Life’s been kind of a mess recently. Between college, work, basketball, and the play my brain just hasn’t worked. I’ve been forgetful with my work, and my time management has been getting much worse. I’m not ready. I feel so behind, maybe it’s burning out. To be honest, I’m not really sure.
Is this what senioritis is?
Anyway, it’s not all bad, my team won our mock trial. All 3 charges were dismissed. I’ve been happier, better. College is keeping me anxious. I just hope it continues going good. Hopefully, it keeps getting better. I feel like I’ve been a little too busy, like am I really enjoying my last moments here?
yes
actually, I think that’s the only thing I am certain about. laughing with my friends going 20 mph down a dark road heads sticking out the top and screaming like we are going 70 mph. Or staying up till 2 in the morning bullying and gaslighting random kids on Roblox.
That’s what I’m going to remember when I leave, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Girlhood is so pure. It is the feeling of sitting in silence on your floor going through your camera picking what photos to post on Pinterest. It is the feeling of turning off auto-capitalization on your phone. Girlhood is beautiful. It is doing everything on the floor- homework, getting ready, even eating- rather than sitting on a chair. Somehow, the floor is more inviting. Girlhood is dying your hair blue with the help of all the friends you made in college, and it turns out terrible, but it was not really about the end product at all, just the experience. Girlhood is borrowing clothes and switching outfits with each other when one outfit feels better for that person’s vibe. It is friendships that consist of talking all night long or watching Gilmore Girls until someone ends up falling asleep. It is a universal experience that women of all ages experience. Nothing beats the feeling of tanning all day at the beach and then getting a nice cold treat after. Or the feeling of becoming friends with someone because they complimented your outfit. Girlhood is simple, but yet impactful. The debriefs, the coffee chats, and even the 3-5 pm naps, it is all part of girlhood. It is using the restroom together at a party and holding their hair back when they throw up. It is supporting them through everything and working together to write texts that will either damage you forever or get you to fall in love with them. It is painting your fingers dark cherry red and taking pictures of the sunset. Girlhood is getting a beverage at a cafe and always taking candid pictures of your friends. It is uploading photos from your digital camera at the end of the day and sending them to everyone, waiting excitedly to see their reaction. Girlhood is messy, it is painful, and it is colorful.
I’ve run and had a clothing brand in the past however this new one I just released I believe is something special. I started this idea in late October of last year. I knew that I wanted to branch out from my old brand and do something a little different but I didn’t know how. I wanted to achieve a new aesthetic and cater more to the punk style of fashion, and that’s when the name hit me, Disgusting. I loved it and began working and creating designs every day, Ever since then I’ve done a great job of marketing my T-shirts and hoodies and they’ve been getting a lot of love on social media. One day I got bored and had some shirts on deck so I said screw it and did a little surprise drop without any marketing or telling anyone that I was going to drop, within 4 days we had already sold over our expected amount which was 15 shirts. We ended up selling 33 and I know that isn’t a lot it’s pretty good for a first release. However, we didn’t even drop our real collection yet, I ended up setting the date to February 11th and just like that the day came I opened the site and orders began piling in. It was a wild feeling seeing that 1k in my Shopify store account, and it will be a wild feeling when I see 10k. I’m very excited about the future.
Throughout these last few weeks, I’ve been building a team of elite soccer players in a game called Fifa. How it works is you play games against other players with your team and as you win you complete challenges and win coins and packs. Packs hide players within them, and there are different ranks for players. For example, a really good player would be ranked gold, which is the best, followed that silver, and then the worst is bronze. This game translates to real life as well and tracks players’ stats if they are doing well throughout the season their rating will go up, however, if their skill has dropped then so will their rating on Fifa. A few of my favorite players that I have been seeking for a while are Brazilian legends such as Neymar, and Roberto Carlos. However, there has been a youngster taking the scene by storm, a young Ukrainian by the name of Mykhailo Mudryk who recently got signed by one of the most prestigious soccer clubs in the world Chelsea. I’ve been seeking his 90-rated card for a very long time.
