the airport is a muddy, magical land of extreme regulations alongside extreme social lawlessness. I hate going there but am captivated every time.
people gather at charging ports like wary creatures around a watering hole. some sorry soul is crouched defeated against a wall, tired eyes shielded by a hoodie. there is a bird loose
There is no plane on the tarmac, but it is almost time to board. You check the announcement board. Your flight is on time. You look back at the tarmac. The previous plane never left. Your flight has been delayed.
Your terminal is on the other side of the airport, and the hallways stretch on and on. You pass the same mural and a Starbucks three times. You cannot find your terminal. You check your boarding pass, and then look at the map. Your terminal is on the other side of the airport.
A child runs around the waiting area. No one is watching them. No one speaks to them. You think you have seen this child before. You leave to buy a bottle of water. The child is gone when you return. There was never a child there.
You step through the metal detector. It beeps. You step back, and the TSA agent gestures impatiently. You step through again. It beeps. You step back, and the TSA agent gestures impatiently. You step through.
The halls rumble with the sound of a hundred rolling suitcases. You only see three, and their owners stare off into the middle distance. They keep walking. Their terminal is on the other side of the airport.
The moving walkways are lined with children waiting for their parents. They huddle together and play small, mobile games. They are waiting for their parents. The stores are empty.
There is a bird hopping around the waiting area. No one acknowledges it. You do not look at it. It hops closer. It is watching you.
You wait for your bag to come out of security, but it never does. There is something in your bag. You wait for someone to speak to you, but they only murmur over the scan. There is something in your bag.
You are looking for food. You pass three bars and a gift store, but cannot find any food. Eventually, you look at a map. Your terminal is on the other side of the airport. You still cannot find food.
They call for your flight to board. You get up, but they did not call for your seating group. You sit back down. They do not call for your seating group. Your flight has been delayed.
It is our duty as feminists to protect and respect women in Hijabs
Now. More. Than. Ever.
Question: if I see someone pull off a Hijab, what should I do? I know there are reasons they are worn so I want to if i should stand in between them and who did this, should i protect them from view somehow, or something else? This has been happening a lot so I feel it’s something everyone needs to know.
Good question! I cannot correctly and effectively answer, as I am a white, non-Muslim person; however, I will reblog in case any of my followers can answer.
I asked my Hijabi friend, so here’s one Hijabi’s answer:
“my opinion is, definitely try cover them or give them something to cover themselves with. And perhaps shoo off the person, without putting oneself in danger! God forbid, if that happened to me, I would like someone to come and comfort me and give me something to cover my hair with and then help me report it to the cops
“
(Followers, if any of you are hijabi and would like to expand on this answer or offer alternatives, please do.)
If u see it happen to 1 of us, pls cover our head + hair with a coat or shawl or any piece of cloth, while hugging us in comfort. Please don’t get hurt by lashing out @ the perpetrators in any way, coz if they dare to do that, they’re probably too far gone in their own hatred to listen to any reason. Much love + Thank You to anyone who supports us.
yes !! everything said here is important af. if you see someone pull off a girl’s hijab immediately cover her hair and provide comfort. don’t talk to the perpetrator but try to get the woman out of there if you can. maybe if you have a scarf on you at the time give it to her so she can wear it until she’s alone and can replace her hijab. please please protect muslim girls because we already had it hard before donald trump became president and now its gonna be worse with people going around thinking their violence and cruelty is justified
for my other white ppl who might have a hard time, it’s my understanding that a hijab is like a major item of clothing, not an accessory like a hat or a scarf. so think abt it more like if someone just ripped someone’s shirt or skirt off. u don’t want to be left there exposed or have to walk home without it.
everyone, even outside America needs to protect our Muslim sisters in these times.
as a man, what would be the best thing to do? should i turn my head and avoid looking at their hair? can i still offer a jacket or something similar?
