandre saw her and told her she had darkness in her and she sees eyes looking back at her, brown eyes, green eyes and BLUE eyes and they would meet again

Bran who sees all past present and future gave the Valyrian steel dagger to Arya for a reason.

Arya displayed her slight of hand Knife moves sparring with Brienne

And remember the ones who need protecting are the ones who get in her way..

Then something I noted on re-watch

The Hound hiding Beric trying to get him to help the Hound this is death you can not fight death. Beric: tell her that and looks to Arya. Beric had been brought back by the Lord of Light for one reason – Arya. He might have known both his and her future

The Dagger Arya used was pictured in a book in the Citadel which would indicate it is a legendary weapon 

All Northmen who did not back Jon that also were not between Winterfell and the wall would join them after that battle.

***Follow up questions and Steve’s answer in italics***

1. When that undead first busted through the wall into the crypt, was that someone who had been buried in there, or was it a wight who found a way in? Can the Night King only raise those who have been killed by him/his kind?

It is corpses from the crypt if it is dead he could raise it

2. I saw Gilly get attacked in the crypt, did she make it? My original thinking was no, she didn't. 

I dont think it was Gilly a lot of people were in there, however I saw Gilly in the crypt after the battle was over.

3. I know you want Tyrion to kill Cercei, but the prophecy of green eyes...does that mean Arya will kill Cercei? Maybe wearing Jamie's face, or do we thinking Jamie lives? 

Actually have been telling Susan it will be Arya wearing Jamie face. Tyrion is the most popular theory though. Jamie is still alive and redeemed himself a bit doubt she will kill him for his face.

4. Any theories about where Dani/Jon are going to find an army to fight Cercei? Maybe some Dornish people who hate the Lannisters? 

Nick and I were discussing this last night. If both Sam and Gendry lived...Gendry can be legitimized making him lord of Storms End giving him the ability to summon the bannerman and the Baratheon Army. Also Storms End is a great place for them to relocate to for the war. The outer walls are 40 feet thick facing Kings Road and the sides facing water are 80 feet thick and face Aptly named Ship Breakers Bay. So protection from sea and land attack and close to Kings Landing. Sam is now Head of the Tarly family so can summon the remaining armies and banners. With Cercei's prisoner Dorne would also join. And fleets from Iron Island.  Let's also not rule out Howland Reed and the Crannogmen

[jeramylarp]

Generation Loss: Larping in Two Worlds

I was born in 1980.  I’m 36.  As I write this, I’m a few days from my birthday.  I was born a few years too late to be considered Generation X, and a few too early to be a Millenial.  For a short period of time, we were referred to as Generation Y, but that never stuck.    I started larping in 2001.  According to my friend Josh, that was the mid period of Second Generation larping.  Things were exceptionally different back then, in ways that I have spoken of in previous entries.  But to bring everyone up to speed.  We didn’t have the social structures in place back then.  Things got swept under the rug, or ignored far easier than they do today.  The internet was still relatively young, and social media wasn’t even a term yet.  There were aspects of social responsibility that were not on my radar when I started.  I certainly always held the belief that people ought to be free to live as they want...but there were aspects of what that meant that I had yet to experience.   I grew up consuming a steady diet of 80′s cartoons, Cheers, Night Court and MTV.  I don’t think I knew what racism was until I was 12 or 13.  It just wasn’t something I was aware of.  Then again, I’m a white middle class guy, so it is easy to grow up blind to such things. I grew up on a larp culture that served as a sort of social crucible.  There are so many things that happened back then that would never fly today...and rightly so.  While I was able to find myself in that culture, there are many aspects of 2001 era larping that I would not and cannot defend in the slightest.   When we built our larp.  We were aware of all the things we wanted to change when it came to the rules, and our approach to storytelling...but 5-6 years ago, a lot of the social aspects of larping simply did not yet exist.  The language and standards were developing, but we didn’t build our game with those standards in mind.  They became a late edition to our enterprise, and ultimately a welcome one that has allowed our community to flourish.   The strangeness of all of this is, while I’ve been busy running a game, I never really got to PLAY a game while this transition was happening.  I’m still a child of an older era of larp culture.  I understand, support, and pursue social innovation...but I still have a foot in the old ways more by habit and upbringing than desire.  If I could do it over again, growing up in this larp generation I suspect would produce a much different me.   As a mid generation larper, I get frustrated at times with the use of social mechanics.  I’m glad to have the mechanics, and I endorse their use.  I just don’t think I’ll ever get 100% used to them.  Asking to consent for physical roleplay should be the standard, but I still have to flick a switch in my head every time I hear it...even if I am always glad to hear it.  It’s not normal to me.  I wish it was.  But I grew up in a different era, and while I have been slowly retraining my brain...change becomes more difficult as we get older.   On the other hand, I do think that social innovation goes a bit too far sometimes.  Even when I employ said innovations, I do so because I know that they are ultimately reasonable and correct on a logical level...but emotionally there are times that I just can’t quite get there.  Logic tends to win with me.   I see this divide a lot with larpers.  Those who grew up in games where it was reasonable to let serious, often illegal, things pass for months or years without them being addressed.  People who grew up in not just the wild west days of our hobby, but prior to our modern sense of social responsibility.  I can see from the viewpoint of those who sometimes feel as though we are being too sensitive...but I also see that we are better creating an environment where people can be safe, and the responsibilities that come with being a steward of that, and that while I might get frustrated in the moment, on the whole, we are better off.  

For me, the most infuriating thing about being a mid generation larper, is feeling like I really don’t understand the new language.  I can use the language, and comprehend it...but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to entirely think in the language, and understand it with the thoroughness that someone coming up today might.  I muddle through.  

These days, I feel like I don’t quite belong to either world.  Then again, I’m a dark and mysterious loner, so it is likely at least partly the result of some blown mental fuse.  I want to be part of what is to come, and I am working toward that every day...but I doubt I’ll never exactly connect to it in a way that is absolute.  I’m still a creature of 2001.   But I’m trying...