I don’t like to be a car kid but man cars are awesome. Here are some I love:
e30, e36, e46 bmw 3 series
These three cars are just so pretty (the last one is my car, although admittedly I’d prefer a different one) the e30 is iconic and overdone these days but just such a nice boxy design with that little grill and the two lights. e36: cool and has a really nice interior plus a little more modern still with that retro boxy thing. e46: I love my car
1955-60 Mercedes Benz 300sl gullwing
I mean this is probably the best-looking car ever made.
Honda nsx 1991
Just look at those tail lights
Porsche safari 911
It’s an off-road 911. What’s not to love.
Lancia delta
Iconic in rally racing, similar to MKI gti but just super unique widebody on this car.
Porsche rwb
911 but like PHAT
1986 mr2
My dad had this car in 1986, it is so cool looking and has pop-up headlights and with the stock wing just is a very cool mid-engine Toyota
Detomaso Pantera GTS
He made a new one recently but those old ones are just so nice, really stunning from every angle.
Lowered Toyota hilux (1969) or Datsun
These trucks are so cute my old ceramics teacher had a Datsun in baby blue, awesome car
300sl, pc: i dont know ive had this photo on my computer a while
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, whose work, although initially rejected, pushed the art world to accept feminism and has defined feminist art to this day.
Judy Chicago was born in 1939 in Chicago (initially with the last name Cohen). She was raised in a wealthy Jewish family who supported her career in the arts, this support allowed her to begin pursuing art from the age of 5. As a result of this early start, each of Chicago’s later pieces is defined by her adept artist skills and technical feats. Being a woman in the art world hegemonized by men pushed her towards her radicalized artwork. In 1965, Chicago released a modern art piece of a series of rainbow beams leaning against a wall, when art critic Walter Hopps saw the piece he largely ignored it and talked to the other male artists in the room. Years after, Chicago and Hopps met again and he told her, that his ignorance was a result of surprise at the high level of her work. Sexism from the world and critics was and continues to be, the major inspiration for her work. The most famous of these pieces is “The Dinner Party”
In 1979 Chicago revealed an enormous project that covered over 1,100 square feet and marks her most influential piece. The piece consisted of a tile floor, three 48-foot-long tables which created the perimeter, and 39 ceramic plates which gave a spot to an influential woman in history. This piece required years of work to complete and the help of over 400 volunteers. In order to complete this feat, Chicago and her team threw, handbuilt, slab built, and slip-cast the pieces. They also employed painting, sewing, and building skills. Inscribed on the tile floor were the names of 999 influential women whose names were largely unknown or forgotten. The piece is both a respectful homage to the powerful women who came before her and a satirical understanding of the nonsensical notion of man’s power. Each of the 39 plates took a vulvaic form, this, although initially thought of as pornographic and unnecessary, defined the piece as a straightforward and “audacious” piece of art that holds a firm grip on what it means to be a feminist in art. The New York Times described the piece in 2018 writing on Judy Chicago as “a repository of women’s history” and remarked on the assumed humor of the piece had it been released in the modern world: “The audacity of “The Dinner Party,” its rhetorical energy, its humor (the vulva plates are, among other things, a play on what it might be like if women took as much pride in their anatomy as men did)”.
Despite its initial rejection from the art world Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” has been tremendously influential to art in its category and marked the first of its kind of feminist art piece. Chicago trailblazed as a leader in the largely male art world of the time and continued to this day as a radical artist and strong feminist. “The Dinner Party” is now a permanent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and continues to inspire the feminist movement and female artists and non-artist alike. Judy Chicago and “The Dinner Party” remain the unambiguous “Godmother” of feminism in the arts.
The recently revised Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests caused many arguments. Several famous male social media influencers posted comments against this revision which ignited more disputes than ever.
From my personal experience on the Chinese internet, especially an online social platform called Zhihu, the tension between feminists and anti-feminists has grown stronger and stronger in recent years. A weird phenomenon is you can find feminists and anti-feminists fighting in the comments of almost any social media post.
Many anti-feminists believe that the word feminism means privilege for women because it includes the word women. In other words, they think it means the feminists want to put women in a higher position than men. Because of these voices, some feminists choose to use the phrase equalism when referring to women’s rights.
I haven’t really been into Taylor Swift’s music since elementary school, but I really like the 10-minute version of All Too Well. Here are my favorite lyrics from it.
“Til we were dead and gone and buried Check the pulse and come back swearing it’s the same After three months in the grave”
Love the metaphor here. I feel like I’ve also been in a toxic, loveless relationship when I hear this lyric.
