I'm having a little bit of fun now. 🩷💖💗

"l had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape.

And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.”

And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.”

And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."

"Your Elusive Creative Genius" by Elizabeth Gilbert

https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/your-elusive-creative-genius-by-elizabeth-gilbert

🩷

Bruce Springsteen - Hungry Heart (Official Audio)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=boJhWtw-6Gg&si=u56tDQO6Ja_4ARau

💖

"'Leisure' by William Henry Davies" - Your Daily Poem

https://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=100

😺🃏💗🤷🏽‍♀️🪄🌱🪃🎭✨🎶😇

I need to rest now.

It really is so tricky to try to be authentic and truthful about your experiences and take better care of your health at the same time! Or at any rate, my body's giving me a bunch of twinges now that's letting me know I need to get better at the second thing. To the task at hand...

Scented lavender balm...Mmmm.

Honestly, it probably is quite a human thing to do, to choose to believe in a certain kind of fantasy reality because people are trying to take care of themselves, right?

I wonder if getting great at forgiving others for choosing a fantasy world that I do not seem to be able to access myself would be a good thing to do for my health?

So weird that I don't remember this!

But I bought mince pies that were discounted after Christmas Day.

"Back at the mince pie competition, Shelagh wins first prize in absentia. Sister Veronica claps politely, but you can practically see her think 'Nepotism! Cheating!' while she does it, becuase Dr. Turner was one of the judges. Two ladies from the community win runner up, and Sister Veronica? She’s SEETHING. Back at Nonantus, she tries to do the thing where you say the baked good you worked on for ages isn’t that good in hopes your friends will give you a compliment. This… sort of backfires.

Sister Monica Joan: Don’t look at me to talk trash about your hard work.

Sister Veronica: Oh?

Sister Monica Joan: These are fine!

Sister Veronica: Oh. 🙁"

~ Jackie Bruleigh

"Call The Midwife holiday special 2024 recap: mince pie madness"

https://www.wgbh.org/tv-shows/drama/2024-12-25/call-the-midwife-holiday-special-2024-recap-mince-pie-madness

Why don't I remember it? Was I sleepy?

Because it's nice to know we can still fathom better healthcare.

"Sometimes I wonder if everyone watches 'Call the Midwife' to witness proper healthcare. Dr. Turner makes house calls, even to slums. He tells an impoverished mother that he’ll call again next week. Which is a shock to modern ears. And then, I swear to God, the midwife says that she’ll be calling round daily. A midwife. In your house. Every. Day. Talk about fantasy television."

~ Anne Marie Hourihane

"Call The Midwife TV review: How do they keep a straight face..."

https://m.independent.ie/entertainment/television/tv-reviews/call-the-midwifes-babies-perform-heroic-stunt-work-but-how-do-the-grown-up-actors-keep-a-straight-face/a464792043.html

I wonder why coloring stuff in apps still makes me think of Anne Frank sometimes?

I feel like it's not happening as much as it used to, but the whole thinking about Anne Frank  and her family as real people who really existed, and how in a way, she and they still seem to exist on another level, has been happening a lot at this point in time of my life.

It really does scream "defense mechanism."

It's so interesting when people jump to defend something without even bothering to be curious about another point of view existing.

That's pretty harsh, but it's pretty truthful at the same time.

"In this life, I really needed to fit in with Patriarchal societal norms, and that's why I have successfully surrounded myself with a lot of Patriarchal women and men who act like your point of view needs to be diminished at all costs, because they were also traumatized by the Patriarchy, but in order to survive, they felt they needed to act as though you are the type whose experiences are absolutely worthless to them, because considering that someone like you counts as a real human being is not what the Patriarchal people wanted them to do at all."

I will have to get one of those clip-on lenses for my phone so it actually shows up if I take a picture.

It's the most Cheshire Cat Moon I've seen ever. 

Opportunities for growth abound!