[iamandco]

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Topshop also carries a wide variety of sizes, making items that fit everyone no matter the height.  Get the Paisley Smock Midi Dress for $95 and the Vinyl Midi Skirt for $90 .   PHOTO: COURTESY EXPRESS PHOTO: COURTESY EXPRESS  4. Express Shop Express.com If you've never shopped Express, it's your lucky day. Express is a fashion girl's best-friend. Like Zara, Express has honed a fresh brand that's on-trend and yet very reliable.  Style lovers shop express for their collection of business casual clothing, party wear, and extensive collection of jeans . Whenever you need an inexpensive blouse to complete your ensemble, think Express. They've got you covered.  Depending on the season, Express can also be the most affordable retailer on this list. They're constantly running awesome sales aside from their every day "buy one at x-get one at x" pricing.  Get the Mid Rise Columnist Ankle Pant for $80 and the Ruffle Chiffon Portofino Shirt for $50 .   PHOTO: COURTESY LULUS PHOTO: COURTESY LULUS  5. Lulus Shop Lulus.com Lulus is quickly becoming a fan-favorite around here . Lulu's collection of stylish pieces feels like Anthropologie and Topshop had a baby . And, the combination works for them. For fashion girls that teeter between edgy and boho moods, it can be a one-stop shop. Or, for the brides with simpler tastes, Lulus also carries a beautiful collection of wedding dresses and bridesmaids dresses.  Get the Balloon Sleeve Tiered Maxi Dress for $97 and the Satin Long Sleeve Surplice Top for $68 .   PHOTO: COURTESY REVOLVE PHOTO: COURTESY REVOLVE  6. Revolve Shop Revolve.com Revolve makes our list of stores like Zara for their vast selection of high-end designer pieces. They work with over 500 brands and designers so, like Zara, their collections are always fresh and on-trend. Revolve carries a little bit of something for fashion girls that subscribe to every aesthetic. Love an edgy style? Revolve has something for you. Do you prefer a boho look from head to toe? Revolve has you covered. Revolve is also a place to find interesting avant garde dresses , trousers, suits, skirts and shoes . Compared to Zara, Revolve can fit a wide variety of budgets from affordable to pricey. Still, due to their mix of designers, many of their items will likely cost a bit more than you'll find at Zara.  Get the Animal Print Midi Skirt for $78 and The Denise Bodysuit for $168 .   PHOTO: COURTESY AMOUR VERT PHOTO: COURTESY AMOUR VERT  7. Amour Vert Shop AmourVert.com We've talked a lot about Amour Vert around these parts. And, every single time it's about how polished and chic their pieces are. So, when it comes to delivering you a list of stores like Zara, Amour Vert can't be overlooked. Compared to other stores on this list, you're least likely to have heard of Amour Vert, but only because it's a hidden gem. If Mango, Pixie Market, or Reformation are your style jams  then you'll love Amour Vert. Fashion girls that are in the know, shop Amour Vert for sustainable minimal-chic pieces that feel effortlessly refined. Get the Joselle Silk Dress for $258 and the Kowtow Casting Pant for $218 .   PHOTO: COURTESY NEED SUPPLY PHOTO: COURTESY NEED SUPPLY  8. Need Supply Shop NeedSupply.com Need Supply is quickly solidifying its stake in the fashion game. As a retail brand, it's a bit younger than the rest of the stores on this list but that's not so say they don't know what they're doing. Need Supply has freaking nailed the edgy-avant garde aesthetic. The pieces that they curate from top independent designers  are often intriguing yet wearable. Beyond avant-garde, Need Supply is totally a destination for neutrals and minimal-chic pieces.  Compared to Zara, Need Supply carries statement items that fit any budget. But the nature of their partnerships with indie designers means they carry a lot of stuff that can be pricey.  Get the Stella Slip Dress for $88 and the Satin Button Up Top for $98 .   PHOTO: COURTESY FINERY LONDON PHOTO: COURTESY FINERY LONDON  9. Finery London Shop FineryLondon.com Like Amour Vert, Finery London is another one of those brands you may not be familar with. But, that's the beauty of this list. Exposing you to special retailers that you need to know is our favorite pasttime. In terms of style, Finery London carries those sleek and classy pieces that feel the most like Zara. So, if Zara perfectly encompasses your style tastes then you'll have a lot of fun exploring London-based Finery London. Get the Ashbridge Trousers for $129 and the Sabine Poplin Wrap Dress for $185 .   PHOTO: COURTESY & OTHER STORIES PHOTO: COURTESY & OTHER STORIES  10. & Other Stories Shop Stories.com Last, but not least, on our list of stores like Zara is & Other Stories. & Other Stories has really been blowing up in terms of popularity . If you love shopping Zara but have a special place in your heart for a slightly boho-chic aesthetic, then & Other Stories has you covered. Compared to Zara, & Other Stories is just as affordable. But, with & Other Stories, you get the best of three  worlds. & Other Stories doesn't have one streamlined style aesthetic. Nope, they craft their collections based on three design aesthetics between L.A., Sweden, and Paris. Get the Double Breasted Plaid Blazer for $149 and the Gathered Slouch Leather Boots for $279 .

[hub-pub-bub]

Author Jennifer Weiner has built a built a career writing the kind of female-friendly, relationship-oriented fiction that typically gets dismissed as "chick lit," with bestsellers like "Good In Bed," "In Her Shoes" and "Little Earthquakes." She's also spent nearly a decade challenging the elitism and sexism of book publishing and criticism. Her new novel, "Mrs. Everybody" is a culmination of Weiner's work as both a storyteller and a truth-teller, a sweeping multigenerational family saga against a backdrop of 70 years of women's history. Weiner joined us recently for an episode of "Salon Talks" to discuss family, Franzenfreude, and why guys should read "women's" literature.

This book is so amazing. It is big. It is sweeping. It is ambitious AF. And it's interesting because your last two were a children's book and a memoir. This is a very different kind of book for you too. What made you try this?

After the 2016 election a lot of fiction people and novelists — especially those of us whose fiction tends to be on the more fun and entertaining side — were doing a gut check and saying, "All right, what am I called to do at this moment in time?" I wanted to write a big dystopian thriller about a future where abortion was illegal and where birth control was illegal. I wanted to write "Red Clocks," if you've read Leni Zumas' book, "Red Clocks." It's a dystopian [novel where] women can't have fertility treatments. Women can't get birth control. Women can't have abortions.

I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried and I just could not make it work. I am not Margaret Atwood, as much as I would love to be Margaret Atwood. Then I'm sitting here thinking, "What am I going to do now?" I always wanted to write a historical novel. Susan Isaacs is one of my all time favorite writers and one of her favorite books of mine is "Almost Paradise," which does the same kind of thing as "Mrs. Everything." It takes on generations. You go back and you see people's grandparents and people's parents and how they were formed in the crucible of expectations and limits.

I wanted to do that. Then there was a voice inside that said, "Is that book big enough? It's just another sister story." I had to tell that voice to shut up because I had to really argue with myself and remind myself that the personal is political and that women's stories can be big stories, even though we are not taught to think of them that way. I just had to get over my fear of doing all the research, which was no joke. I finally gathered up my courage and went to the library and here we are.

