Latest Posts by yuunfi - Page 4
‘To those who fell martyrs for the sake of the land of sad oranges, and to those are yet to fall’
Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian writer and member of the PFLP.
Israel assassinated him along with his niece in a car explosion in Beirut on July 8, 1972. They had to collect his body parts off trees. His wrist was found on top of a building with his hand watch still ticking.
what I read
Here’s what I’ve been reading (and also thinking about) these past couple weeks
Friendship is not a pale imitation of sexual romance. It is a romance unto itself: The art of loving and losing female friends
“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves,” from Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison– this made me immediately want to read her similarly titled essay collection because holy !!! shit !!
Ever read a book you’re indifferent to and then read a review of that book and it’s everything? Everything that appeals to you, makes sense to you, draws you in? This one talking about Normal People, drawing a parallel to (my favourite) Jane Austen and the ordinary, intimacies of romance is it.
“Once you reduce all living beings to the equivalent of market actors, rational calculating machines trying to propagate their genetic code, you accept that not only the cells that make up our bodies, but whatever beings are our immediate ancestors, lacked anything even remotely like self-consciousness, freedom, or moral life—which makes it hard to understand how or why consciousness (a mind, a soul) could ever have evolved in the first place,” from David Graeber’s what’s the point if we can’t have fun?
The rise of therapy-speak: how a language got off the couch and into the world
I tried watching Pretend It’s a City (mostly out of my love for Scorsese) but reader, I couldn’t do it. I left it mid series and I don’t plan on going back to it. So here’s a review of Pretend It’s a City that doesn’t entirely get my feelings on it but one I can definitely get behind
“The lasting effects on suicide rates, depression and anxiety are still being measured, but in interviews, a dozen mental health experts in Europe painted a grim picture of a crisis that they say should be treated as seriously as containing the virus.” Young people’s despair deepens as covid-19 crisis drags on
“All of a sudden two decades have passed and you still have not kissed anyone with tongue, or kissed anyone at all for that matter, or had a 3 AM conversation with someone who would rather look into your eyes for ten minutes straight than talk. You have never worn a lover’s sweater or “forgotten” it at home in your bedroom just so you would have an excuse to see them again. You have never even stood face-to-face with someone who makes your hands shake so hard it feels like they’re both having a separate anxiety attack. This causes you much guilt and self-blame and sadness but above all, an overwhelming curiosity. Are you really that ugly, that unwanted, that uninteresting, that boring, that no one, absolutely no one, has ever looked at you like the only thing on earth? The answer is no. The better answer is that someone out there, somewhere in the world, is “wondering what it’s like to meet someone like you,” and they have two decades worth of love stored in their veins like a shoot-‘em-up drug, and they’re just about ready to inject it into someone else’s bloodstream. All you have to do is roll up your sleeves and wait for it to happen. At times you felt so lonely you could stand at the edge of a cliff with nothing beneath you but air and grass and a long, long way down, and you’d still feel emptier than that canyon itself. Maybe you even danced with yourself alone in your room a few times, arms outstretched around a ghost, pretending someone else’s hands were on your waist, someone else’s eyes boring into yours. Or maybe you fell temporarily in love with strangers on public transportation, fell in love with anybody who so much as accidentally brushed your hand on the way past. For you, falling in love with dozens of people a day was a coping mechanism for not having anyone to love you in return. But people are not eggs and falling in love with a dozen of them does not mean your shell will remain uncracked. One day you’re going to hit the point where you’re so desperate for human contact that you’re going to snap in half and all your love will bleed out like egg yolk. But someone out there is eating a bowl of Ramen noodles right now, or putting on slippers, or settling into bed. They are doing all the normal things that you’ve done in your own life. They are just like you. They have cellulite and extra fat in all the wrong places and goals and fears and doubts and bad handwriting. The truth is that they are just like you, and being just like you, they’re looking for a lover too. They’re what you might call a soulmate. They think they’re all alone in feeling the way they do, but you’re really both two halves of a whole. And one day you’ll meet them, bump into them on the street, and your two halves will be put together, and you’ll make one.”