"But the privilege of those truths cannot be bestowed on creatures whose rejection of the maternal bond has become a rejection of a wider unspoken, colossally unfair contract. Women with children are handed social acceptance for their vital investment in 'the future,' in exchange for unrewarded, unsupported labour that props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo. All while still suffering sneeriness about the value of their work in comparison with the serious graft of the men who win the bread.

On top of that, women have to navigate all that motherhood – or not – entails, all the deeply personal, bewildering, isolating and unacknowledged realities of both, while being subject to relentless suffocating, infantilising and violating public theories and notions that trespass on their private spaces. With that comes a sense of self-doubt and shame in making the wrong decision, or not being as content with those decisions as they are expected to be. It is a constant, prodding vivisection. That, more than anything clinical observers feel, is the truly disorienting and disturbing experience."

~ Nesrine Malik

"The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine"

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris

I'll be off to my fairyland now.

"Women who don’t have children do not exist in a state of blissful detachment from their bodies and their relationship with maternity: a number have had pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions and periods. A number have entered liminal stages of motherhood that don’t conform to the single definition from which they are excluded. A number extend mothering to various children in their lives. Some, like Harris herself, have stepchildren (who don’t count, just as May’s nieces and nephews didn’t). A number have become mothers, just not in a way that initiates them into a blissful club. They experience regret, depression and navigate unsettlement that does not conform to the image of uncomplicated validation of your purpose in life."

"Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering."

~ Nesrine Malik

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris

Perhaps there will be more needed discussions about "useful fantasy" in the near future.

"To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return. Assuming motherhood happens without such context, Charman tells me, is a 'useful fantasy.'"

~ Nesrine Malik 

"The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine"

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris

Also, the conversations about who's actually doing all of the child care can get so much more sophisticated than they have been.

 "A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that 'free' service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidised rights depend on. The lack of parental leave, childcare and elderly care would become profoundly visible – 'disorienting and disturbing' – if that service were removed."

~ Nesrine Malik

"The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris

Perhaps I am here to mother not with intention!

"Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering."

~ Nesrine Malik

"The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris

Do you realize that sometimes, some of us are just trying to have a nice evening?

However, here's what we're doing now. We're reading

"The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine"

~ Nesrine Malik

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/02/jd-vance-childless-women-kamala-harris

Anyways, that's a real problem!

Meanwhile, it is so annoying to me that this sounds like a fantasy that hasn't actually happened yet

"I talked to so many women, for example, who were joining companies or corporate boards where they were the first women. They talked about how hard it was to be the first woman. Then, as other women joined, there was suddenly a moment when it just wasn’t an issue anymore."

"Malcolm Gladwell on Finding Meaning in Your Life Experiences"

https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/malcolm-gladwell-on-finding-meaning-in-your-life-experiences/

And then I'm like, but what if it has happened somewhere? I would like to know where. 

What if out of 100 companies, that has happened at least one company, somewhere? Shouldn't we all be inspired by that?

Meanwhile, as another brilliant career move,

Conan makes out with his own face.

"Stay til the end to watch..."

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEYSQEVzGJv/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Do daughters always have an obligation to pay attention to the things their dads don't want to look at?

I know there are dads in the world who do not seem to want to care about how it's actually 100 percent impossible for most daughters to ever experience the world as they're experiencing it.

But why can't I live my own life feeling just as entitled to be just as careless? 

Apparently, I can't. And I can't even be just be poor and simple and fine and with not interfacing anymore with the "trained by their society to be clueless about so much cad dads" ever again. 

But why not?

Ah, how about this one?

"Rise to the highest you know: An interview with Dorothy McLean"

https://www.findhorn.org/blog/rise-to-the-highest-you-know-an-interview-with-dorothy-maclean

From issue number six of their magazine. The one that I found in the store was issue number five.

Oh, this was nice find!

"THE FINDHORN FILM"

~ dannymillerfilms

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QT4xwLwxi9o&si=TmuV3FrEq7cdXOxd

After also finding a book from the '70s about this place in a used bookstore last month!

It's healing vibes & doing chores time.