I'm so glad you brought that up because traditionally stories about war are stories, and stories about men things are stories, but stories about family are ...

Domestic. Women's fiction. Chick-lit.

If it's a story about women, then it's not interesting to everyone.

You have to package it so carefully. In my reading last night, this topic came up and I was talking about Meg Wolitzer's books and how carefully those covers are designed to make sure that there's not a woman, there's not a beach, there's not a flower, there's no Eiffel Tower with a beautifully dressed woman photographed from behind in the mist. The subtexts of those covers is, "Men, you can read this and be OK."

You will not be embarrassed on an airplane.

You will not get your period. It will all be fine. There are women in the book, but don't worry, don't worry. We've made it safe for you. I hope that men read "Mrs. Everything," I really, really do, but as you can see there are women on the cover.

It's abstract enough.

The men can think they're just shapes. Just shapes. Just circles and swoopies and shapes.

My 16-year-old, the grumpy one who hates me, came to my reading the other night and she's like, "Ugh, it was a room full of middle-aged white ladies." I said, "OK. A, what do you think I am?" I said. "B, what do you think you are going to be?" Then I was like, "Lucy, who do you think reads any book?" Women are enormous consumers of fiction. Women are the readers. We read books by women, we read books by men.

We read all the books. Nobody has to do any special arranging to signal to us that Dave Eggers is OK or John Cheever is OK. We read men in school and we were taught that that was Literature, with a capital L. We read books by men. Men did not grow up reading books by women in school and believing that that was literature. I think that for a lot of men it's like, "Oh, it's all romance," or, "It's all fluff," or, "It's not for me." I think that's really unfortunate. I think men are missing great stories.

They absolutely are because it's just about the human condition and about family and about relationships and about the dynamics. This is also about a 70-year period in American history. It's not a bad thing to know about what went down in this period. I want to talk to you about that because you are a former journalist. Reading this, I could feel you doing the work, Jennifer. Even when I got to 2003 and someone has a Blackberry and someone is on the Zone Diet.

Some of it I could remember. I had my Blackberry a lot longer than most people. I just gave it up. I didn't want to use an iPhone because the typing was hard. The typing still is. I have really huge thumbs.

But there are pieces I could remember, obviously the pieces that I lived through. I remember the '90s pretty well. I remember the '80s-ish. I barely remember the '70s when I was a kid. The '60s, the '50s, that was where I really had to dive into the magazines and the newspapers and the classified ads, which were always the most interesting part of the newspaper. I wanted to get the details right. I wanted to really make you feel like you were there, like you could feel that shag carpet under your feet, or you could taste the New Coke in the '80s, or whatever it was.

The Jell-O.

The Jell-O.

Jell-O comes up a lot in this book.

It's those kinds of little details that make it very real. Just even the little moments of, this is what the experience of being an African-American veteran of the Vietnam War would be like. Things that, again, guess what, men? There are men in this book.

There are men in this book. Perhaps we should have put one on the cover.

This is a book about history. It's also really personal. There is a very crucial element in this book that is drawn from your family.

The story of my family is that my parents both grew up in Detroit in middle-class Jewish families. They both went to the University of Michigan. They met and they got married. My dad became a doctor and they moved to Connecticut and they had four kids and they lived in the suburbs. My dad left in the '80s, just decided he was done being a father and being a husband and left. My mom was a single mom for ten years with teenagers and young adults and all of us trying to get our lives started. Then in her mid-50s, fell in love with a woman. We were all shocked. None of us had seen this coming.

I remember being on a conference call with my siblings and being like, "Did you know? Did you know? Did you have any idea?"

Her first girlfriend was this much younger woman who was closer to my age than my mom's, which added this whole other layer of awkward weirdness to it. Then they broke up and then my mom met Claire, who's been her partner for the last 16 years. My mother would tell me when I was growing up, I would complain about things, and she would say, "It's all material." When I grew up and used that material in fiction and had characters like complaining about their gay mom, she was OK with that.

As I got older and as my daughters got older and as I started to think about what her life must have really been like and what it must be like when there's a part of you that you can't share, that there's this secret you're always keeping, there's something you know about yourself that you can't be open to the world about and how that shapes your life. I wanted to write about that because I'm interested in women's stories and women's secrets and the way we are in public versus the way we are in private, the way we are with men versus the way we are with friends, or family, or sisters. I wanted to do a more thorough and respectful telling of my mom's stories. That's where Mrs. Everything, that's was where it was born.

We can talk about the secrets that women carry. We talk about where we are now at this moment in history, which is not great.

#BelieveHer.

#NotGreat, also. These characters, through multiple generations, go through molestation, rape, illegal abortion. Being closeted. Having an interracial romance. Going on a sugar daddy site. Being sexually harassed and abused in the workplace.

Being judged for not wanting kids.

Being shamed for your size, for having the audacity to put on weight. All of these things that women do go through and do suffer through in quiet. In times past, there was no back and forth. There was no conversation. This book is a conversation about that.

I promise there's funny stuff too!

There are two sisters in "Mrs. Everything." There's Jo and Bethie. Jo, as in "Little Women," she's the rebel, she's the tomboy. She wants to be a writer. She wants to live in a city. She wants to have a big life, as in "Little Women," ends up married to a guy who sniffs at her writerly ambitions and ends up as a mother for awhile. My Jo, I was able to give a different ending to. Then there's Bethie who's the good girl. Bethie in "Little Women" is the sister who dies. I'm sorry if I just spoiled "Little Women" for anyone who hasn't read it yet.

But you've had like 200 years.

Yeah, so come on. Catch up. Bethie, she's the pretty, suffers-in-noble-silence sister. Then when she dies it's this moment of heartbreak for this family. She's like, "Don't weep for me." I wanted to take a good girl and I wanted to talk about what the world does to good girls. Here's my Bethie who is shiny as a new penny and she's bright and she loves to perform and she loves to be the center of attention. She's Queen Esther in the Purim play. Then there's this uncle.

What happens with Bethie and the uncle, I am discovering, has happened with a lot of women. I did one video chat with a group of readers about this book a couple weeks ago. I was like, "And then this terrible thing happens to Bethie." Right down the screen scrolled, "That happened to me. That happened to my sister. That happened to my best friend. That happened to my partner." Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I was just like, "God, I so wanted to believe that I was making this up." Of course I know what happens, but boy, it happens a lot.

Everything, every single thing that we've just talked about, affects everybody.

Affects everybody.

Every single person in the world is or knows someone who's been sexually abused, who has been sexually assaulted, who has had an abortion.

