i always thought of a king sized bed as being a bit bigger than a queen, but now that i have one, i can tell you that a king sized bed is an absurdity. i can sprawl out, and my husband can sprawl out, and the cat can sprawl out, and none of us are touching. i reach out in the night, and find only pillows and plush walruses. i reach further and eventually find his elbow. he rolls over the comforters to try and find me. “i have crossed oceans of bed to be with you,” he says. there is a vast expanse of bed untouched, unmapped, unexplored. the cat is still trying to sleep on my face.
In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in Star Wars learn to use the Force.
In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.
Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.
Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is nonburglars who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.
To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.
The futility of tagging the person you reblogged something from, into your reblog, because you think they’ll like it…
On the plus side, I do like it. 😀 😀 😀
Seriously, limiting yourself to the architecture at hand is only if you’re trying to have things go unnoticed for as long as possible.
Otherwise, speaking from a more nefarious moment in my life, locks are only there to deter opportunists, and real thieves will let themselves in however they want.
one thing I want to say today relates to my current job. (As you guys know, I’ve left off working in science labs to work an office job in sci comm. My role is kind of … nebulous and involves a lot of “oh, Elodie can help you with that, she does weird stuff. Train Elodie on that.”)
Because it’s an office job, the mentality is for everyone to present their workflows as incredibly difficult and skilled, requiring a lot of training and experience to do properly. Which is fair enough! These skills are difficult!
“Elodie, today we are going to train you to use… A HIGHLY COMPLICATED AND DIFFICULT WEBSITE INTERFACE. You will need to take a lot of notes and pay careful attention, because it is extremely advanced. ARE YOU READY”
“… This is WordPress.”
“…No it isn’t! it says something different at the top. And it’s very complicated, it’s not something you can just know already.”
“Nah son, don’t worry, it’s WordPress. I mean, God knows I don’t blog much, but I can manage me a bit of WordPress, it’s cool.”
“No. You can’t. Don’t worry, it’s very difficult. Now sit still and be trained on how to upload a photo to WordPress.”
“All right.”
—-
“Elodie, do you think that you can MANAGE SOCIAL MEDIA? It is INCREDIBLY HARD and may involve THE HASHTAGS”
“… I think I’ll manage.”
—-
“Elodie, can you put a HYPERLINK in a thing? Think about it before you answer.”
“Is it like a BBCode kind of thing, with the boxy bracket things, or do you want it in HTML, with like angley bracket things?”
“It is a button that you press that says HYPERLINK.”
“I can do this thing for you.”
—-
“Elodie, can you write a punchy summary that will make people want to click on a special link that says “read more” to read all of the text?“
“Probably?”
—-
“Elodie, this is how to use TAGS on CONTENT. TAGS on CONTENT are important because – because of THINGS. Things that are too arcane and mysterious for anyone below the level of Manager to know.”
“Cool, I can tag stuff for you.”
—-
“Elodie, this is obviously a ridiculous question, but can you edit videos?”
“Not very well, and only if you want to make it look like there is sexual tension between characters from different forms of visual media, or perhaps to make a trailer for a fanfiction? Which is not necessarily a good use of my time and I’m not sure why I felt it was so cool to do to begin with…”
“What?”
“Actually, upon further reflection: no. No. Nope. I can’t edit videos. They’re completely beyond me. Not in my wheelhouse. Hate videos. Hate them. No innate skill whatsoever.”
“That’s what we thought”
—-
“Elodie?! You can use PHOTOSHOP?!”
“Yeah, I mean, I usually just use Pixlr. It’s free, it’s online, it’s powerful, you don’t have to download anything…”
“but you are not a GRAPHIC DESIGNER!!”
“Er… no.”
“Next you’ll be telling us you can MAKE AN ANIMATED PICTURE.”
“I mean, I haven’t really done a lot of it since Livejournal, and they weren’t that good anyway, but yeah… I can do you reaction images.”
“THAT IS WITCHCRAFT”
“Yes. Definitely.”
—-
What I’m trying to say is: a lot of people talk a lot of crap about what we Millenials do on the Internet, because there is NO CAPITALISTIC VALUE in the screwing around we do with our friends. “Ughh why are you ALWAYS on the computer?” our parents whined.
