Moshpit of Monsterous Mobsters

magicalnaturetour:

Yosemite Valley at Night - The mist on the valley floor reflects car lights driving through. Yosemite National Park, USA. (Phil Hawkins/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest) via Big Picture

(via thebiobabe)

nodaybuttodaytodefygravity:

greatleapingocelots:

Ryan and Colin throughout the years.

(via watson-a-name)

thatcerealkiller:

Tmi Roth

(via blossomcrown)

cleverblondeinaunionjack:

#i like how Eve is like ‘oh god no i don’t like this question #and john is like ‘my time has come’

(via blossomcrown)

(Source: duh-jango, via thatcerealkiller)

A Weird Memory that Leaps

I think I have PTSD for basically everything that ever went wrong in my life.  Catshit reminds me of the trailer where the infant cousin died of neglect.  Cereal makes me nauseous - I was seven when we ate nothing but for a week straight.  Springtime reminds me of schooldays after winter.  Of energetic crowds and that perfume/makeup smell teenage girls cloud themselves in.

I remember being terrorized in an office by three fully grown men and one sheepish classmate (who, even though he was the antagonist, could tell I got a raw deal and washed his hands of the incident later on).  Highschool.  Made worse by incompetent leadership and cold-war-ish paranoia.  You get blacklisted as a teenager, there’s still hope.  They don’t tell you that, though.

They thought I was violent.

I had a report sheet for ‘being involved in’ certain disturbances in hallways and the sprawling yet ever-crowded cafeteria.  I put down a few fights (that had nothing to do with me), mostly by joint manipulation and limb restraint techniques my dad taught me for self-defense.  It sounds like bragging because it is.  One kid had a knife.  I wasn’t going to let anybody nearby get hurt because he was hormonal or high or having a really bad day or whatever. (Turned out he was high!  Meth: never once.)

So, my name was on this officially typed out list, like a security log or something, and they made a point to show it to me without giving me the chance to submit a written statement, to protest, to even explain.  To call up the teachers and lunchroom attendants who had been involved, who warned me not to DO stuff like that because it was ‘a liability to the school’.  Without thanks, because the last thing teachers need in a large school is a fight to involve *more* people - something I totally disregarded through my entire school career to continue to stop the violence a-s-a-fucking-p.

I remember the incident vividly, though.  The one that got me shoved into this tiny office with its too-large occupants, among them a security guard who made a point to pull back his jacket and reveal the gun he carried.  I was growing into kind of a gentle person at that point in my life, and this is probably what made me a target for bullying.  There was a classmate who, no matter how direly I told him I did not appreciate the sexual questions and blatant verbal harassment, insisted on turning his attentions then to the friend behind me, to repeat the same only as a second-hand talking about me.

Having taken the teacher (not an actual teacher!  Just some guy the school hired because he knew the Principal, who was fired the next year after an ‘investigation’) aside to voice my complaints THREE SEPARATE TIMES over the course of a week, I was about fed up.

When reported to higher authorities, the teacher liedabout my communication attempts, or provided the excuse that he was ‘distracted’, even though I asked him before and after class, in the hallway, away from noise, to please DO SOMETHING with the authority granted him to relieve my daily torment.  The term ‘sexual harassment’ made him visibly uncomfortable, and he often brushed my complaints aside.

The student who was harassing me?  His seating arrangement was never moved, as requested twice.  He was ‘told to leave me alone’, once, maybe?  And it was phrased ‘if you like her, stop picking on her.  ask her out instead’, much to the amusement of the rest of the class.

I do have a problem, see.  But it’s not violence.

I’m cute.

I’m a cute girl. 

I wasn’t allowed to be angry.  When I found out the teacher wasn’t even certified (by his own admission, to the entire class), I was angry.  I asked the teacher how he got his job if he didn’t have a degree, and he told us about the principal and himself.  I wrote a letter to the principal, explaining the importance of listening to dogs who bark, because it’s the silent ones that will actually bite you.  This is an allegory any country kid knows - the barking ones are trying to communicate their agitation.  The ones that want to bite you will just up and bite you, because their intent is harm and not communication.

My intent was communication, and the teacher wasn’t listening to me, and I was frankly ready to put my antagonist to the floor and twist his arm (literally) to leave me alone.  The so-called teacher wasn’t going to intervene, and that was my last option really.

In the letter, I was drawing the line between teacher-student communication and how tragedies like Columbine happen because teenagers are volatile when abused, like dogs.  Well.  This was the early 2000’s.  Way too soon to be throwing the ‘C’ word around.  The principal was not a country kid, and I — ahaha, I recall a counselor escorting me from her office only for the principal to come dashing out of his office (having been urged to read the letter by the counselor) to look both ways down the hall like a scared cartoon, and dash back into his office to lock himself in until the guards could come.

Fear is… there is no way to explain it.  The pit in my stomach when I realized that people will read selectively and focus on the keywords that alarm them the most, rather than take an open discourse with a bullied teen who won’t stand for that passive ‘be a nice cute girl and just accept the sexual advances’ bullshit.

So they stuffed me in an office with three grown men who intimidated me, threatened to with-hold my diploma if I ‘couldn’t act right’, and waved the importance of documenting EVERYTHING in writing rather than by hearsay.  I asked if the teacher’s certificate was documented by hearsay, by this time snotting up in rage and terror, and the men looked stunned.  I said I’d tell my mother the school was letting us alone with some DUDE who was just a buddy of the principal’s not actually TEACHING us anything (we watched Tom Hanks films every. single. day. in that class).