With Bethie's story, I wanted to show the importance of language because she doesn't have the words, really, to even tell anybody what's going on. She can't say, "He's molesting me." She doesn't know that word. Or abusing me, even. All she can come up with was like, "He's hugging me too long." Her mother, who is a widow now, who's supporting this family, who's out in the workplace, who is enjoying her life in the workplace and probably feeling guilty and conflicted about that, is like, "What do you mean he's hugging you too long?" Bethie ends up confiding in her sister. Jo is the one who sort of takes care of business on her behalf.

As I was writing the book and as I was putting Bethie through one thing after another, I had to be careful that it wasn't too much. But I wanted readers to think about the importance of naming things. How once you've got a term for something or a word for something or a language for something, that's when you can start to solve it. That's when you can start to fix it. As we move forward and we think about the gains we've made and perhaps the ground we're losing, I wanted people to think about the importance of naming things and speaking out loudly and telling our stories bravely and knowing that our stories matter in the world.

It's the Mr. Rogers quote, "What is mentionable is manageable." It's that simple. Speaking of telling our stories, you know we want to get into this. The past nine years, you have been in a very bold, brave — to the point of being really savaged for this — talking about the sexism in the literary world, in the way that women's stories are written about, in the way that women's literature is talked about, in the way that women in general as a group, or demographic, are talked about. When you started having this conversation you were pilloried for it. Now here we are.

Here we are.

Can we just say, you were right? You were right about a lot. In this book,  you take on in a pretty explicit way some of that hypocrisy. What does it feel like now to look around and see that there has been this reckoning?

There has been this reckoning. Again, this goes back to naming a problem and being able to point at something and say, "Yes, this is real." When I started talking about it and Jodi Picoult started talking about it and saying, "Women's books are not reviewed as often," and we were told we were lying. We were told we were jealous. We were told we were just making it all up. We were told we were hysterical. We were told that our books are crap and that's why no one reviews them. Then someone started counting.

The organization VIDA every year does its count and they discovered that lo and behold, there was a true discrepancy. They started calling editors and then reporters started calling editors and saying, "Hey, New Republic, you reviewed seventeen books by men and one book by a women. What do you have to say for yourself?" Or, "Hey, Paris Review, you published 75% of your short stories by men last year. What's up with that?"

Also, discovering the rot that was actually going on behind the scenes at some of these publications.

Some of the biggest offenders have been "Me Too-ed," as we say in my house, and are no longer at the head of these organizations. I think that there's been a shift. There are women at the helm of some of these publications, which makes an enormous difference. A lot of editors have tried to do the right thing, have said, "Yes, we know there's a problem here. We are trying to address it."

Even the editors who haven't said that, they get called on the carpet. If they say, "We review the best books and if the best books are by men, we will continue to review books that are just by men," people say, "Well, let's talk about your criteria. What is best to you? How are you defining it? Who's defining it? Who's on your staff? Let's take a look at that masthead." I've seen real progress. For me personally, to see this book called ambitious and to see people call it a great American novel and to see people say, "This book has something to say and it speaks to readers," that's just tremendously gratifying and rewarding. I don't want to do a big victory dance or anything because it's not fixed yet, it's not all better yet. Are we moving forward? Yes, I think we are.

I love this book because it is at a moment when there is so much despair and hopelessness. This is a book that looks at that, but it also ultimately joyful and hopeful and funny. And sexy.

Sexy, yes. Super entertaining because that's my job, at the end of the day. I don't want to write polemics. I don't want people feeling like they've just spent 400 pages watching me stand on a soapbox and yell at them about reproductive rights, even though I want to do that sometimes. Yeah, there's some pretty sexy sex scenes. Honest to God, I gave the book to my mom. She was at my house for Passover, so I give her the advance reader's copy. I'm sitting there watching her read it. I'm thinking, "Oh God, please leave. Please leave. Please just go. Just get in the car before you get to the sex scene because I don't want to sit here and watch you read about two teenage girls and a vibrator. I just do not."

MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles."

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#Sonny #Rollins #Biography #Photos #Wallpapers #clouds #fashiondesigner #fashionkids #food #girlpower #instagram #night #star #water #youtube

Theodore Walter Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone, inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, Bebop.

He began to follow Charlie Parker, and soon came under the wing of Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and guru. Living in Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical peers included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor, but it was young Sonny who was first out of the pack, working and listing with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell and Miles Davis before he turned twenty.

“Of course, these people are there to be called on because I think I represent them in a way,” Rollins said recently of his peers and mentors. “They’re not here now so I come to feel like I’m sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I’m one of the last guys left, as I’m constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to evoke these people.”

In the early fifties, he established a reputation first among musicians, then the public, as the most brash and creative young tenor on the scene, through his work with Miles, Monk, and the MJQ.

Miles Davis was an early Sonny Rollins fan and in his autobiography wrote that he “began to hang out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd…anyway, Sonny had a big reputation among a lot of the younger musicians in Harlem. People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else. He was a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians. Some thought he was playing the saxophone on the level of Bird. I know one thing–he was close. He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas. I loved him back then as a player and he could also write his ass off…” Sonny moved to Chicago for a few years to remove himself from the surrounding ingredients of negativity around the Jazz scene. He reemerged at the end of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, with an even more authoritative presence. His trademarks became a caustic, often humorous flavor of melodic invention, a command of everything from the most arcane ballads to calypsos, and an overriding logic in his playing that located him hailed for models of thematic improvisation.

It was during this time that Sonny acquired a nickname,”Newk.” As Miles Davis explains in his autobiography: “Sonny had just got back from playing a gig out in Chicago. He knew Bird, and Bird really liked Sonny, or “Newk” as we called him, because he looked like the Brooklyn Dodgers’ pitcher Don Newcombe. One day, me and Sonny were in a cab…when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and said, `Damn, you’re Don Newcombe!” Man, the guy was totally excited. I was amazed, because I hadn’t thought about it before. We just put that cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the amazing hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, that evening…”

In 1956, Sonny began recording the first of a series of landmark recordings issued under his own name: Valse Hot introduced the practice, now common, of playing bop in 3/4 meter; St. Thomas initiated his explorations of calypso patterns; and Blue 7 was hailed by Gunther Schuller as demonstrating a new manner of “thematic improvisation,” in which the soloist develops motifs extracted from his theme. Way Out West (1957), Rollins’s first album utilizing a trio of saxophone, double bass, and drums, offered a solution to his longstanding difficulties with incompatible pianists, and exemplified his witty ability to improvise on hackneyed material (Wagon Wheels, I’m an Old Cowhand). It Could Happen to You (also 1957) was the first in a long series of unaccompanied solo recordings, and The Freedom Suite (1958) foreshadowed the political stances taken in jazz in the 1960s. During the years 1956 to 1958 Rollins was widely regarded as the most talented and innovative tenor saxophonist in jazz.Rollins’s first examples of the unaccompanied solo playing that would become a specialty also appeared in this period; yet the perpetually dissatisfied saxophonist questioned the acclaim his music was attracting, and between 1959 and late `61 withdrew from public performance.