"TMJ Cranial Nerve Sound Bath  **Stop Jaw Clenching"

~ Healing Vibrations

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qz5F54OCuP4&si=GDhashgyXqfZkTsH

Well, I do hope things get better.

Did she say "welcome to a regular day of school in America" at minute two?

"We are SO CLOSE to Class Consciousness"

~ Happy Pancake

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lnjaFNW4eu0&si=aT4nJcW6vFVA5E2z

Well-Meaning but Willfully Ignorant Patterns can be Traumatic.

A "Call the Midwife" episode can be traumatic.

"Doctors who give advice without knowing the exact cause..."

https://youtube.com/shorts/IvYktg_Mk0c?si=xx3xLCUV0R_RSw3s

I feel like my cat approves when I watch stuff like this.

"Phin's dad here..."

~ orangeisthenewblackandtan

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_r19J_JIiq/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Health will be a continual theme.

There's a need to focus on what is the better path or the best way to conduct a life to make for oneself.

There is a disagreement that some have about what's the best way to move forward.

Some of us may feel that when you don't look at some of the problems or suffering, it just feels too fake and too inauthentic.

It feels like there's a duty to point out that these things are being ignored.

But then I suppose it all gets too depressing to look at a lot of times?

I think that what I want to do is look at what needs to be acknowledged, and then figure out the best way of going about healing what needs to be healed.

I had a lot of leisure time today. Whether or not I spent it as best as I could? Well that's another question.

Everyone has to learn to make the best of  whatever hand they've been dealt with. I feel like I have to pick myself up and dust myself off.

I wonder what would happen if I got rid of all the clothes that are tattered. The beggar character in the last book I read made me realize I am getting tired of clothing that looks like it could have been worn for Les Miserables.

And I have to take a lot more care with my health. I need to figure out how to ask a better way of living to surround me because vibing with a lot of the suffering of the world is...I don't know. I feel like it's part of our learning experience on Earth, to be sensitive to the suffering on this planet, but there's a real need to get better, too, healthwise.

Old-fashioned illustrations in an early version of Sara Crewe!

Wow, I am going to read this!

"The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sara Crewe," by Frances Hodgson Burnett 

https://readingroo.ms/2/4/7/7/24772/24772-h/24772-h.htm

I feel a little stunned sometimes.

When the 'having to give up on caring about human rights for certain types of people because as it turns out, patriarchal society made it feel more uncomfortable to do so" phenomenon repeats itself.

Does this version star Shirley Temple?

"An orphaned girl tends goats for her grandfather until she's sold to serve as a disabled girl's companion."

Heidi (1937)

https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/77647/heidi#overview

Heidi! Add Heidi to the list.

Annie, Sara Crewe, Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, that girl in The Secret Garden who was Colin's cousin, and Heidi.

How to ignore your health to enterprisal standards?

Well, if you just ignore the health of SO many other kinds of girls and women, and also manage to produce the kinds of superior small human beings that the patriarchy will be delighted to lift up as a good example for all the rest to aspire to in some future lifetime, you might be on your way to finally getting a long-coveted promotion?

Tough times. Tough people!

Annie (1982) - "Little Girls"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cDkEXszYtdo&si=zOCul2oqSFbqETRA

Sacrificing human rights for girls due to extreme economic hardship should be a thing of the past.

 "In 1932, Georgia native Erskine Caldwell wrote Tobacco Road, a raw, descriptive novel that shocked the conscience of the nation about the sharecropping system in Depression-era Georgia, a place he later described as somewhere people 'hungered in shacks miles deep in remote woods.' The novel’s protagonist, Jeeter Lester, becomes so desperate to feed his starving family that he offers to exchange his 12-year-old daughter’s virginity for a sack of turnips. Many sought to censor the novel at the time as vulgar and offensive, but Caldwell countered that he only wrote about 'the world as I knew it to be during that particular era for the white and Black people who lived difficult lives together in the rural South, and it told about the hard sharecropper system which was an often ignored though dominant element of Southern life.'"