“How did you make the text go all slanty like that?” our bosses wonder.
We have decades of experience in Photoshop. We know how to communicate; we can make people across the planet care about our problems. We know how to edit media to make two characters look like they’re having the sexual tensions. We can make people read our posts, follow us, share our content. We run and manage our own websites – and make them pretty. We moderate conversations, enforce commenting policies, manage compromises, lead battles, encourage peace, defend ourselves from attack, inspire others, and foster incredible levels of communication.
We produce our art. We advertise our art. We engage with others through our art. We accept constructive criticism and dismiss destructive trolling of our art. We improve our art. Our art gets better.
We narrate our stories.
All by ourselves. Our pretty blog backgrounds, custom-edited themes, tasteful graphics, punchy content, clever gifs, our snappy putdowns and smart-ass text posts, even our familiarity with fonts and composition – all of these skills we’ve casually accumulated for fun/approval are MINDBLOWING LEVELS OF COMPETENCE IN THE WORKFORCE.
When these skills are sold to you – when they’re packaged and marketed, and when you pay to consume them and have the Elders rate you on them – they are incredibly valuable. They are Media and Communications degrees. They are marketing internships. They are leadership workshops. They are graphics design modules. They are web design courses. They are programming courses. We are good at this shit; we have it nailed down.
You can’t put “fandom” or “blogging” on your CV, but you deserve to. You should get this credit. You should claim this power and authority.
Claim these skills. They are valuable. They are important.
Everything you have ever done is a part of your powerful makings.
I want to second what elodieunderglass has to say here, because it’s so true. You want to buff up your resume or your LinkedIn page?
-if you know enough html to do <i>this is italic text</i>, then you understand HTML and can pretty much call yourself a Junior Developer
-if you ever wanted to customize your LJ or tumblr and copied someone’s CSS code and then went in and tweaked font color and added your own header image? You understand CSS and again, you can put Junior Developer in your LinkedIn title.
-if you can use twitter and tumblr and put hashtags and regular tags on stuff, you’re a Social Media Manager. If you can get people to follow you and comment back, you have Demonstrated Social Media Efficacy.
-if you can use Photoshop (or Pixlr!) to make five million pictures of Natalie Dormer really pretty, you are a Photo Editor.
-if you can migrate some of your Photoshop skills to InDesign, you are a Production Editor with demonstrable skills in Layout For Print Publications
-if you want to look even more impressive and pick up an easy job that mostly involves googling bits of code to copy and fuck around with, go play on CodeAcademy and get yourself qualified in not just HTML and CSS, but also JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and others. Again, this makes you a Software/Applications Developer.
The only reason you’re given the impression that these are jobs for really smart brogrammers with masters degrees in computer science is because scary jargon keeps people out. Look stuff up, and you’ll find out you already know a ton of this material. I promise you, you’re more qualified for tech/developer jobs than a lot of the people actually working at firms that focus on those kind of jobs.
^
Often in my job people ask me if I can do something, and if I respond with, ‘No, but I’m sure I could find out how,’ they look at me like my head just rotated 360 degrees. One thing about being on the internet in this age is that you have experienced how you can just google something and you’ll probably find a youtube tutorial.
Don’t know how to use the Puppetwarp in Photoshop? *20 minutes later and some cursing included* Okay, now I do.
Don’t know how to knit? *ten minutes later* totes pro.
A lot of people bag our generation but there’s so much to be said for the sheer amount of information we’re used to absorbing and parsing. Don’t underestimate that, either!
OK entry-level kids, listen. ‘I don’t know how to do this but just give me 20 minutes’ is probably the most important, career-advancing thing you can say at your workplace because not only does it show that you’re adaptable and proactive and any number of dumb buzzwords that happen to be popular in The Industry these days. BUT If you build up on it over time, it will also pretty much make you indispensable, which is so important in an unstable job market.