Sonny remembers that he took his leave of absence from the scene because “I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I essential to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I’m going to do it my way. I wasn’t going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own. I used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time.”

When he returned to action in early `62, his first recording was appropriately titled The Bridge. By the mid 60’s, his live sets became grand, marathon stream-of-consciousness solos where he would call forth melodies from his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs, including startling segues and sometimes barely visiting one theme before surging into dazzling variations upon the next. Rollins was brilliant, yet restless. The period between 1962 and `66 saw him returning to action and striking productive relationships with Jim Hall, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and his idol Hawkins, yet he grew dissatisfied with the music business once again and started yet another sabbatical in `66. “I was getting into eastern religions,” he remembers. “I’ve always been my own man. I’ve always done, tried to do, what I wanted to do for myself. So these are things I wanted to do. I wanted to go on the Bridge. I wanted to get into religion. But also, the Jazz music business is always bad. It truly is never good. So that led me to stop playing in public for a while, again. During the second sabbatical, I worked in Japan a little bit, and went to India after that and spent a lot of time in a monastery. I resurfaced in the early 70s, and made my first record in `72. I took some time off to get myself together and I think it’s a good thing for anybody to do.In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille, who had become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album. (Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early â€80s producing his own Milestone sessions with Lucille.) His lengthy association with the Berkeley-based label created two dozen albums in various settings – from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams); from a solo recital to tour recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-â€80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man.

He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2004â€s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for “Why Was I Born”). In addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004.

In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement – and gave a solo performance – at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles. The event was hosted by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and attended by world leaders as well as distinguished figures in the arts and sciences.

“I am convinced that all art has the desire to leave the ordinary,” Rollins said in a recent interview for the Catalan magazine Jaç, “and to say it one way, at a spiritual level, a state of the exaltation at existence. All art has this in common. But jazz, the world of improvisation, is perhaps the highest, because we do not have the opportunity to make changes. Itâ€s as if we were painting before the public, and the following morning we cannot go back and correct that blue color or change that red. We have to have the blues and reds very well placed before going out to play. So for me, jazz is probably the most demanding art.” And Sonny Rollins – seeker and grand master – is jazzâ€s most exacting, exhilarating, and inspiring practitioner.

Name Sonny Rollins Height Naionality American Date of Birth 07-Sep-1930 Place of Birth America Famous for

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[magicmenageriestuff]

Top Cat  –  Hoyt Curtin

“The indisputable leader of the gang”

*Warning : Cat Porn*

*

Yes, that Top Cat.  The wise guy cartoon alleycat from New York City with his gang always trying to get one over on Officer Dibble.  It was a staple of my childhood in the 1960s and certainly contributed to my impression of the city where I now live.  As did the music.  Like many of Hanna Barbara’s cartoons – Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, The Jetsons – the music was composed and recorded by Hoyt Curtin, a Californian specialist in the punchy joyful bright slices of cartoon sound.  Top Cat the Theme Music is only 42 seconds long and is thus the shortest piece of music in My Pop Life to date.

From the funky horn fanfare to the stuttering trumpet intro to the glamorous celebratory vocal refrain (which reminds me somehow of Isaac Hayes’ Shaft (see My Pop Life #60)) and the crisp xylophone punctuation, this mini cartoon symphony is a marvel of crushed sound & misheard lyrics.

Top Cat ! whose intellectual close friends get to call him T.C.

Strode right in, it’s whipping to see…Top Cat !

Hmmm.  Well that is what I’ve always sung, from the age of five.  Nonsense.  Wait. OK according to the lyrics bible Genius.com (which is highly recommended by the way…) it is :

Top Cat ! whose intellectual close friends get to call him T.C.

Providing it’s with dignity…Top Cat !

I genuinely just found that out.  Prefer my five year old version somehow.  Anyway.  The  music always made me feel that it had been played on a single that jumped – we had some of these – a scratched record – where a groove was missed and the tune would jump forward 15 seconds.  Somehow Top Cat does this in its second 20 seconds.  Check it out – it is completely wild, and probably quite hard to play.  It is a masterpiece theme tune to a masterpiece cartoon that ran from 1961 for only 30 episodes.  Which were endlessly repeated.

Top Cat, Benny the Ball, Fancy Fancy, Choo Choo, Brain & Spook

The format was as follows – a street gang of cats living in dustbins by a fence eating fish-heads, and thrown-away fast food.  Led by smart status symbol Top Cat – T.C. –  Benny the Ball, Choo Choo, Brain, Fancy Fancy and Spook were all expertly delineated characters in bright colours and working-class NYC accents.  Their enemy was Officer Dibble who was a human, constantly trying to foil their get-rich-quick schemes.  I suppose there was a strong symbolic element here – a representation of the poor underclass, finding ways legal or usually otherwise to make ends meet.  The voices were all superb.  Arnold Stang was T.C.

Mimi, Roxy and Boy in Brighton : a very rare picture of them together

Back there in Sussex we always had cats – indeed apart from a brief spell at the LSE and a handful of years in Los Angeles, I have always had a cat, or two, or three.  I believe them to be superior to dogs.  They clean themselves.  They bury their toilet. They give themselves their own status. They are spirit animals who give your home life and soul.  When they die, I am bereft for a long long time.

My first cat was called Caesar, a big male tabby given to me when I was one year old.  I remember burying him in the garden of our house in Selmeston when Dad was still at home, so I would’ve been seven or eight, and so would Caesar. Then we got white tortoiseshell Sheba and black & white Kitty Little.  We also had dogs during this period of my youth – Corgis Raq and Bessie, and then Welsh Sheepdog Brutus who used to chase cars.  When we became homeless in 1970 (see My Pop Life #84 ) I don’t know what happened to the animals.  After nine months the family were re-united in Hailsham and I think Sheba and Kitty Little were still with us but this may be a feline hallucination.  I’ll ask Mum.  I have a memory of finding Sheba dead under the kitchen tap one school morning in Hailsham because she had eaten string and was trying to drink water to lubricate herself.  Pets give you these horrific moments and even if they live long, they will inevitably die before you do.  Certainly by the time Rebecca was born we had grey/white Lucy who lived a very long life and eventually died as Becky turned 18.   Once I moved to London for university in 1976 there were no pets allowed in Halls of Residence beneath the Post Office Tower, however when I lived in Finsbury Park with Mumtaz in the early 80s we had Monty, another tabby, and when I left, in 1985, he stayed.  Or did he? I think maybe he moved in with me for a bit, then went back to Mumtaz…

London 1990 – Honey, Hardy & me

In the mid-80s I got a flat in in Archway Road N6 and when Jenny moved in we got two beautiful Siamese kittens, Hardy and Honey.

