Alana.
what a week huh?
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#space #moon #cosmos #natureWolf with a huge chum salmon that it caught in Fish Creek, SE Alaska
Photograph by Nancy Wagner
Paul Atreides. You are your father’s son. You are my son.
TIMOTHEE CHALAMET and REBECCA FERGUSON
DUNE 2021 | Denis Villeneuve
Admitting my star sign was a mistake.
“Oh, so that’s why you are they way you are. You’re two fire signs ruled over by water!”
Pretty sure it’s just the ADHD.
A fun thing to do whenever someone asks you your sign is to lie about your birthday. It still means listening to them attempt to explain your entire personality badly for a few minutes, but then you can undercut them as soon as it gets too annoying.
So, for a while I was doing mailroom/account followup work for a nonprofit, and on my firt day there, one of the ladies, “Debbie” asked me when my Birthday was. Assuming she was planning office Birthday parties, I told her.
The next day she came in with my ENTIRE star chart with personality tropes, life advice, predicitons for my future and so on. Now, I don’t go in for Astrology but I can tell when someone is making a well-meaning gesture and I can say “Thank you” and shut up.
Especially because I told her the Wrong Birthday.
See, my birthday is in the middle of a cluster of a whole bunch of family birthdays and growing up I used to have to share my Birthday with my older cousins and while that’s not really a big deal (even fun if you’re older) it kinda sucks when you’re five and none of your cousins share your interests.
So mom made a deal with me: We’d celebrate my “Un-Birthday” in January, when nobody else in the family has a birthday or anything else, and the “real” birthday would be my Cousin’s. I got my own birthday and they got a second party and it was fun.
As I got older, I just started using my Un-Birthday for everything except paperwork, becuase January is boring and bereft of holidays except the one that’s really part of Xmas these days. On paperwork, I put my real one, but I’ve been celebrating my birthday in the wrong month for over 25 years now, and didn’t think about it when she asked, and told her my Un-Birthday.
And for a few weeks everything was fine.
But Debbie had a RIVAL.
Another woman in the office “Sharon” was also big into Astrology and was convinced Debbie was Doing It Wrong, so when she was going over payroll, she saw my Legal Birthday, realized Debbie had filled out the chart wrong, and then proceded to drag Debbie on the company facebook group, and a bunch of astrology groups they were both in.
I found out when I came in three days later from a long weekend and Debbie burst into tears and sobbed “HOW COULD YOU LIE TO MEEEEEE???”
After an extremely garbled recounting by our coworkers, a talk with my manager about “Hey yeah I don’t think it’s Legal for Sharon to take my name and date of birth from Payroll and put it all over facebook?”, the manager had a talk about “I know you are all over 50 but this is NOT WHAT THE COMPANY FACEBOOK IS FOR”, Sharon was ‘removed from the premesis’ and I finally got to sit down with Debbie.
I explained the slip-up and how I sort of have two birthdays and think of the January Birthday is my “Real” one.
Debie looked up from where she’d been sobbing into her tissue all morning, realization dawning on her less like the illumination of the sun and more like a baby sea turtle headed in the wrong direction because of light Pollution.
“Oh!” She said “You’re TRANS-ZODIAC! You might have been born as an Aries, but you’re really a Capricorn!”
As someone who’s been hit by a minivan and gotten a minor skull fracture from it, I’m pretty sure hearing that sentence gave me more brain damage.
“Sure Debbie.”
You know, I had no idea where this ride was going to take us, but of all the outcomes I expected, that was not it.
What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck.
Listen. I think I just unlocked a new emotion.
It is entirely unfair that cleaning is an act that must be repeated, I am not a god so why should I be expected to fight against entropy
This is Sarah Grimké.

She was born to a rich plantation family in the American South during the time of slavery. She owned a slave, Hetty, a girl her parents gave her when she was a child. She was absolutely the sort of person whose racism you could justify as being ‘of her time’ and ‘just the way she was raised’.
And she cited the injustices she saw growing up on the plantation as the motivation for her becoming an abolitionist as an adult.
When she was a kid, she tried to give bible lessons to the slaves on her Dad’s plantation, and taught her own slave to read and write. As an adult, she and her sister campaigned for the end of slavery. When she found out that one of her brothers had raped one of his own slaves and gotten her pregnant three times, she welcomed her nephews into the family and paid for education for the two that wanted it.
This was a woman who was raised in a culture of slavery, looked around her as a child and said “hey, wait a minute, we’re all assholes!” and spent the rest of her life trying to put things right.
It absolutely was a choice.
This is something I’ve been forced to learn in the past two years. The world around me is turning into something I was raised to believe could only happen in history books, or maybe in other parts of the world that sort of belonged in history books.
The more I see this happening–and the more I learn about the past and how hard people did fight to stop Hitler from initially rising to power, or to point out the humanity of slaves–the more apparent it becomes that we have always had these choices, and they’ve always been the same.
And we’re always going to have genuinely appealing opportunities to make the worst possible choices again, no matter how much more modern the world appears.
George Washington owned slaves right? Most of the founding fathers did, and in grade school, to smooth over that abuse of humanity by an American hero, we as children were told “Yes, George Washington did own slaves but he freed them when he died.” And you infer that he didn’t like slavery but it was an economic necessity.
And then you’re in your mid twenties watching a food show on Netflix and you learn that because Pennsylvania was a Quaker colony, they led the nation in emancipation and if an enslaved person was in Philadelphia for more than six months, they automatically became freed. And the young nation’s early capital was in Philadelphia, where Washington brought his household of enslaved people with him. And he took them back to Virginia every five months for a time so as to start that clock over and keep them enslaved.
There’s a trend with historians to want so badly to maintain the prestige of George Washington and an exceptional and morally pristine figure. And true, there are many instances in his writing where he sounds like his opinion on slavery as an institution is turning and that he knew slavery was wrong. But his actions. He literally had to do absolutely nothing to free his household staff, and took great pains to keep them enslaved.
It’s important to remember that too. That there were people in positions of enormous power, who know what they’re doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway.
Do not let anyone tell you his teeth were made of wood.