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sammehbutt

@megjosep / megjosep.tumblr.com

hi i'm megan and i'm obsessed with way too many tv shows.
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reblogged

Google is so ingrained in my life that when I see ‘goggle’ I immediately think it’s a typo

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For that "glitch in the matrix" thing going around

Not me, but my mom.

In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.

She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said “Cathy’s in bare feet,” and hung up. Except that’s not what they said–my grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had died–“got himself shot”–and that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:

–My grandfather had no recollection of the conversation–which would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didn’t die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated would’ve been near-impossible.

–My mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the run–she had a fake ID and everything. She hadn’t called herself “Cathy” since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.

–According to my mom, she never gave a name for herself–either Patricia or Cathy–when she was in Bare Feet, and she would’ve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.

–This isn’t just an account from my mother–my dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.

But that’s not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:

–I’ve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizona–on the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive “through Bare Feet” on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. I’ve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.

My mother stopped in a town that doesn’t exist, ate in a restaurant that never was, made a phone call that could not have happened and was apparently answered by a ghost from 40 years in the future, and later that night someone called my grandmother from a number that turned up on her phone bill only as a pay phone in Arizona to say that single sentence, “Cathy’s in Bare Feet.”

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vox

“Coastal elites” are in a bubble. So are white working-class Americans. See the full story (and the rest of Patrick’s tweets) here

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larathia

Actually, I would like to say - since I am also in the rural Red Zone - that while he’s right about this part of the country being like 99 percent white with a power structure heavily slanted toward ‘dude’, the answer isn’t going to be “they need to get out more” because, frankly, they can’t.

Lemme put it to you like this: I’m in a Town. If you’re on the coast, you’d consider my Town to be a badly dislocated suburb. One. Suburb. It has one starbucks. One mcdonalds. One (small) strip mall. I’d have to travel 30 miles to get a full service FedEx place or bookstore. I’d have to drive a hundred miles to get to a City, and quite a bit more than that to reach a Major City. “get out more”, for what you want, would involve basically taking a vacation because it’d be at least 12 hours of driving. And on minimum wage (which is nearly all the jobs out here) vacations are few and far between.

And therefore my response to you is this: REPRESENTATION MATTERS. You know what people around here use to see the rest of the world? TV. That’s what. And if all your villains are foreigners, or non white, and all your good guys are straight white dudes, there is nothing in the world hereabouts to contradict that. That’s what we see because there sure aren’t a lot of non-white, non-straight, non-christian types here. What people here know of all that diversity they get from hollywood.

You want to teach the locals that black people aren’t all thugs? Cast more black heros and romantic leads. You want to teach them that muslims aren’t all terrorists? Start making a point of representing them more positively in oh, I don’t know, everything?

FAIR POINT

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shakespurcey

Broooo yesssss

Source: vox.com
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