Hardy and Honey, about six months old

Such beautiful animals, they both talked a great deal and were sweet companions.  One night when we came in from a theatre show they were missing – then a small miaow led us to the top of the wardrobe where they were nervously looking down.  Then a movement under the bed – a Ginger Tom ran out through the cat door into the back garden.  He had bullied them.  Eaten their food.  Ginger Toms do that in my experience.  Anyway a few weeks later the same thing happened.  There Hardy and Honey were again, on top of the wardrobe.  We had discussed what we would do if it happened again.  Plan A.  Jenny walked down to the cat door and locked it.  Then the Ginger Tom (for it was he!) ran back there and got trapped in the bathroom (which was the back room due to the weird Housing Association conversion we were in).  I ran a tap and filled a jug. Ginger Tom was hissing and growling and Honey had come down for a ringside seat and got trapped in the room.  I tipped water onto the Ginger Tom’s head until he submitted, then finally opened the catflap and out he went.  We never saw him again. Nor did Honey or Hardy.

Hardy in Highgate, 1992

When we went to Scotland on holiday once a year – a 12-hour drive up to the West Coast & the islands – we would take the Siamese with us.  They would be locked in the cottage when we went for walks.  I remember Hardy growling at the sheep one morning.  When we were in Los Angeles Jenny’s school friend darling Betty would stay in our flat and look after them.  We would go back and forth.  Then when we returned from Los Angeles in 1995 we knew we wanted to move out of Highgate.

Honey got out the front door on the day we packed up the van to move temporarily to Kilburn and sometime that night got run over on that busy road.  Heartbreaking doesn’t begin to describe it.  I had to scrape her body off the road with a shovel and bury her in the back garden.  I felt sick.  Later we got another strange Siamese called Tia who never quite fitted in, never liked Jenny but used to swoon at me.  Hardy and Tia came to Brighton with us but we were away so much during that period – in LA and elsewhere that we eventually gave them away to a lovely old lady who had just lost her two Siamese and needed some grown ones because she couldn’t bear raising another kitten.  She would write to us about them every now and again which was lovely.  They died there in the Sussex countryside about ten years ago.

Marvin aged 20 weeks

At some point in 2004 we visited Stockholm with Amanda Ooms and met her sister Sara who had helped Andy Baybutt and I with The Murmuration (see My Pop Life #87) and met her new kitten Otis.  What a great animal!  He was a Devon Rex breed, with only one type of fur (most cats have three : down, fur & guard fur) and he was super-intelligent and friendly.  Bless Otis he passed away last week (Feb 2019) aged 15.  Anyway we were ready to re-cat ourselves and decided to get a Devon Rex, then found Marvin from a breeder.  Such a beautiful little boy he was, who would climb up from the ground up my legs, my body up to my shoulder and sit there.  He lasted a mere 9 weeks before cutting his mouth on a wicker basket and getting very weak. We took him to the vet who did a blood test and told us he had a factor 8 deficiency which meant his blood couldn’t clot and a transfusion wouldn’t work he would never live a long life.  That was simply awful.   I held Marvin’s little body to my chest through the night listening as his breathing got shallower and shallower, stroking him and whispering love into his absurdly large ears until he gave a big sigh, a final tiny rattle and passed over.  Jeez that was sad.

Chester

Eventually in April 2008 we decided to brave another Devon Rex and Chester arrived.  What a cat he was.  Like an old chinese man.  Very communicative.  Very funny.  He would crawl under the duvet every night.  After a year we decided to find him a mate.  By then we’d found a breeder that we liked, Michelle on the outskirts of Sheffield, whom we’d dropped in on one day while visiting my dad who lives in West Yorkshire.  Her house was full to the brim with cats, all friendly and smiling, purring and relaxed, draped over the furniture, window ledges, feeding kittens, greeting us.  She had all the queens inside – about twenty five females, and all the males outside in the yard and a back shed.

Michelle’s queen Orientals

Devon Rex mum and smigel kittens at Michelle’s

                Mimi’s mum, and, possibly, a very young Mimi

It is an extraordinary house.  We saw the new brood upstairs of tiny little pieces of Russian Blue Cornish Rex fur and said we’d be back in 10 weeks for a girl.  Mimi came back with us in the Jeep on the 200 mile journey and Chester fell in lust as soon as he laid eyes on her.  We had to separate them for a few nights, then it was obvious (from the howling) that we would have to spey dear Chester. After that they got on famously….most of the time….

Chester, me, Mimi – late 2008

Mimi kitten with Chester aged 15 months

Despite this clear blow to the head, Chester was not very good at fighting

A very special animal, Chester also had a congenital problem, this time with arrhythmia – an uneven heartbeat.  He died aged four while I was filming in Nashville and Jenny and I weren’t getting on.  I flew back and we buried him in the back garden in floods of tears, his early death re-uniting us as a kind of awful sacrifice.

Mimi we felt was lonely then.  We worried about her.  Michelle heard about Chester dying young and offered us another Cornish Rex so I drove up to Sheffield again and came back with the most affectionate cat I’ve ever met – Roxy, a bonkers tortoiseshell female.  Mimi hated her.

Roxy is a one-off weirdo.  I would actually say she has special needs.  In the nicest possible way of course.  She loves to sit on a shoulder.  Feels safe up there. Then she will purr and push her face into my beard, squirming with joy.

She would get out of the garden and wander down the road shouting at the top of her voice as if she was lost.  People would pick her up and say hi where do you live?  I could hear them over the garden trellis. We put a collar on her with the address and my mobile phone number engraved on it. One day, sitting in the Peace Statue cafe in Hove with Andy my phone went.

“Hello, do you have a cat called Roxy?”

“Yes I do”

“She’s in the hospital”

“OK thanks I’ll come and get her”.

Luckily I was on my bike and when I got home there was a nurse on my doorstep with Roxy and her winking eye, like butter wouldn’t melt.  After three months, Mimi still hated her. Roxy tried to make friends but no.  What to do?