Consider this: unless you get a job with a super-successful startup where your boss is like 25, chances are you’re going to land in company where the higher-ups are in their 40s-50s, thus belonging to that particular generation that habitually puts down millenials for having No Experience of Real Life. Except in a workplace environment this means they expect that they have to train you on every single little thing, aka waste time and resources on you, aka see you as a soooort of useful nuisance who’s there to do the little menial jobs no one else wants to do. This is where the last to come first to go thing comes from really.
What your crusty 50+ y/o bosses don’t realize is that ‘being on the computer’ all day, you inherently develop a thing called rapid skill acquisition. Yeah, it sounds fancy (so fancy you can put it in your CV) but most of the time, as the previous comments point out, it just involves Google and YT tutorials. You’ll be surprised how many highbrow professionals don’t actually do this, b/c they reached the top and feel like they have a secure position and basically fall so behind on things that a 20 y/o intern can out-skill them, or quickly learn to out-skill them any day of the week. Most likely they’re not aware of this. And no, it’s not as out there as it sounds. Consider you’re talking to people who think you need training to use WordPress. Imagine what telling them you can use a blogging platform to create an easy to update professional looking website for fucking free will do to them. Imagine telling them you can make gorgeous graphics from scratch, update the company logo or design some rad business cards. THERE IS SO MUCH YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DO THAT THEY DON’T KNOW CAN BE DONE.
A couple of years ago I interned for a research centre where I did this all the time. Three weeks in they called me to sign an employment contract that tripled my pay and I got to go everywhere with them and meet important people in my field, it was great. My 23 y/o brother, who doesn’t have a single solitary hour of formal training in PR/marketing or IT in his degree, interned as marketing assistant for a small IT company and was so quick to catch on that they hired him after the internship and by the end of the year he’d already helped increase their turnover. Eight months, unpaid internship included, and he made them more money! That kid is never going to get fired!
Also learn some programming/web design. Seriously. I see these self-taught 16 y/o kids making gorgeous Tumblr themes from scratch and I’m like. You are al fucking wizards. Not even out of highschool yet and you’re pretty much set up for a job that potentially pays in the 6 digits.
You are smart and you are creative and you are amazing! You need to be brave and confident and capitalize on that because you’ve got what it takes and more. Fuck the jargon, you’ve got the skills.
All of this. Also, don’t be afraid of job requirements that say “must have a BA in Mass Media and 10+ experience in the Youtubez” or some stupid shit like that. Most companies are making it up as they go when it comes to anything digital. They have no idea what it takes to be a social media manager or a web developer, so they copy-pasted the requirements from someone else. Apply anyway. Quantify your skills & experience using their words and then show them what you can do. Right now, especially in the media industry, all the big-wigs at the top are sending corporate mandates to HIRE PEOPLE LIKE YOU because they are so afraid of the ~digital future~ making them insignificant. Claim your space. You likely have more practical experience than half the people working in the field.
Honey, let me tell you something. I am an Administrative Assistant for an audit unit. Auditors, who use God knows what programs to do their analysis. They’re cool. Then you have the managers. Who oversee the auditors. Who I have to handhold to do every little thing in Word, Excel, and Outlook. Because they don’t understand anything. “Alice, how do you add a watermark?” “Alice, can you add a graph in Word that shows this information?” “Alice, I can’t get the borders to stay on one page only and not the whole document.” My answer? “I’ll fix it before I give it to the Chief Auditor. Just make a note.” By the way, if you’ve ever in your life read and made some sort of suggestion to your friends’ essays, reports, or anything, regardless of high school, college, or university level, you have the skill Quality Control. Trust me.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in gods, you’re a witch”
Yes, and not all witches believe or adhere to a secular belief system of a higher power.
Scottish witchcraft, actual Scottish traditions and not made up neo-Celticisms, were far more focused on local spirits and the relation between oneself and ones surroundings. And most importantly, the will of oneself. Which isn’t to say that people also didn’t believe in gods, but, well, the concept of gods will always be there. We as a species can’t help but dream of things beyond us. We looked at the stars and looked for ourselves among them. We found familiar shapes and wove stories around them, named them, found meaning and purpose in the steadfast lights of the dark and endless night.
And then because we’re also idiots we went to war over them. My god is bigger than your good, yea well my god is older, who says, fuck you, meet me in the pit. (People think the space race began in the 50s. They are, for the sake of symbolic narrative purposes, wrong.)
