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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • I got in trouble at multiple points for reading books during recess/bringing them to lunch. For some reason, it made some teachers really upset. It wasn’t even that they were school library books - just that I wasn’t supposed to have books at recess or something.

    What was really ridiculous was the troubled teen facility/alternative “school” I went to (as a punishment for tattling on my mom for all of her drugs/attempting to kill myself because she was a psycho bitch I couldn’t escape from).

    They would punish me for things that “happened” at home, so she would tell them that I cussed/fought my sister/did drugs.

    The absolutely insane thing though: I wanted to watch Fight Club. My mom had friends over and was drinking, I asked her permission to watch the movie, she gave me permission, I watched the movie (I had read the book so many times, fell in love with it as a silly teenager.)

    The next day, she was angry that I had taken advantage of her being drunk by tricking her into letting me watch the movie. (Big thing with her - getting punished retroactively because she didn’t mean to give me permission for something.)

    So I was sent to school with my “stoplights” being all red.

    We had to come up with “goals” that we would work on to improve ourselves at the school. I genuinely thought I had done something wrong, so I made my goal “not to ask my mother for permission to do things when she is drinking.”

    This lead to consequences. We had a meeting, where I was told saying things like that was dangerous, implied my mom was an alcoholic (the bitch had DUIs!!! My siblings and I used to show off how good our lungs were by starting the car because it had a fucking breathalyzer), and that I could be taken away and put in foster care.

    I lost my “progress” in my levels, and spent a week in the red with no privileges - because my mom was a fucking oxy popping lush.

    This is the “funny” story there. What they did in retaliation to my allegations of sexual abuse was far worse.


  • My family abandoned me after my divorce - my ex husband did some fucked up manipulative shit. (“I want us to be poly/for you sleep with another guy” -> “he cheated on me” when I finally did it to both of our entire extended families.)

    What has helped me coped more than anything is new hobbies. Rebuilding a self. I started taking pottery classes and made some outside social connections. Art is a really good means of the self exploration that teaches you who you are and what it means to be a person again. Therapy of course, but you have to find someone that clicks with you.

    It’s been about two and half years since it happened. (Well, the divorce itself was a nightmarish year long hell.) I’m finally starting to feel like myself again.

    I’d say Google your local vo-tech or library. Show up to cooking classes or book clubs or something. Something new, that honors the new person you must become.














  • There’s multiple versions of Brazil - the American version is just a little bit shorter. Those changes aren’t a big deal though. Howeverr, theres a made for TV version referred to as the “Love Wins Out” ending.

    The movie is a parody of 1984 (absolutely hilarious and worth watching as are most things involving Terry Gilliam. I’ll spoil it a wee bit but the point isn’t these plot details.)

    Basically, instead of Winston and Julia being lovers standing up to Big Brother, you have a delusional idiot who fucks up his pretty easy job in the evil totalitarian government by obsessing over and stalking a woman who has zero interest in him. His grip on reality is tenuous at best.

    At the end, he fucks up and gets the Room 101 treatment. We’re treated to a fantastical scene as La Resistance comes in to save him, exciting bombings and car chases and reality bending visuals that are too ridiculous to be real. Him and the woman ride off into the sunset as badass rebels escaping the evil government.

    That’s where the “Love Wins Out” movie stops. It’s clearly a hallucinatory dream sequence, and the actual ending reveals our “hero” has been tortured into insanity.

    Like, the whole point of the movie is that she doesn’t like him, doesn’t know him, doesn’t want to know him. We don’t even know that she’s in La Resistance - it’s a great “unreliable narrator” film. But this TV version gives a character who exists to be an unlikeable moron the girl and a happy ending.




  • To me, it communicates that you prioritize the aesthetics of the books over their contents. (That hackneyed phrase, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ I think is part of the “hatred” people express towards this choice.)

    There are def books to be collected because of their aesthetics - I have a gorgeous Taschen on the Crusades, a Maimonides text in Hebrew (which I can’t read), or very old English translations of Chinese texts. I’m very jealous of people who have things like complete Harvard Everyman’s or lots of vintage Penguins. Or people who just love Moby Dick so much that they’ll fill shelves with Dicks (Along color - Penguin put out a beautiful blue edition that I still can remember holding and debating on buying back in 2018.)

    I don’t get “hating” the way someone else chooses to collect or organize their books. (And I’d have no room to stand on, because some of my shelves have more stacked on them than they have in them, it’s chaotic) I do “judge” people on the books they have and show, because the books you read and consider important are pretty easy ways to see what ideas have influenced your mind.

    I love the opportunities for conversation that looking at a bookshelf brings, because I suck at small talk. It gives me a deeper understanding of a person - I can pick up a few niche interests and broader themes with a quick look.



  • Books. I own probably a thousand physically, have hundreds of thousands of PDFs and epubs between my laptop and NAS.

    The superpower is that I have a book “sense.” I know about where each book I own is - my shelves are not organized in any meaningful way, because I’m ADHD and will just pull one out to look at something and reshelve it. I’m not at home right now, but I can imagine my shelves and stacks in my head - can tell you where Palestine and the Palestinians or The Forty Days of Musa Dagh or the beautiful English translation of the 左传 or House Made of Dawn or the book on Scottish coins i thrifted a few days ago all are.

    I can look at almost any given strangers bookshelf and recognize/have read at least one of their books. I navigate libraries by feel and don’t need to look up books.

    I also read inhumanly fast I think, and have somewhat of an eidectic memory for text. It’s been almost twenty years since I read The Great Gatsby but a student brought it up and I was able to do a 45 minute lecture on it, with quotes from memory.

    I’m also prodigious at sex. I’ll read more books in a week than most do over their life, and I’ll also fuck more people in that week than most do over their life.