^I’m hoping someone has an answer islamaphpbia is on the rise in my town and I want to be a good male non Muslim ally
For men, yes please, we would prefer it if you avoided looking at our hair, and if we don’t have something to substitute as a hijab at that moment, anything you could lend us, a jacket, etc, would be very appreciated.
Also, since most girls avoid physical contact with men they’re not related to, please do not hug them, but rather shoo the offender away if you can, or at least escort the girl to a safe place. You can still offer words of encouragement and support. Furthermore, understand that the victim may not be very welcoming towards you because she’ll obviously be shaken, and won’t know where you are coming from. If that’s the case, please still give her something to cover herself (hijab is very important, think of it as someone ripping your shirt off) and stand some distance away until you are sure she’s in safe hands.
Thank you so much for your support, we really appreciate it, god bless all of you.
In the horrible climate we’re currently in, please take note of this.
Reblogging this again for the guy-instructions
Same
As a white girl who supports these women with all my heart, BOOSTING!!!
i love it when you accidentally meet eyes with a stranger in public and you flash a quick polite smile and they look at you like they wish you were dead in a ditch
I’ve seen this several times on my dash and always with southerners being confused in the tags why the rest of the US is like this, and as a southerner, I have to say, SAME. Like, there’s plenty to hate about the south, don’t get me wrong, but at least in general we have public courtesy down to a science. I ordered at a Sonic out West once and the guy specifically had someone take over his headset so he could come out and shake my hand because he was from Tennessee and it was the first time since he moved West that he heard anyone say “Yes sir.” And it’s just…. Automatic for me? And this polite smile thing, people will jump and glare and I’m just trying to be friendly not awkward? What else is a socially anxious southern child to do upon accidentally making eye contact? Look down and hurry away? Isn’t that rude??? Someone explain why is smiling met with such anger I am confused and afraid.
Exactly!! When I moved to Missouri I was baffled at how rude everyone is! Like I saw someone I knew at Walmart and stopped to chat and they didn’t even stop! They just went ‘hi’ and moved on. Like????
And when I moved here I made cookies for the neighborhood, cuz that’s what you do and the first place I went they said “we don’t eat things with sugar” and shut the door.
Like why do y’all hate everyone so much?
I’m Canadian and am also confused
Well yeah everyone knows Canadians are the friendliest people in the world
I’m from Indiana and I’m pretty sure if you don’t talk to someone you know In Wal-Mart for at least 5 minutes you go to jail
No but that would still be rude in kentucky
You are expected to talk for at least 15 minutes, say goodbye (like, a “take care y’all, tell me how that knee is doin”) and then you talk for another ten minutes, move a little further apart and say goodbye again (“well I better get going tell your nana I said hi”) and then you talk for a while and say goodbye one more time (“I’ll see y’all at church on Sunday/school/Jo-mart/Nana’s funeral”) and move on to the next person
And don’t even get me started on food etiquette
It’s not a south v. west thing, it’s a city thing. That’s why New Yorkers are the purest version of this. And it’s why I get both sides.
I grew up in a small town in Northern California, and it was proud of all the small town things – “you can leave your door unlocked” and all that. I got a job for a while as a bank teller, and this coworker of mine had moved there from New York.
I liked him (I tend to get along with folks) but a lot of people thought he was rude. “short” “impatient” even “brusk” were some descriptions of him, not just from our coworkers, but from the bank customers too. They complained because he always rushed them, never wanted to make small talk, etc.
One day I was working next to him, and I heard him verbally pushing yet another customer along, just racing him through the transaction against his will, and I thought, I’m gonna say something to him about it.
As soon as the customer left though, before I could say anything, my coworker goes “damn I hate people like that, get to the front of the line and want to tell me their whole life story. So RUDE!”
So I say something like, how is he the one that was rude to you?
