#this was in the middle of the first wave of the pandemic and I'd recently lost my mum

[pepperf]

“Did you see that apparently Y-chromosomes are disappearing?” Holzer asks me with good cheer. I was not aware that they were imperilled; the question makes me laugh, as Holzer surely intended. At 72, wearing her typical dark jeans and dark, long-sleeve shirt, her long hair unstyled, she is forthright and attentive. A self-declared “old hippy, wannabe-revolutionary”, she possesses a disarming sense of humour.

[tetsunabouquet]

Stop blaming feminism as a whole for Hollywood's shit

I'm coming this as the granddaughter of a feminist activist who worked in abortion clinics when they were still illegal in my country. It's one thing to say the current wave of feminism is demonizing feminine values and has, in a way, become yet another version of the patriarchy saying that to act like a man is the superior way to act and that it's the cause of Hollywood churning out horribly written female characters. It's another to demonize feminism as a whole. Take a video I recently watched on YouTube on the subject, the dude made it clear he disliked feminism but reiterated stuff like, 'feminine qualities have their values'- when that is literally the original feminist message. Congratulations, you are an old school feminist without realizing you are one. Not only that, but to prove the guy's point he showed a couple of newspaper articles, including the rise of mothers murdering their children. First of all, this dude is unknowingly to himself, implying that infanticide is a masculine trait as women acting masculine and rejecting feminine values was the big focus point. Personally, I don't think an argument essentially saing, "Feminism is bad because now the women are killing their children like we do", is an argument that speaks bad about feminism but rather speaks badly of men because infanticide isn't something I'd ever think is a good idea to claim in a debate. Secondly, is this dude chronically online? We're living in an economic crisis as bad as the Great Depression, we just outlived a pandemic, and there is an actual feminist setback on the abortion rights in the US and Poland alike. I'm pretty sure any of these factors play a bigger role in the rise of infanticide by their mothers hand then shitty Hollywood movies. Because it's not like making abortion extremely difficult to practically impossible will result in an increase of unwanted children or something. It's not like there aren't deeply painful reasons not to want the child and how some of these mothers will just kill the baby instead of giving it up for adoption. No, that's totally not a thing... Yeah right. Ironic considering it was coming from a Christian man, when the religious (including strict Christian) communities look down on a child born out of wedlock and a girl losing her virginity before marriage. Them slutshaming women for doing so as they raise their daughters, filling them with an almost traumatic sense of shame when they end up with like that. I think a girl in that situation is likelier to kill herself or the baby then an atheist, middle class college girl that consumned Hollywood media who got knocked up by her boyfriend as they weren't using protection. Seriously, you're giving Hollywood way too much credit and you're showcasing that you think women are so easily manipulated by media that we would kill our children because Hollywood is saying 'settling is bad'. Imagine being that filled with hatred for a movement you've become completely brainless and delusional.

[notesfromdruchan]

Atishoo

In many ways, I've never found closure after Atishoo's sudden death that I got to know a fortnight later from her daughter. I'd often start an email to the abyss, addressed to Atishoo, telling her how much I miss her English wit and her counsel and her irreverent wisecracks about everything under the sun and so much more but they would end up as drafts or get deleted. Nothing seemed to fit the bill to accept that this person, who I knew for a very brief moment in time, is no more here.

Friendships with older people – Atishoo was pushing north of sixty when I first knew her – are few and far between because it's not often that one meets old folk who can vibe with the younger ones. But those that do are a wellspring of youth even as time and disease cripple their physicality. I was lucky to know and be befriended by Atishoo.

That wasn't her real name of course. It was a "nick", a handle she used on an old internet hangout place that I sometimes frequented. When we exchanged emails, I got to know her real name but for this recounting, Atishoo will remain so, as she does in my memories and recollections of her.

She would regale me with tales of the garden she set up and tended to. She had recently set up something like a bird-feeder which a noisy, bulky pigeon – who she named Bert – toppled over with his friends, so she had to rebuild something stronger with the help of her son. Eventually, "Bert and family" would begin to feature a lot in our emails. This was her quip when I enquired about Bert: "Bert and his extended family are still eating me out of house and home but enjoy their new found – no expense spared I might add – spa!" She also had created a pond and let some tadpoles mature in it. When the time came, I received an email with the subject "Ungrateful frogs", declaring, "They all left overnight, never said thank you for your hospitality or even a wave goodbye for giving them a good start in life."

At the time I knew her, she was suffering from cancer that the doctors and the family were trying hard to keep in check. But all that pain could do nothing to her spontaneous wit nor to her stoicism. It was very rare for her to let an inkling of all that pain through her words to me. A lot of our chats would hover around about animals and her narratives would often crack me up good. She also had four dogs, one of which, in the last leg of my acquaintance with Atishoo, got lost and then found, all in a matter of several stressful hours.

Atishoo's presence coincided not just with the discovery of cancer in her but also the discovery of a lymphocytic ailment in my maternal grandmother. She (Atishoo) would have just come back from a bout of scans but was ready with an unassuming, serene dose of counsel for me. Somehow, she'd distill all her stoic wisdom into a pint of English wit and offer it to me and that would make all the difference.

More often than not, she'd lure me into pleasant conversations with her and other folks that used to hangout during times when I'd go under the radar for the recluse that I am. Her emails would always bring a sense of happiness, a sense of familiarity and inexplicably, a sense of home. It was also fun to watch her craft a new email thread in response to a previous one instead of just hitting "reply" and that first time she learned to "reply" instead of starting a new email and I almost missed it.

After a while, "where are you, it's been a while?"s became more frequent from me to her than in the other direction. And then, an email from her daughter in the middle of September informing me of Atishoo's death. Atishoo had managed to not let on that things were so bad that I was not the only one taken aback by the suddenness and the finality of the news. She was gone but it didnt quite register for months. Perhaps, more. Years have passed and this feeble fantastical notion that Atishoo is still here, just gone silent, lingers around.

Atishoo was gone before the pandemic years. She was gone before the sparrows made a brief comeback during the lockdown months. She was gone before I'd eventually adopt a kitten, or start volunteering at an animal shelter. And I've missed her presence all the more in my inability to share the zeitgeist with her and read her irreverent and humorous hot-take responses.