I belong in Narnia

really wanna live in a peaceful seaside ghibli town with ambiguous european architecture and bakeries and maybe a field right outside of town where i can have picnics with the love of my life tbh

have i ever told y’all about the greatest moment of my academic career

i was a freshman in college and i had this history teacher who was ~edgy~ and his hotness level on ratemyprofessor was off the charts and he was the first teacher i ever heard use the word “fuck.” anyway he would do this thing every so often where we’d have a “quiz” and the first two questions were always really easy and the last one was hard - they were all similar questions, and the point was to show what you learn about history and what you don’t. 

so one day he’s like okay kids time for a quiz and the first question was who killed abraham lincoln. the second question was who killed JFK. third question was who killed william mckinley. 

we all take a few minutes and write down our answers, and then the teacher asks the questions again so we can shout out the answers. everybody answered the first two with really no problem.

now, keep in mind that this class was at 9 a.m. and i was exhausted All The Time during my freshman year of college so i sat in the back in my sweats and never said a word and the teacher definitely had no clue who i was. 

so you can imagine his surprise when he asked the class who shot william mckinley and without missing a beat i said, “czolgosz,” pronounced correctly and everything. 

my teacher froze and in a very stern voice asked, “what was that? what did someone just say?”

i repeated: czolgosz.

my teacher: “who said that?”

i raised my hand, and my super cool history teacher glared at me. he then asked me how the hell i knew the answer. he said that in the TWENTY YEARS he’d been teaching this stupid class, nobody, not A SINGLE PERSON, had ever known the answer to that question.

i then had to quietly explain to a room full of people that there’s a musical called assassins and there’s a song about czolgosz shooting william mckinley at the great pan american exposition in buffaloooooooo (in buffaloooooooo)

The arts are important.

I shocked a teacher once because I could recite the preamble to the US Constitution (got bonus points to), She asked why I’d taken it upon myself to memorize it. I had to explain it was in a School House Rock song….

We use that School House Rock song with 5th graders.

I love the stars

The moonlight shows us for what we really are. We are not among the living and so we cannot die. But, neither are we dead. For too long I’ve been parched of thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I’ve been starvin’ to death, and haven’t died. I feel nothing, not the wind on my face, nor the spray of the sea… Nor the warmth of a woman’s flesh. You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You’re in one! Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) dir. Gore Verbinski

Exploring the Scottish Highlands

watschinger_lukas

things are hard right now for Jewish people all over the world– if your synagogue has a donation page link it on this post and i’ll spread it around. 

to start: here is the official gofundme to help the Tree of Life synagogue pay for building damage and help the people effected.

my synagogue is doing some really great accessibility and inclusivity work right now and works with a lot of local charities–you can donate to them here

period dramas to watch on Halloween (requested by @lizzieborednow)

Bold of you to assume there will be icebergs by 2022

A Christmas Carol is so wild to me because it takes not one, not two, but like four fucking ghosts to convince this dude not to be the biggest douche in the universe. Like, four fucking ghosts came back from the dead, rose from the Goddamn grave to be like, “I came back from the dead because you need to quit your shit.” Fuck. How big of an asshole do you have to be to have four fucking ghosts tell you to stop?

Have you ever met a rich capitalist

Also, one of those ghosts was a rich capitalist douche. He needed to reform Scrooge to work off his own sentence, didn’t he?

Marley’s ghost basically told Scrooge that if he kept being a greedy douchebag he would go to hell and Scrooge still needed convincing and that honestly is 100% believable to me

That an old rich white guy being told “Your going to hell unless you help the poor” would respond by going “I still kind of want to NOT help the poor tho?”

Charlie Dickens knew what was up.

Dickens had to work in a factory hos entire childhood. His father was thrown in a debtor’s prison. Thats why all his stories are about rich fucks getting owned.

The thing I love about A Christmas Carol is that at the time he wrote it, Christmas, as a holiday, was on par with our Arbor Day. And Scrooge held the Majority Opinion. 

 Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.

So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family.  And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it.  And gave it to friends.

Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.

That, my friends, is the power of a well written ghost story.

I just looked up this to see if this was true and it is!

The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’

He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.

A Christmas Carol is literally a leftist/socialist story about not being a dickwad to your employees because they’re human too, your ‘fellow man’

I WOULD PAY TEN TIMES AS MUCH FOR CHOCOLATE IF IT MEANT REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF SLAVES IN THE WORLD? HOW IS THIS ANY KIND OF PROBLEM. 

good news, you can! the company’s called Tony’s Chocolonely and their entire purpose is to make slave-free chocolate and reform the chocolate industry.

https://tonyschocolonely.com/us/en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony%27s_Chocolonely

Whole Foods carries it. If you don’t want to support an Amazon-owned company, World Market carries it. You can also buy it directly from the company. 

It’s the best chocolate I’ve ever had and it’s 100% slave free. Tony’s Chocolonely works really hard to push for transparency within the chocolate industry and actually has and is following an action plan to eliminate slavery within cocoa production. They’re good people who make good chocolate.

A list of slavery-free chocolate companies:

As a certified Chocolate Snob™, I HIGHLY recommend Aldi/Trader Joe’s (they’re owned by the same company) for chocolate. It’s cheap and great quality for the price, and almost all of it is Fair Trade and/or UTZ certified. TJ’s dark chocolates are a little more expensive but also a little higher quality than Aldi’s, I’d say, but Aldi beats a lot of more expensive stuff (such as Nestle that’s for sure). And TJ’s cocoa powder is noticeably tastier than the Kroger store brand for the same (or lower) price!

When the whole party is down but your bard is up

I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it’s white, it’s snow-white.

It’s really depressing how Labor Day has gone from “give laborers a day off” to “give white collar office workers and executives a day off but make retail laborers work so that executives can get a latte on their day off”

Nobody is making anyone work. If you don’t want to work on that day, don’t.

Labor Day was a “blackout” day at my job, meaning you couldn’t request off and if you called out you’d get a write up or even potentially fired. Gtfo of here with that weak “you don’t have to work if you don’t want to” bullshit.

Dear Dawsey, Amelia, Isola, Eben, Eli and Kit, please forgive me. That’s first. I hope you will forgive me breaking the promise I made not to write about your Society. We had a trust I am profoundly sorry to have betrayed. Secondly, know that this manuscript is yours alone to do with what you will. I will not publish it. That’s not why I wrote it. “Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, seeking to find the old familiar faces,” Charles Lamb wrote. Without knowing it, I feel I have been searching for the old familiar faces for many years now, and can’t quite account for why I recognise these as yours. But I do. Do you suppose it’s possible for us to already belong to someone before we’ve met them? If so, I belong to you, or you to me, or me simply to the spirit I found among you on Guernsey. That is as good a definition of family as any I know. Thank you for sharing the story of your family with me. And for sharing Elizabeth. Though I did not get to meet her myself, I feel keenly how her life has changed the arc of my own forever, in ways I am only just beginning to discover. I wish you all peace, and hope that if books do have the power to bring people together, this one may work its magic. 

                                                                                            Love, Juliet