And goes, like he can’t believe how stupid I’m being, “ not to me, to all those people in line behind him that want to finish up here and get on with the rest of their day! You’re at the bank, you know why you’re here, you step up, you do a polite greeting and get the fuck down to business. Everybody has shit to do, and they can’t do it until you shut up about your life story that zero people drove down here to listen to. It’s so selfish! I can’t stand people like that”
Since then, I’ve lived in San Francisco, and L.A., and Montgomery Alabama, and Germany and Portland and Oakland and a bunch of little ass towns like Suisun Ca, and Kenwood and all kinds of places, Santa Cruz and Rohnert Park. And I’ve thought about the thing that guy started me noticing.
It’s true. The closer in to a city (and the larger the city) the more the concept of polite changes from “how you are effecting the person you are communicating with” to “how you are effecting the people packed in around you”
In Oakland there are like, zero grocery stores (Oakland is literally documented as a “food desert”) and so the best grocery store in Berkeley is also a favorite grocery store of Oakland residents and it is… full.
You’ll spend a full 30 minutes in the snake of cars circling around in the parking lot waiting for somebody to finish shopping and leave so a parking spot opens up. Once inside, it’s more of the same. Shopping carts are cart-front to ass cheek. You literally can’t reach onto a shelf for a box of cereal without waiting for somebody to give you a break in traffic. Sometimes you get stuck standing in a single spot for several minutes, boxed in on all sides. I’ve only been twice, and I swear to all holy gods that if I saw two people trying to catch up on chit chat while we all tried to maneuver around them, I would been reaching for my murdering stick. It’s called skype motherfuckers, go the fuck home and talk to each other, jfc, the rest of us are trying to make a deadline for some other shit we gotta get done today.
Now, going back home, to small town Nor Cal, yeah, I don’t want to be rude, I’m gonna stop and say hi, I’m gonna ask about your family, I’m gonna rack my brain and remember that you had a sick cat or a trip you were trying to take or an interest in boats, and I’m gonna ask about that shit, fuck yeah tell me about how the tomatoes are coming in this year, I hear the birds are worse than ever.
Anyway, city folk ain’t rude, they just polite different; suitable for city life.
This is such a great explanation, and really important.
Such nicknames… Old One Eye and Old Bastard… are happily accepted. Hell. Half of his names in the norse stories mean similar things; “Harbard,” for instance, translates to ‘hoar-beard’.
Bölverkr translates to ‘bale-worker’, meaning ‘worker of evil’, which is a reference to his habit of causing bad luck and tragedy to those who piss him off.
Glapsviðr means ‘swift tricker’, for his cleverness and ability to outwit most enemies. One of my favorites,
Hrosshársgrani, translates literally to ‘Horse Hair Mustache” and I think we can all agree that that is a fantastic nickname.
Odin has thousands of names, most of which even his devotees do not know. He seems to take pride in this.
As to depictions of him in media…while not always accurate, well. Let me put it this way. One of his thousands of names is
Faðr galdr, or father of (magical) songs. He is the god of inspiration and creativity, particularly in storytellers.
Why do you think, dear nonnie, that images of Odin have crept their way into so much of pop culture? All the great popular stories…Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the thousand fantasy and sci-fi stories they inspired…there he is. As Gandalf, and the thousand wizards inspired by him. As Obi-Wan, and Yoda. Look at any entry in the TV tropes ‘wizard classic’ category, and that’s him.
Why is this image of a wise old wizard figure so enduring? Why has the image of the Allfather in the form of a wandering wizard, changed in no significant way, been so enduring, despite efforts to stamp out the Norse pantheon?
Why, for that matter, were Christian monks driven to take down the stories of him, recording the Eddas and sagas through no small investment of time and energy, despite the fact that it represented a tradition that they found distasteful?
Guess.
He approves of his name and image being out there. He approves very much. He’s been quite carefully making sure that he is portrayed in such, for something better than eight hundred years.
Odin’s very wise, and very farsighted. He knows, better than most gods, that nothing lasts forever. He knew the Norse would not. He took steps to ensure that his name and the tales of him and the other gods survived. He’s taking steps now, and seems to be actively recruiting on a rather large scale for new devotees; this started, incidentally, some thirty years back, just as the rise of neo-nazis claiming his name began and even a little before; the Allfather, I think, saw that coming, and began actively recruiting non-shitty assholes to combat this. Many followers of Odin have noticed this; we are actively pushed to push back against such abuse of his name, and pushed towards causes such as environmental conservation.