~ Jim Barger, Jr.

"Jimmy Carter: Unwavering" — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER

https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2024/jimmy-carter-unwavering-100

Just kidding! Just kidding. Hee hee. Some of us are looking for Miss Hannigan...

"Well, at least we all saw 'Annie,' so now we're all looking for our sugar daddies!"

"Annie (1982) Original Trailer [FHD]"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=I78xulb-l0s&si=kB_u5_44yxC5-n1x

"Carol Burnett Won't Take No Lip"| Annie (1982)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BP4EaKumzzE&si=VRsVl2E73pwqeL0G

I know they at least probably saw "Annie," the movie.

Did no one else get all those books about misunderstood orphan girls as the heroines when they were growing up?

"Sara Crewe!" "Anne of Green Gables!" "The Secret Garden!" "Emily of New Moon!" All right. I believe that more people probably didn't receive the last one, but I feel like a lot of people at least got exposed to those other stories, which seemed to be about  instilling the values of being kind to the the outsiders and recognizing that they have things about them that are good and special too.

This is really cute!

 "Gifting our wobbly cat a handmade sunflower bed for his birthday"

~ orangeisthenewblackandtan and got.lemons

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8fawM7y0LG/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

🪄I have a wish to eat bread 🍞 and enjoy it 🙂.

"GRAPHIC: As Trump policy changes loom, nearly half of farmworkers lack legal status"

https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/12/30/graphic-as-trump-policy-changes-loom-nearly-half-of-farmworkers-lack-legal-status/

Anyways, it's another new year!

"So much depends upon..."

"The Red Wheelbarrow" | The Poetry Foundation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow

"3 American myths I don't believe anymore after living abroad"

~ things your mom should've told you

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfhCiFmtO8g&si=IxgUGQdSDO1gGU-X

Now she lives elsewhere.

"3 American myths I don't believe anymore after living abroad"

~ things your mom should've told you

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfhCiFmtO8g&si=IxgUGQdSDO1gGU-X

So apparently, she used to work for Tesla.

"3 American myths I don't believe anymore after living abroad"

~ things your mom should've told you

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zfhCiFmtO8g&si=IxgUGQdSDO1gGU-X

Earth! Beauty! Julian Sands in a tree in a charming adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel!

Funny clip! But I don't know why they cut off the end of the scene.

"Room with a View Clip"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8eE7FR8q8tg&si=zfyh3D1ilbvtSxgt

Oh I just remembered something else.

Team Coco | "With so many options, how will Conan decide"

https://www.instagram.com/teamcoco/

I don't know. But wherever he goes, he could choose to highlight the healing power of nature surrounding his lodgings, and then maybe he could be more like Conan of Green Gables. 

O to see them! Not only the homes, but perhaps even more, their surroundings!

"The Original Homes of Lucy Maud Montgomery"

https://www.anneofgreengables.com/blog-posts/the-original-homes-of-lucy-maud-montgomery

Such an interesting upbringing!

"People were never right in saying I was ‘Anne,’ she told a fellow writer, Ephraim Weber, in a 1921 letter, 'but, in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily.' She was referring to Emily of New Moon, a later novel, the first in a series about the difficulty of making it as a young female writer.

I had come to Park Corner to walk in Montgomery’s footsteps and see the world from which she spun stories that blended fantasy and reality. Yet her fiction, synonymous with bright, idyllic settings and bubbly heroines, also had a darker side—and the picturesque beauty of Park Corner felt at odds with the sober vibe of Emily (1923), her bleakest and most serious book.

'You should go to New Moon,' Pamela Campbell said when I confessed my interest in the lesser-known Emily. The house, she said, 'is just down the road.'"

~ V. M. Braganza

The Author of 'Anne of Green Gables' Lived a Far Less Charmed Life Than Her Beloved Heroine

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lm-montgomery-anne-green-gables-life-180981839/

Maya the poet, Anne the outsider...

"Most people don't grow up. It's so damn difficult..."

