Love is real, etc., etc.

The only good hetero love out there

i honestly wanted to die last night but that’s also what pence wants and i am, if nothing else, a creature fueled by spite.

Planned Parenthood has been here for 100 years, and one thing is clear: We will never back down and we will never stop fighting to ensure that Planned Parenthood patients have access to the care they need and for the people who come from communities that need our continued support in this new reality.

Many of the people Planned Parenthood health centers serve may be concerned about their safety, and the safety of their families and friends. We will support our immigrant, Muslim, Black and Latinx colleagues, partners and patients in the face of threats made over the last several months.

Health care should not be political. Every morning, Planned Parenthood health center staff across the country wake up and open their doors, as they have this morning, to care for anyone who needs them, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, income, or country of origin. They will do so today, they will do so tomorrow, they will do so every day as they have for 100 years.

Men are fucking disgusting, part 2485726364784483762367472636474

What the ACTUAL fuck?

do…men understand that you cant just….buy birth control…in the store………….like condoms?????? you…cant really shop around…for birth control?????

Also you don’t like??? Take MORE??? Because you’re having a ton of sex??? Like you always take the same amount wtf

men are so fucking oblivious we need better sex ed

“Don’t know how to shop” I’m physically repelled omg

“a party favor” someone kick this man in the head

It’s odd because Hillary winning isn’t going be this huge gesture of feminism and female strength that we were made to believe growing up but at the same time if Hillary loses it’s going to be the biggest blow to feminism, women’s rights, and overall equality as it is basically our nation saying that a man with zero political experience is worth more than a woman with thirty years of it.

Dear Strange Man on the Train,

At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.

You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.

You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.

This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.

At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”

This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?

“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.

Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.

I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”

At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.

Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”

Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.

So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.

But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”

“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’

“Wow. Fine. Whatever. Fucking bitch,” he said.

Fucking creepers. May I ask how feminism or anything similar would actually have prevented this from happening? This ya already socially unacceptable.

Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.

Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.

So, yes, I believe more feminism would prevent sexist moments like this. Also, water is wet, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, and cheese is addictive.

REBLOGGING FOR THE FUCKING COMMENTARY

Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism (via queer-feminist-quotes)

Senator Elizabeth Warren on The Late Show, July 21, 2016

I would like her to rule these lands

Trevor Noah calls out Trump’s “locker room talk” for what it really is in brilliant segment

Common: Tiny Desk At The White House

Watch Common play 3 new songs (and an oldie) with Robert Glasper and Bilal in the @whitehouse library. 

if you’re in america and you’re eligible to vote…… i’m begging you to vote for hillary like literally begging

I wouldn’t vote for either of them. They’re both keeping secrets and will both turn this country to absolute shit.

anyway vote for hillary instead of throwing your vote away

This is what gets me. The fact that for 90 minutes Hillary clearly showed how prepared she is to be president. How capable, knowledgeable, and cool-headed she is. She put forth actually solutions to problems that are inclusive and hopeful.

Donald Trump stood there for 90 minutes and yelled belligerently into his microphone. Twenty minutes into the debate his sentences were incoherent and, as he is so skilled at doing, he managed to never actually answer the questions thrown his way, unless he was called out on it and given even more time to actually respond with something relevant to the topic at hand.

And yet here we are. The debate is over, Hillary has clearly won and shown the American people want an actual President should look like, and people still aren’t convinced. Hillary has been at this job for THIRTY YEARS. And yet, she still suffers from this ‘likability’ thing thanks to the GOP propaganda that has been smearing her name since the beginning of her career.

“But she’s a liar!” “She’s hiding something!” “She’s keeping secrets!”

Bullshit. Hillary Clinton is a high-ranking government official. Of fucking course she’s keeping secrets, that’s her damn job. If we knew ever last thing that ever went down in the State Department, we’d all shit ourselves. Those are just your own shitty excuses for not voting for her because she wasn’t your first option in the primaries. What, exactly, do people think will happen if Hillary becomes President? What would be the terrible awful outcome of that? I have never actually heard, specifically, what she would do that would ruin our country beyond repair. We all know what Trump would do. It’s his fucking platform, he’s not trying to hide anything there. But no one can actually lay out specifics on what makes Hillary so scary, other than the fact that she’s overly qualified for the job she’s being interviewed for.

If you really feel so strongly about it, fine. Vote third party. But please, do yourself a favor. Actually fucking look at what Hillary and Trump are proposing for this nation. Really try to understand what exactly will happen if one of them gets elected. And then truly think about whether or not you could stomach looking the next generation in the eye if your third party vote gets Donald Trump elected President of the United States.

“This election draws into relief how women are penalized for not being perfect while men are rewarded for not being terrible.”

What Are Archives?

October is American Archives Month and, to celebrate, UNC Charlotte Special Collections and University Archives have a series of posts planned to raise public awareness about the importance of historic documents and records.

What Are Archives?

[National Archives building, Washington,DC,  2012 © Ctac [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]

In the course of daily life, individuals and organizations create and keep information about their personal and business activities. These records – and the places they are kept – are called “archives.” Archival records take many forms, including correspondence, diaries, financial and legal documents, photographs, and moving image and sound recordings. Archival formats can be varied, including digital formats like email, text messages, digital photographs, online calendars, and social media activity. There are many types of archives - those for different types of government records and those that contain the personal records of people and organizations. There are national archives, state archives, city archives, community archives, business archives, academic archives, church archives, and more.

[Mary and Harry L. Dalton Rare Book and Manuscript Reading Room, UNC Charlotte Atkins Library]

You likely have an archives in your home. It might be in a filing cabinet, a box in the basement, or a chest in the attic. It might be saved to floppy discs, burned to CDs, left on a digital camera, or stored on a hard drive. This is your personal archives: a collection of materials that record events from your personal or family history.

[Examples of archival storage, including acid-free folders and boxes, UNC Charlotte Special Collections and University Archives]

There are similarities between your personal archives and local, state, or national archives. All save items to serve as proof that an event occurred, to explain how something happened, or for financial or sentimental reasons. Both personal archives and larger archives save a variety of materials that can include letters, photographs, films, ephemera, databases, financial materials and more.

[Archivist (Adelaide Minogue) checking humidity stacks, August 12, 1942. US National Archives [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

Archivists are the professionals who identify, preserve, and provide access to these documents of lasting value. They work to ensure that  important records will be available for research by generations to come. To help preserve material, archivists in all types of repositories store archival  records in special housing and storage areas - acid-free folders within acid-free boxes that are placed in dark spaces with consistent temperature and humidity.

Sources:

Examples of archival storage facilities and spaces:

[A UNC Charlotte Special Collections and University Archives’ storage area]

[The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum interior with view of archival box storage, [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

[Server room at The National Archives (UK), 2011, By The National Archives (UK) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]

[Coal mine maps at the University of Pittsburgh, Barbara (WVS) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons]

[Mapleson cylinders in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, By Kosboot [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]

A great overview of archives and archivists, just in time for tomorrow’s #AskAnArchivist Day!

And here’s a more animated view of the @usnatarchives:

I want to cry but i have things to do

This speaks to me