Voice cracking, actually drawing strength from the fact that my antagonist was just as bewildered by all this bullshit as I was (he actually did like me, I mean, awful way of showing it) — I told these three fully grown men that I would take this shit to the newspapers unless they gave me back the letter I’d written and took my name from that bullshit list.

That day, I wasn’t just a cute girl barred from her dignity and punished for her misguided valor.

That day, I was a goddamn lumberjack with solid oak cajones. 

Other teenagers?  Not so lucky to be secret hulk-lumberjacks who know self-defense.  I was scared, the principal was scared, the antagonist was scared, even the false teacher was scared enough to lie outright to save his job.  The three grown men in that office weren’t scared.  They were bullying a small teenaged girl into keeping quiet.

I guess there’s not really any point to this.  I remember my past very vividly, down to what the carpet in the office made the air smell like, and the fact that the dude behind the desk had too much cologne while the one nearest me too much b.o.  The look on the antagonist’s lightly pimpled face, equal parts sheepish triumph and then very quickly alarm and shame.

I had to tell him, in front of those people, that it would have come to a fight between us had be continued to disrespect me.  I had to admit that his words made me feel objectified and attacked, and that is what sexual harassment is, and I had to repeat all this with a highschool vocabulary because this kid did not know what ‘objectified’ meant. 

So, points against me?  I broke up fights.  I was cute.  I was intelligent.  I wrote letters of complaint using complicated allegory.  Victimized for being awesome, basically.

Points for me?  I knew what blackmail was.  (Jsyk, I hate subterfuge.) 

I signed a written agreement to with-hold certain information from the press (which the counselor co-signed and faxed to my mother) until a year from then, by which time the state could find a suitable replacement for the teacher AND the principal.  Nowadays that school is better run, better funded, but the misanthropic teen in me still suspects there is bullying and subversion and that everything within those newly tiled halls is still rife with the stink of fear.

Oppression doesn’t wash out, after all, and you can’t paint over patriarchy. 

(via sugoi-as-hell)

obscuritywolschick:

Spectrum

(Source: gvstradamvs, via fuck-yeah-monstrous-men)

(Source: adammuto, via foulnorhetoric)

Pulp Fiction trivia: Speculation abounds as to the nature of the mysterious glowing contents of the case:

• Could it be Elvis’s gold suit, seen worn by Val Kilmer (as Elvis) in True Romance?
• The most persistent theory (most usually attributed to a friend of a friend who saw it posted on a message board by someone whose brother had read a report of a radio interview with Tarantino himself) is that it is Marcellus Wallace’s soul. The story goes that when the Devil takes a person’s soul, it is removed through the back of the head (this isn’t part of any known religion, but this is what the message board posters say). When we see the back of Marcellus’s head he has a Band-Aid covering the precise spot indicated by tradition for soul removal. Perhaps Marcellus sold his soul to the devil which would also explain why the combination to open the briefcase is 666.
• Quentin Tarantino has said that the band-aid on the back of Marsellus Wallace’s neck had nothing to do with an allusion to the Devil stealing Marsellus’s soul… but that the actor Ving Rhames had a scar on the back of his neck he wanted to cover up.
• Or could it be simply a 20-watt light bulb?
• According to Roger Avary, who co-wrote the script with Quentin Tarantino, the original plan was to have the briefcase contain diamonds. This seemed neither exciting nor original, so Avary and Tarantino decided to have the briefcase’s contents never appear on screen; this way each filmgoer could mentally “fill in the blank” with whatever struck his or her imagination as best fitting the description “so beautiful”. The orange light bulb (projecting shimmering light onto the actors’ faces) was a last-minute decision and added a completely unintended fantastic element.
• In a radio interview with ‘Howard Stern’ in late 2003, Quentin Tarantino was asked by a caller the contents of the briefcase, and he answered, “It’s whatever the viewer wants it to be.”

It’s the diamonds from the Reservoir Dogs heist, duh.

(via foulnorhetoric)

secretagentcarrot:

onlylolgifs:

I just realized that “lead” rhymes with “read”, but “lead” also rhymes with “read”. 

Pray for those who have to learn English as a second language amen

(Source: kterkper-sixty-six, via david-bowie-is-a-reservoir-dog)

meisterc:

THAT TRAILER REMINDED ME HOW MUCH I MISS DRAWING LOKI

(via mmmmmonster)

thatferrybroad:

wliabl:

Cleopatra’s Underwater Palace, Egypt 

I still don’t get why no one is LOSING THEIR FUCKING SHIT OVER THIS FIND

iT SURVIVED THE EARTHQUAKE THAT LEVELED THE REST OF THE CITY IN 365 A.D. 

CLEOPATRA’S FUCKING PALACE

WITH INTACT FUCKING STATUARY

NOT TO MENTION THE REST OF THE FUCKING ENTIRE GODDAMN ISLAND OF ANTIRRHODOS INCLUDING THE ANCIENT PORT OF ALEXANDRIA

AND THEY’RE GONNA BUILD A MOTHERFUCKING UNDERWATER MUSEUM

UNDERWATER. MUSEUM.

can I be a mermaid tour guide there or some shit, you don’t even have to pay me i will just live there forever oh my fucking god

(via mmmmmonster)