— Writings For Winter - For Twenty Year-Olds who have never been loved (via beepboopboopbeep)
i don’t know how to say these things in a nice way because my nerves have been fried for quite some time and i’m basically running on empty right now but i wanted to write about anti-asian sentiment, and more specifically, how people can address it.
there are a lot of posts with a lot of notes going around coming from very well-meaning people about how we can combat anti-asian sentiment by fighting cultural appropriation or stopping insults about food and whatnot, and i understand the impulse, but the fact is this: anti-asian sentiment is rooted in white supremacy, in colonialism, and in imperialism, and those things cannot be stopped by simply teaching people to say our names correctly.
if you want to end anti-asian sentiment, we must end white supremacy and imperialism. if you want to end white supremacy and imperialism, you must learn about the histories of white supremacy and imperialism— not only in asia, but across the world. it is crucial that we, as asians, unite ourselves with other colonized people to fight these systems. i invite others to move past the badge of allyship and truly learn what it means to commit yourself to the fight against white supremacy and imperialism, and then do it.
now, more specifically: when we think about the 8 people who were killed in atlanta this week, we understand that they were targeted because of their asianness, yes, even knowing that all who died were not asian— but they were targeted also because of their class, the line of work they were in, their migration status, their gender. the women who were murdered were at particular risk because they were working-class migrant women who worked in a massage parlor, and who may have been s*x w*rk*rs. this is absolutely crucial to understand! you cannot understand their deaths as being separate from war crimes committed by the united states in vietnam, or from the sex tourism industry in southeast asia.
even when we think about the spate of attacks on asians on the street, or at the train station, or on public transit, who is being targeted? the majority of these attacks are on working-class, low-income migrant elders. there are other attacks, still, that i have heard that have targeted asian women specifically. these, too, are acts of violence tied to white supremacy and imperialism. so understanding this– if a white man approaches me, or my sister, or my migrant neighbors with intent to harm us, what good does it do if he is educated about how to pronounce my name, or if he knows how to use chopsticks respectfully?
these are just some thoughts i am having that i think are missing from the conversation, at least on this website. thank you for reading if you have gotten this far. i hope this makes sense. i truly pray for the downfall of imperialism every single day.
if you are looking for places to learn more, or to donate, please check out the following organizations. i am in new york, so some of these orgs will be local to me, but i have tried to include national orgs i know of that are doing good work. thank you.
Nodutdol – donation link for NYC-based community organization of Koreans in the US against war and militarism
Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) – donation link for NYC-based org of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean working class people fighting for economic justice
BAYAN USA – USA-based alliance of grassroots organizations working towards national democracy in the Philippines. there is a donation link on their website. this is the overseas chapter– the main organization is in the Philippines.
Red Canary Song – donation link for US-based grassroots collective of Asian migrant s/x w/rk/rs
Butterfly – donation link for Toronto-based Asian and migrant s/x w/rk/rs network
Atlanta-area spa shootings fundraisers – GoFundMe donation links for families affected by the Mar 16 murders
I love characters that are completely harmless until they finally unleash their power and then they’re TERRIFYING
🍯🐝 1. mary oliver, devotions: softest of mornings / 2. ponyo (2008) / 3. vanessa angelica villarreal, a field of onions: brown study / 4. only yesterday (1991) / 5. federico garcía lorca, new heart / 6. @heartcountry, the honey running down my arm / 7. red honey as a result of bees feasting on cherries / 8. nikos kazantzakis, report to greco / 9. by nur_light / 10. @heartcountry, the things that don’t rot
lately i’ve been having emotions about the sad plant boy again, so i made this
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Leaves From the Vine (Remake)
Produced by Chongthenomad
I decided to do a song a bit similar to what I did with ‘When Avatars Fall in Love’… After listening to some of the old themes from the original show, I decided to re-make ‘Leaves From the Vine’. Which as most of you know, is the song Iroh sings on his deceased son’s birthday.