Boy’s first night in Brighton – oh god, there’s two other cats here…

Get another cat!  This time it was to Basingstoke and the last of a litter, a beautiful black Oriental.  I met his father who was a Siamese and his mother who was a mushroom Oriental softie.  Roxy swooned for the Boy as soon as she saw him.  She licked him, chased him and bit his throat which was rather alarming.  But that is what cats do when they play.  She was teaching him how to fight.

She has taught him everything since.  They sleep together, wash each other, play and fight together. Mimi kept her disdainful character intact, and when it was that we came to move to New York City, we brought Roxy & Boy with us and left Mimi in Brighton.  Mimi is an outside cat, she was the queen of that hill in Kemp Town.

Mimi & Delilah-Rose, Brighton 2008

So we found her a home in Norfolk and later received some lovely photos of her looking very pleased with herself as a nine-year old girl’s pet and the only cat in the house (her one true desire).

Roxy we wouldn’t allow outside because she got lost every time, and Boy could take it or leave it – and he liked to bring back worms and slow worms (legless lizards) from outside and leave them – alive – in the kitchen.  But we’d already decided not to let the cats out in Brooklyn because of

TOP CAT!

THE MOST EFFECTUAL TOP CAT !

The local alley cats here have thick fur because they sleep outside in all weather. They slouch and have scars and behave like tough guys.  They are huge.  They are contemptuous. They probably have leukemia.  We imagined them meeting Roxy & Boy and speaking in Brooklynese :

“Yo. What’s your name – puss-in-boots?  What you doin’ down here? Welcome to the  hood.  You is European?! Don’t make me fuck you up kitty kitty.“

Scarcely anyone in New York speaks like this anymore, they’ve all moved out to Long Island or Westchester, or Jersey.  I mean it’s noticeable when you hear that Top Cat twang on the streets, like an endangered species.  But I think the cats still talk like that even if the people don’t.  The cats haven’t been gentrified yet (although there are gangs of “cat lovers” who go out and spey them and give them injections for leukemia).   So Roxy and Boy stay in. They have space, pretend trees to climb, food, beds, water, toys, windows to look out of with sunshine coming in.  Now and again Boy demands go out out onto the stairs so he can scratch the stair carpet.  Actually he is very dog-like.  He plays fetch and guards the perimeters.  They are content.  I love them with all my heart as I have loved all my cats, but maybe a little bit more.  They are, of course, our little kids.

Mimi & Chester in Brighton

Boy & Roxy in Brooklyn

  These are the two opening sequences I remember :

A sample of one episode ‘the maharajah of pookajee”

My Pop Life #215 : Top Cat – Hoyt Curtin Top Cat  -  Hoyt Curtin "The indisputable leader of the gang" *Warning : Cat Porn* *

[blasianangrymom]

My Birth Story

What does love look like: My Birth Story

Uncomfortable, scared pregnancy = Uncomfortable, scared birth.

THE SHITTY BIG-ASS PREAMBLE, AKA Apparently I am incapable of writing a linear narrative.

I had a “strata” at church made of cheese, hamburger, and breadcrumbs. This was the birthing cocktail I needed, apparently. I had a ton of loose stools, just like last time with the birth of my first child, around 12 pm when I returned. Like last time I kept wondering: Is it early labor? Is it cheese? Is it both? I have a way, a knack of alienating Western? Polite? Civilized? people with my love/non-fear of discussing the body. Foreshadowing the momentous coming of our second child, reminded by our best man Jeff at the wedding, that I introduced this knack to my future husband the first night we met by showing him my foot corn (According to Jeff who introduced us, Jasen’s response was of compassion). I’d not kept it 50% then in matters of body, and the thing about birth is, especially home birth, you have no choice but to keep it 100%-120%. So a big memory for this birth is shitting all over the place. On the couch, on the way to the bathroom, perhaps a little bit made it into the toilet?

Everything’s a blur, but I do remember this birth being more painful than my first. Samuel has a bigger body than Ruby (though she had a larger head). I had also alienated by kind stay at home white-guy-writer-dad-neighbor Jeff, because the last month of pregnancy I was so damned hot and uncomfortable — the day Sam was born it was about 90 degrees (which is anathema to any typical Seattleite and I’ve been one since my birth in the mid-80’s)—I would lay in bed, pregnant as all hell, naked in our room which is adjacent to neighbor Jeff’s house separated only by a few feet, a chain link fence barely plastered with sparsely lined trees. In my mind, he was an innocent white guy enjoying the side of his house, walking and whistling as he might, then the sight of my distended-bellied, uncomfortable naked body splayed out right next door made him uncomfortable. You might note that I didn’t exactly intentionally do this, but we are cash-poor and lazy with completely ineffectual heavy blinds that are perpetually hanging halfway open, the cord tangled on one side, the other cord half-cocked—it’s a damn mess.

Anyhow, I think we both noticed each other, him uncomfortable with my naked pregnant (Asian? does that factor in?) female body, me uncomfortable with being caught naked by my neighbor or uncomfortable with his uncomfortableness.

All this is to say, WHAT DOES LOVE LOOK LIKE?

My patient Jasen wiped my shit-pouring ass without hesitation. Be it the garbanzo beans I’d had just before I was sure it was labor-labor and not pre, that is “false” labor, or leftover strata hanging out in my gut even after the 12 pm loose poops.

Love looks like

Jasen wiping my bottom and throwing away the pee pee pad.

Wayne, Carol, Caryn, Cate, Ed, Mom, and Dad watching Ruby while Jasen rushed home to fill the tub.

Dana and Melissa telling me via my confused post-12 pm-poops to call Midwife Jenn.

Midwife Jenn and her husband Don ditching their anniversary plans to see the terra cotta warriors to go home and be on standby for labor. Of course it was their anniversary; last birth was my midwife’s son’s birthday, the only day she took off all year, and also Thanksgiving. I make auspicious children.

Jasen fighting me tooth and nail (“you’ll take control of house organization out of my cold, dead hands”) to work against my scattered frugal instinct to make the clean, organized house of my dreams. This is still a work in progress, naturally (it’s out of my cold, dead hands).

Brandi, supporting and videoing and being present for the birth.

Ben sacrificing his pay so we could have more.

Alice with her surreptitious gardening and then being able to watch Ruby, looking for castor oil  in my disorganized ass house while I just laid my fat naked ass on the couch, purchasing a curtain rod to protect Ruby from her playful self, and a sustained hunt for apricot juice.

Nate being available to watch Ruby

Vicki bringing delicious food when I was starving.