The images of him in pop culture only aid this. They give him an opening, so to speak, through which to slip.
He used Gandalf to first contact me. He’s used other familiar faces for others.
So, TLDR; Odin approves of seeing himself in pop culture. Very much.
It’s completely staggering to me that I seem to be seeing posts similar to this one so often lately and never did before despite following plenty of Odin devotees and other heathen-leaning folk for years on this platform. It’s wild and I can tell you he’s definitely recruiting and he’ll use any face or name you’ll accept to reach you.
He knew, I think. He knew full well that this sort of social and political turmoil was coming, and he saw that some people who know nothing of him would try to use his name.
He took steps to counteract this. He’s still taking them. He seems, so far as I can tell, to be gearing up for something.
And knowing what I do of him….and I would never be so bold here as to claim to know everything about him. That’s not even possible for a mortal, I think. That’s not even possible, I think, for most other gods.
But what I do know of him tells me that what he wants for mortals closely coincides with what I do. A global information network? Free sharing of information? Healing and health for all, and science and exploration beyond our world and within our own? Knowledge and learning available to all, regardless of birthplace or status? Learning simply for the love of it, available to all who love to learn? Freedom to create, for artists, without fearing where their next meal will come from?
That is what he wishes for us. He saw, I think, that aspects of society would push back against such things…and took steps and is taking them to counteract them.
9 year old me, reading Forgotten Realms books; “God Elminster is so cool fuck damn he goes everywhere and has like a million names and is a BAMF wizard and a ton of enemies and can shapeshift and once turned himself into a woman and is a wily bastard and has a rad hat goddamn he’s my favorite.”
30 year old me, narrowing my eyes at Odin; “You…absolute MOTHERFUCKER.”
*Soft sound of divine snickering*
And somewhere in the 20th century in a pub in Oxford, a one eyed gent sees John enter and greet Clive and the rest of the Inklings.He’s been lurking just outside the college some days. Others, the shadow of a broad brimmed hat falls over a desk filled with Old English translations in a study filled with pipe smoke.
An old hand alters the slope of elf-speech, just so, and mirth is found when the girl named for the Roman goddess of the hunt is frustrated by her professor, all lost in his mythologies. Yet, she is inspired to spin tales of her own, tales of stubborn hot-tempered wizards with Moving Castles, parallel worlds, magical woodlands. She who was named for the huntress later becomes friends with the young man who gives Morpheus, Prince of Stories, Lord Shaper, his rebirth. Gives us Wednesday and Shadow and Mr. World and Low-key Liesmith. She befriends magicians, writes of them, though her old teacher frustrates her so.
Somewhere else that’s not the pub, across the sea, he asks a rhetorical question, knowing Gary will think on it and realise that things can be more than just words on a page, even as his friends blow on their dice, for luck. There, is after all, magic in the breath.
For now though, which is to say before, the gent sips his pint, watching the Inklings disappear into the snug. Many realms have been forgotten, but the trick with Memory is that it works in All Directions. It always comes back, despite the gent’s fears, new every time.
Eveything’s connected, after all.
“One more for the road, my dear?” he says, favouring the barmaid with a roguish grin. “And one for yourself, eh?”
He leans forward, giving her the full force of his charm. He has time, after all.
Like the goddess’ namesake’s young friend will later write:
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” Neil Gaiman, Dream Country (The Sandman, #3)
Ignore the wink the old gent sends in our direction across the years. That did not happen. He did not smile, and bend the weave of lives to his own ends, yours and mine and others. Did not give us the grin of an Old, Grey Wolf who is sly and wily and twice as slick.
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
Reblog for disability commentary.
That last paragraph is absolutely important.
“How come nobody ever heard of ‘dyslexia’ until widespread literacy became a thing?”