Maya Angelou 

@femalepoetsociety

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DESY7KJCRrA/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

"Celebrating L.M. Montgomery's 150th and the many lives of Anne Shirley"

~ Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b1VP1YSMcs4&si=58ogBilnmcyDhvkI

Mother child; mother child self?

"Why Don’t You Write About Autism?" – Literary Mama

https://literarymama.com/articles/departments/2024/01/why-dont-you-write-about-autism

"Many many summers ago..."

Aminah Nieves

https://www.instagram.com/p/DCk9AkFRSsU/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Ah, history!

"Goodbye 2024"

~ uespiiiiii

https://www.instagram.com/uespiiiiii/reel/DEP0mRZPZAJ/

r/ Unexpected 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/s/toHad13P9x

What does your society expect of you now and previously?

After seeing

"Native American teenagers have had a difficult time"

@Joeshort-n4w

https://youtube.com/shorts/2uHG_Xy-LWg?si=4Z9O188sHGmgM6bz

and

"You're not wrong."

~ Sara Pascoe at Hayes Film Festival 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DERxC-qqDuj/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Felt the need to address different perspectives existing.

It feels like the perspective that you "haven't been through anything before age 14" is...not true.

It's more like what some adults will say as a way to make life and their society seem more orderly.

Patriarchal society still wants people to feel very insecure.

"Yes, 1923's Most Horrifying Scene Is Based On Real Life"

https://screenrant.com/1923-show-teonna-rainwater-native-american-boarding-schools/

Even the most privileged ones in the society are made to feel very insecure.

"Comedian Sara Pascoe, 43, admits she had given up..."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14072813/Sara-Pascoe-kids-husband-try-harder-IVF-abortion.html

"I desperately wanted to be generative and be a part of the community."

~ Sara Pascoe

Seems as though Pascoe was made to feel insecure if she didn't have kids in a specific kitchen (oops weird typo! Haha) er, type of way, and this kind of story makes me feel like that old "Patriarchal Society just wants us to worship white guys' genetics at the expense of everyone else" programming is still running. Unfortunately, those programs haven't changed all that much for some people.

Perhaps her husband just didn't have the same ideas as her on being able to adopt. IVF was his idea, wasn't it? 

"'I think he was worried about a space of sadness in our life, where I was very convinced that we could adopt and foster."  ~ Pascoe

'It was like making a hypothetical decision based on a sadness I hadn't felt yet. The way society ties women's success to marriage and babies weighed heavily on me; I think women are complicit in reinforcing it.'" ~ Pascoe

"Comedian Sara Pascoe, 43, admits she had given up..."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-14072813/Sara-Pascoe-kids-husband-try-harder-IVF-abortion.html

Patriarchal Society still wants people to be able to be the most satisfied with being self-absorbed and insensitive to a lot different kinds of people who weren't historically valued by their society.

Patriarchal society teaches people (and parents) that being cold to others is the way to be a good role model. The best way to raise children is to train them to be just as self-absorbed and insensitive as their society wanted their parents  to be. And that's fine for everyone else too, supposedly? Not really.

"Nieves explained that Teonna didn't enjoy hurting Sister Mary even if it was retribution for the nun's own cruelty, saying it 'wasn’t an action that she really desired to do, but it was one that she had to do to save herself and everyone in that room.'"

"Meanwhile, Ehles explained that Sister Mary saw herself as a protector in her own warped way as she truly believed this was the best way to help these girls, though notes that is because Sister Mary is 'full of intense ignorance and damage.'"

~ Colin McCormick and Peter Mutuc

"Yes, 1923's Most Horrifying Scene Is Based On Real Life"

https://screenrant.com/1923-show-teonna-rainwater-native-american-boarding-schools/

Honestly, this is 2025, and Patriarchal Society still wants people to do what the rich property owning white guys think they should do. It is a society that wants people to be very shallow. And in order to do that, the Patriarchal Ones must feel entitled enough to think that making people feel they're not good enough is the way to go, and that being highly insecure is what's actually "good enough" for them.