Emily, Charles, and Michaela making pre-celebratory beer with me for Samuel’s arrival.

Jess, Porter, Harper, Etta, and Patrick watching Ruby during the birth and being willing to watching her overnight.

Alpha insurance broker from heaven!

In summary, an army of love for a successful birth.

And, Melissa. Dear Melissa. You set up the birthing tub with Jasen, gently chastised Jasen to go be with me when he was not, and carefully took down the tub—full of poo, blood, baby-birthing-juices, it was tinged red with floating debris, ah, the floating debris. By the finally pushes I was definitely disturbed by said floaties in the tub—based on Ruby’s birth, I thought there wouldn’t be shit, but following a pregnancy of weird shits, and a new baby with weird shits (i.e. poop remnants and shirts galore), it is not a surprise.

IMMANUEL

STRATA. Uncomfortable as fuck. Moving from pews to the back of the church with carpeted stairs. Pastor asked if baby dropped, she could tell the baby’s position had changed. Whoops, we couldn’t tell.

LOTS of uncertainty. For weeks, I’d been thinking, it’s gonna happen early, it’s gonna  happen, I have uncomfortable contraction-like feelings, but they go nowhere, we wake up, no baby, womp womp. So what was to make this day any different?

hottest day on record

Jenn and Don’s anniversary

friend Beth’s daughter Evie’s birthday

two days before due date.  

3) After much consternation looking for apricot juice (Alice tried PCC, nope), we had a lemon verbena, castor oil German-midwife-induction-cocktail ready to go and I was trying to decide what was more auspicious day to coax my baby into existence—6/27 or 6/28, but we didn’t need it, huzzah!

4)  On the one hand, the birth was harder, scarier, uncomfy, I was more tired (from taking care of Ruby). On the other, we were MORE PREPARED THAN EVARR.

A) Therapy

B) Supplements-nutrition-visiting the doctor

C) Acupuncture

D) Birthing class, though we were snooty about it—I was sad for our culture begetting scared women afraid of their bodies, Jasen was snooty about our first birth.

E) Talk to peers

F) Talk to Ruby. A LOT. Like every night.  

G) Relationship class

H) Total Pelvic Recall

Massage. Vag therapy advice + masmassage

Based on our most trying year and a half, mine personally and also as a couple with a post partum mood explosion of some sort, a tots-mama-meltdown, I needed to ensure this time around, that the insanity, post-insanity HAZE of Year One and a half and Two of Child One was not repeated or at least not as devastatingly so, this time around. So far, result has been successful.

This time: our finances are less stable

we are delinquent on rent

we were fighting about the tub. the $250 tub (my vag, not yours, homie).

we almost lost our insurance.

we almost had our water shut off.

an anonymous donor stepped in and helped-they covered the global midwifery fee, the tub, all of it. Ho-ly-shit.

I didn’t do my kegels as much-first, benign neglect, second, on purpose (on advice of my white Vag lady).

my goal of Sammy not fucking up my periurethral area: MET!

birthtub: MET!

confronting J with my shit (though not in the tub): MET!

I am one lucky lady + my children + hubby are lucky motherfuckers.

I was nervous that the coochie pads weren’t made—we had several, but not many—didn’t need ‘em!

We are at 6.4 weeks, and my vag + bod, other than being too hot and too stinky, are feeling on the up and up.

GOD BLESS IT. GOD BLESS ALL THE LOVES. IT ALWAYS WORKS OUT. Out of $? My mom shows up with $20. The credit card. (Countless) people feed us. People are patient. People understand.

*The End*

[jjaywmac]

This is a Christmas shout-out for Allez-HOPS! What is Allez-HOPS, you ask? It is cave à bière (beer cellar) in the heart of Nice, France.  Now, those of you who know me or have seem my pictures KNOW that I am a wine drinker. White at lunch; red at night. That wasn’t always the case. Here is the back story:

Back in the day, when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, it was beer all the way.  In the ‘80’s, I started having reactions to malt (along with basil, cilantro, herb teas, and other things).  I quit drinking beer and eating Mars bars (just kidding about the Mars bars. Yuk.)

Last Christmas, I went to an American Club of the Riviera event – A Christmas Local Beer Tasting and Lunch.  I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried to experience a “tutored beer tasting by Daniel Deganutti”, one of the governors.  https://allez-hops.com/  I was willing to try. This was my first Christmas after Steve’s death.  I needed to get out of the condo. 

The Tasting started at 11:00 a.m.  Beer, IN THE MORNING???  No matter. I could call Uber if I needed help home. Plus, the French 3-course lunch “by an accomplished chef at the nearby Pastry Plaisirs” sounded delicious. http://pastryplaisirs.com/en/ 

What a fun day!  I enjoyed every minute of it. Met interesting people, sipped a lot of beers, learned the type I like (forgot what he said), ate delicious food, and discovered I can handle malt.

Pastry Plaisirs only opens for lunch Monday through Friday, and dinner on Friday and Saturday.  Plus, it caters to private events, birthday parties, and such. It is small, intimate, and delicious, starting when the chef, Louis Dubois, born at Poitiers, decided to open his restaurant, tea room and pastry shop with his girl friend Aurore Parrant. He cooks; she serves. Yum. 

As for Allez-HOPS, I am not certain how it started.  I asked, got the Readers Digest version, and quickly forgot what he said. Well, he was preparing for a tasting while I wanted to know where he and his family lived in the Mid-West. Haha. I will get the facts and get back to you. What I do remember, a guy, Daniel, from the Mid-West moved with his family and his life savings to Nice in 2015, to open a craft beer shop in Nice.  What???? In the middle of wine country?  It was inaugurated in July 2016, and has a selection of more that 400 local and international references, and contains a micro-brewery, making on the spot the beers of their mark called “Brasserie Bluee”.  And, he is doing quite well!! 

Since then, I have walked by Allez-HOPS many times, going to and from my physical  therapist.

  I have not stopped in because, as I said, I am a wine drinker. But, last week, I was having a couple of friends in for cocktails, and one drinks Duvel beer. So, I went to Allez-HOPS, bought 4 Duvel beers, 4 Duvel-type beer glasses, and got “delivered” home by Daniel because the package was heavy and I was walking.

What a nice guy. He and his family live in Grasse, and he commutes every day. I am pulling for him and his shop.  https://www.facebook.com/allezhops/

    ALLEZ-HOPS! cave à bière This is a Christmas shout-out for Allez-HOPS! What is Allez-HOPS, you ask? It is cave à bière (beer cellar) in the heart of Nice, France.