#some are recurring which is awesome bc we get to know them and their perspectives

[inkbirdie]

the gayly prophet is one of my all-time favorite podcasts! it’s absolutely hilarious and the commentary is always on point. an excellent for queer hp fans to consume fandom content ethically in a way that supports trans, queer, and BIPOC creators. i love listening to new episodes (and eps of the queer movie podcast, another fave) on my walks. i often find myself laughing out loud with Lark and Jessie and hoping no one around notices lol

one of my personal favorite aspects of the podcast is how Lark points out the egregious amount of semicolons, ellipses, and general lack of good punctuation and grammar that scoundrel jkr exhibits in her writing. as a writer and someone who hates terfs, it’s very funny and therapeutic.

i highly recommend the gayly prophet to anyone who likes harry potter, a good time, queer people, NOT terfs, or is just into the delicious asmr-like paper turning sound effect when they move between topics. they also have another podcast about buffy the vampire slayer, and although i haven’t listened as i have never watched the show, i’m sure it’s also wonderful!

so yeah that’s my gayly prophet rant, now everyone go listen!! hashtag ruthless for life 😎

the gayly prophet

I can’t believe I don’t see more people talking about @thegaylyprophetpodcast. it’s such a fantastic gem. it’s like listening to your friends talk about gay harry potter shit while you’re comfy on the couch next to them.

you don’t have to start at the beginning. they go through the books chapter by chapter and talk shit about jkr and do tarot readings and scream. they’ve done at least one episode per chapter for PS/SS through POA. pick one and go.

it’s a podcast so I know my adhd babes out there are gonna struggle but it’s my favorite thing to listen to while I’m doing an easy task. folding laundry, cleaning, driving, etc.

just trust me and give it a try. so fucking precious. if you need a starting point, try “Proving Love is Real with Chuck Tingle.” bring tissues.

also they have adorable merch like this:

[ID: two stickers on a gold glittery surface. left sticker is a black outline of a star and the words SUPPORT TRANS WITCHES on top of the star. the words are pink, white, and blue. second sticker is a comic book-style spiky speech bubble outlined in black. over it are the words HEX TRANSPHOBES in red.]

[stars-forever-dwell-blog1]

A Few Words on Passion

So I got to thinking about the issue of passion after I wrote my last post…art can be a mirror. And reading said post back to myself, and examining my thoughts in general, I’ve realized that passion is something I think about a great deal of the time. I’m not talking about sexual passion here, but things in life I’m passionate about. Which leads me to think about my parents.

I don’t know if all kids reach a point where they put their parents under the microscope in order to decide which traits of theirs they want to emulate, and which they want to discard, but I definitely did, and continue to. And one of the biggest things I’ve noticed about my parents is that they really didn’t have an all-consuming passion for anything. After they had my sister and me, for all intents and purposes, they ceased to be people. Maybe this was normal in the ’70′s and ’80′s, because the widespread myth that parenthood completes you was still accepted much more than it is now. Whatever the case may be, the example they provided for us was extremely bland. My mother stayed home with us, cooked, cleaned, sewed, and my father worked. He truly hated his job (which was teaching) and was, in some ways, more of an absence than a presence.

But it’s not like they were never interesting people. My father was raised on a farm in the middle of Bumfuck, Manitoba, and despite the fact that his entire community believed that farming was The Way, The Truth and The Life, he left said lifestyle and moved to The City (a point of contention between him and his parents for the next 30 years…seriously), and he even backpacked around Europe in his 20′s. My mother was born and raised in Freiburg, Germany as well as Italy (her mother was German, her father Italian), and when she was in her 20′s, she moved to London to work as an au pair. She then came to Canada for a year, with the plan to head east to west, ending in BC, and then fly home again. BC was what she wanted to see the most, her promised land. Instead, she got as far as the prairies, met my father in Winnipeg, and ended up marrying him, having two daughters, and staying for 30 years, despite her family’s serious disapproval of marrying someone who wasn’t “her kind.” In other words, German. (Yes, the fact that her parents were not “of the same kind” is not lost on me.) They never once came to Canada to visit her, and I’ve never met anyone from her side of the family to this day; she won’t talk about them at all.

When she was 19, she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby, despite her father kicking her out of the house. She moved in with her sister and worked 3 jobs to support herself and her son, who she named Michael. After a year of this, she realized she couldn’t give him the life he deserved, so she gave him up for adoption.

Those two short paragraphs above are literally almost everything I know about my parents’ pasts. Is this weird? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I see two people who were interesting, adventurous and brave. What happened? How did flying overseas, challenging outmoded paradigms and blazing trails beyond social acceptance change to peanut butter sandwiches, Sesame Street and parent-teacher conferences…and nothing more?

It’s true that I’m not a parent, and I’m sure there are many things about it that I don’t understand. But I still firmly believe that you don’t have to stop being a person in order to be a good parent. I can see how it could happen, especially back twenty years or so. But becoming aware of this change in my parents has made me even more resolved to not go down the same road, whether I ever have kids or not. I think that a lot of people get older and just grow complacent. They forget the fire of their youth, the reason behind what they were passionate about, what they were willing to fight for and sometimes even die for. Comfort becomes more important, maybe too important. When I was 18, I heard about a clear cutting protest on a small island in BC, and I didn’t give a second thought to packing up everything owned (which fit into a 100L backpack at the time), and catching the next ferry out. I pitched my tent and I poured myself, body and heart and soul, into the cause. There were real discomforts (no showers, no electricity, no laundry, no heat, and any and all of our food was donated by the community), and real dangers (angry loggers who were just trying to feed their families, who could at any time resort to physical violence…and they did on several occasions). Yet never once did I waver in my commitment. This year I’m turning 32, and if I ask myself honestly if I would do it again…I would. Though now I see with a broader perspective, and I realize that there are different, maybe better ways to protest clear cutting than a bunch of neo-hippies living in the woods on a tiny piece of crown land that sits between a raped piece of earth and a logging road. Yet our presence did two things: it was a physical barrier to more logging, if only a temporary one, and it raised awareness for our cause. I often think about this scene from Fight Club, a movie I wasn’t overly impressed with (but this one scene is awesome.) It’s the part in which Brad Pitt is driving the stolen car with Edward Norton beside him and the two members of Project Mayhem in the back seat. As he steers the car into oncoming traffic, he asks, “What would you wish you’d done before you died?” to the car in general. Without pause, the two in the back reply, “Paint a self portrait.” “Build a house.” And Edward Norton replies, “I don’t know.” I really think we should all be able to answer this question without missing a heartbeat.

So maybe passion and the courage to put one’s physical comfort aside for a greater good are “easier” in youth, but they can and should be consciously cultivated as one grows older. As one’s perspective naturally shifts and broadens in some ways, the things one is passionate about should still be held onto and fought for with uncompromising fire. To quote one of my favourite movies:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering – these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love – these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish. . .what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer: that you are here – that life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.’ That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”