Hope you like it~
can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
But man.
That stuff is scary.
they both have no sense of direction…. it was fate
You would not believe your flies if ten million fire eyes lit up the world as I feel asleels.
Cuz they’d fill they fill the open eyes and leave sockhops everywhere you’d think me rude but I would just stand and
dance.
I’d like to make myself a fly. Planet eeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarth Sloooooooooowlyyyylle.
It’s hard to say that I’d rather Seal the deal when I’m a 𝕤𝕟𝕒𝕚𝕝. Cuz everything is never as it meeeeeeeeeeeeeeemmmmmmees.
Cuz I get a thousand bugs from ten thousand lightning hugs as they try to teach me how to fuck.
a fox trot above my hugs a sockhop beneath my 𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖘 the disco bug is just hanging by a thread
i really can't stand this anymore oh my god
so i have made a few posts talking about this, but my mom is Making Ultimatiums that are going to fuck me over financially just for the hell of it. i am currently unemployed, receiving no more benefits, and i have absolutely no savings. at this point i have a negative balance on my bank account and i have nothing much i can do about it. i am a trans man with adhd, ptsd, and severe depression so it has become inhospitable in my current living environment, and i need to move, except i currently live in one of the most expensive places in the US and i don't know how to drive. basically, i need to buy a bike, get a plane ticket, and find a job. so this is a mutual aid request but also like. if any of you know of any trans people who know of any trans safe living areas that are not wildly expensive, please message me!
anyway i have talked for too long, here is my info
cash.app: $luvlandfrog
paypal.me: /ezrabanksy
Alexander McQueen Fall 2019 RTW
winter dates
Some warm poetry, for cold evenings:
Molly Fisk, “Winter Sun” (We can make do with so little / just the hint of warmth, the slanted light.)
Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things” (It is a kind of love, is it not? / how the cup holds the tea.)
Barbara Ras, “Bite Every Sorrow” (You can speak a foreign language, sometimes / and it can mean something.)
Jack Gilbert, “Failing and Flying” (Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.)
Lisel Mueller, “Things” (Even what was beyond us / was recast in our image; / we gave the country a heart, / the storm an eye)
Rabindranath Tagore, “On the Seashore” (The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach / On the seashore of endless worlds children meet)
John O’Donohue, “Matins” (May I live this day / Compassionate of heart / Gentle in word / Courageous in thought)
Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm” (The summer night is like a perfection of thought. / The house was quiet because it had to be)
Brian Patten, “Inessential Things” (Cats remember what is essential of days)
Emily Dickinson, “Simplicity” (How happy is the little stone / that rambles in the road, alone)
Yi Lu, “Valley’s Green” (flowers like tiny saucers — little bowls — little cups / filled to the brim with their own colors)
Jacques Prévert, “How to Paint a Bird’s Portrait” (When the bird comes / if it comes / observe the most profound silence)
Archibald MacLeish, “Eleven” (Happy as though he had no name, as though / He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem, / Like a root growing…)
Denise Levertov, “A Woman Alone” (Then / self-pity dries up, a joy / untainted by guilt lifts her. / She has fears, but not about loneliness)
Richard Brautigan, “Your Catfish Friend” (I’d love you and be your catfish / friend and drive such lonely / thoughts from your mind)
Linda Gregg, “The Letter” (I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking / good care of myself)
Andrew Lang, “Ballade of True Wisdom” (And I’d leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, / For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers)
Ada Limón, “The Raincoat” (my whole life I’ve been under her / raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel / that I never got wet.)
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Just” (These people, unaware, are saving the world)
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” (I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.)
when your cat licks his paw…then rubs his head with the paw… wow….that’s his shmapoo and conditioner…..
hey i made a quiz for which hq school you’d attend. u can take it if u want!!