no offense but! i wish american students would stop seeing foreign language classes as just an academic requirement but an opportunity to learn part of another culture!
I wish language education in english-speaking countries actually seemed to care about teaching us about another culture and learning a language for reasons other that it being useful, rather than just teaching us to pass an exam
I wish learning a second language was mandatory in the US and was taught to us at an early age when we are still developing language skills and comprehension so that its not so difficult to learn other language at a high school level.
i’ve been thinking about all those posts about “we need female heroes who do girly things”/”why is the female hero always such a tomboy” and then the response posts that are like “uhhh actually we don’t really have any really masculine female heroes either” so i was trying to figure it out—what do we have, exactly?
and really what we get is women who eschew “girly” things while still managing to look like society’s ideal woman. they would never touch eyeliner (they’re too busy with Important Things), but their eyeliner is immaculate. they have a huge, varied wardrobe, but wouldn’t be caught dead actually shopping for clothes. and it reminds me of the expectation that women must be effortlessly beautiful. don’t wear makeup or you’ll seem self-absorbed—but god forbid you look like you’re not wearing makeup. it’s interesting to me, that the impossibilities imposed on female characters are the same ones imposed on real women.
A lesbian couple gets a shocking surprise one day when God (played by Laverne Cox) shows up at their door. Upset at how humans had turned her message of love and acceptance into a message of hate and discrimination, she decides it’s time to send Jesus back to earth and wants the lesbian couple to raise Jesus. Hilarity ensues.
No need for homophobic or transphobic jokes when you can have exchanges like “Ma’am your son turned the water fountain into wine again and got all the other students drunk” “Jesus Christ.” “….. I’m not sure if that’s suppose to be you responding to me or you requesting to speak to him.”
Also jokes about infinity-“Ask your mom”.
Kid: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s place?”
Mom #1: “Oh, I don’t know, sweetie. Ask your mom.”
Kid: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s?”
Mom #2: “I don’t know, have you asked your mom already?”
Kid praying: “Mom, can I sleep over at John’s place?”
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.