Personally I fully suspect there might be such a thing as gods, but frankly I don’t need them to be me or to do what I do. When people ask me what witchcraft means to me, or if I can recommend any good “how to” books to them, I often find myself at a loss because there are no books I have found that affirm what I know in my gut to be true. You either are or you aren’t. And how you decide that is when you decide that you are. The rest is just the accumulation of knowledge over a lifetime and the assurance that you are responsible for your life, and how you affect the world. And you must conduct yourself accordingly with how you see fit.
And if it turns out there are gods and they’re going to be upset with me that I didn’t pray to them because I was busy, well, fuck ‘em. Any divine entity that can remain passive to the suffering in the world doesn’t deserve my reverence anyway.
But that’s just me.
It doesn’t invalidate you or how you do what you do. Whatever you need to get you through—so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, or yourself—you do you.
I’ll be over here. Ramming toothpicks into lemons without ceremony and making vaguely threatening promises at the sky on the off chance something might be listening.
This. Just this.
I’m not a witch, I don’t follow any particular path of any sort. At most I follow my Scouting oath.
I promise, on my honour, to do my best. To do my duty to God and the Queen, to help other people at all times and to uphold the spirit of the Scouting Law.
The way this oath is defined by Scouts Canada is:
Duty to God – whatever responsibilities and/or actions are required by whatever faith you follow. Spirituality is required, a thankfulness and mindfulness of the greater universe in some fashion. Religion is not.
Duty to Queen – our responsibilities towards our community, nation and world.
Other than that it all boils down to being the best, most honest and helpful you that you can be.
And that’s enough.
I describe myself as a devout agnostic. I neither believe nor disbelieve in anything. I just work to make my life the best and most meaningful it can be.
For others that comes with gods, spells or practices. For me it comes with tp roll telescopes. And that sounds perfect to me.
just once I want to see a good post critiquing makeup culture that doesn’t turn out to be made by some janky radfem blog
oh hey!! I’m not a janky radfem I can do it myself!
makeup culture is wack and normalizes a ludicrously high bar as the bare minimum women can do. I saw a “lazy"makeup tutorial the other day that listed 22 separate goddamn products. you’re supposed to buy and know how to use 22 different things on your face just for the privilege of being considered lazy and that’s uuuuuuh what’s the word? bullshit.
Really, five products could work, even 3. Just frame the face, eyes, lips, and you’re done.
0 products also works great
because I’m gonna be real here, the idea that 22 products is a minimum sucks but it’s really upsetting that any amount of makeup is the bare minimum at all
I would really just suggest some powder foundation, concealer, mascara and lipgloss/lipstick, or tbh just mascara works too, but that’s up to you
I’m sorry if I didn’t express this clearly enough in the original post but I’m not really looking for more concise makeup regiments. my intention was to point out how it’s Bad that makeup is considered a bare minimum at all, regardless of individual feelings on the matter
no face should be “required” to have “a minimum” of makeup. makeup has no health benefits and does nothing but fill the pockets of companies that prey on women and our insecurities.
makeup should not be seen as hygiene because it isnt. get that shit out of your head.
this post: makeup culture is ridiculous and 22 products should not be considered a minimum requirement for someones face. no one should have to do that
the notes: so like……. what youre saying is……. we need to make the minimum about 5 or 6 instead… i gotcha
Really the only makeup you need is eyeliner but that’s just my personal opinion
I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 – more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her – perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.
In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but only with their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.
In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose – but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves – why would their parents agree to this?
This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.
Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?
Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy – sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result – was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.
In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J – Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they are in love. Their speech betrays it.
Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent – all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.
When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England – basically everyone non-aristocratic – the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.
tl;dr:
Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Hell no!
Q. Was it legal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Not without dad’s consent – Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.
Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?
A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.
Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?
A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd – she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.
Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?
A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. That is the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over – Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason.
I saw this in my emails and couldn’t see why I’d been tagged in it (all the while nodding vehemently along) and then I saw my tags and ah. Yep. Still forever mad at how badly Shakespeare is taught in most schools.