“You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath”
If your partner is trying to hide your relationship when you’ve told them you don’t want to, that’s a red flag. They’re definitely doing something shady if they’re completely against having a public relationship when you want one.
“And you call me up again just to break me like a promise So casually cruel in the name of being honest”
This lyric is really pretty. I love it. I don’t like people who say mean things and then try to excuse their words because they’re “just saying” or “just being honest.” Like, it’s not that hard to not be a jerk.
“You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine And that made me want to die”
This lyric definitely sums up the fundamental problem with Taylor’s relationship with the unnamed man (who is Jake Gyllenhaal). Taylor was only 20 when she started dating a 29-year-old. It might not seem like a big gap because they were both legal adults, but that’s the same age gap between a 16-year-old and a 25-year-old. That perspective makes the age gap clearly inappropriate. Also, Taylor was barely an adult. She had only been of age for two years, whereas Jake had been an adult for over ten years. She realizes later that he took advantage of her because she was young and is ashamed of it.
“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”
Here’s another lyric that points out the problem of their relationship. Her scarf reminds him of innocence because she was barely an adult when he started dating her. She was young and innocent, and she didn’t realize that their relationship was inappropriate until it was over. Jake went after her because she was young, pretty, and didn’t know any better.
“Wind in my hair, you were there You remember it all”
This lyric is a reprise of the end of the first chorus. Taylor changes the lyric from “I was there I remember it all.” to address Jake and say “you were there you remember it all.” It points out that Taylor wasn’t solely at fault for ending up in a bad relationship with someone too old for her. Jake was also there, and Jake knew exactly what he was doing. He remembers everything too, but he doesn’t have the same shame around the relationship that Taylor does. Taylor didn’t know that the relationship wasn’t okay, but Jake did and he pursued her anyways.
“And I was never good at telling jokes, but the punch line goes I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age”
I love the blatant call-out. It’s also completely accurate. Jake’s current girlfriend, Jeanne Cadieu, is 25 years old. He’s 40 years old. It doesn’t take a psychologist to realize all the reasons why this isn’t okay at all, but for reference – Jake would be 21 years old (the legal drinking age in the U.S.) while Jeanne was 6 (in 1st grade in the U.S.). With an age gap this big, it doesn’t matter if they’re both of legal age right now because it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a huge gap in maturity, experience, and understanding of right and wrong. The age gap is completely ridiculous and frankly disgusting.
In conclusion, Jake Gyllenhaal is a creep and a borderline pedophile. If this statement seems like an exaggeration, consider the fact that if Jake was attracted to a 25-year-old when he was 40 and a 20-year-old when he was 29, it’s reasonable to assume that he was attracted to minors when he was in his early and mid-twenties. He has a pattern of dating people that are much younger than him.
I really like this song even though the content is sad. I reccomend listening to it.
Over the summer, I had one homework assignment for AP Psychology. It was to read Forty Studies That Changed Psychology and write two paragraph summaries for ten of the forty studies that caught my eye. In normal fashion, I read only ten of the studies and wrote the paragraphs the night before the due date. One of the studies that caught my eye was a study called Masculine or Feminine … or Both? that explored gender in psychology and proposed the idea that instead of masculinity and feminity being measured separately based on sex, they would be two variables on the same graph. Not only did this study introduce the idea of androgyny, but it also completely changed how psychologists studied gender.
The study was done by a professor who gave her students a list of positive attributes and asked her them which ones she felt were desirable to the opposite sex. This made it so that it strictly abided by gender norms in society. She then took the list and turned it into a test in which different attributes were listed with an “agree-disagree” spectrum with masc attributes contributing as negative variables and femme contributing as positive variables. She then made scoring guidelines: anyone -.05 or under was on the masc spectrum, anyone 0.5 or over was on the femme spectrum, and if the score ranged from -0.49-0.49, the person would then be considered “androgynous”.
In 1974, this was one of the most progressive gender studies in human history as it suggested that gender attributes weren’t exactly tied to sex. However, this study was done in 1974, not only have gender studies come a long way, but some of the research methods are outdated. For example, the attributes that are labeled “masculine” or “feminine” are only based on hetero-normativity and do not consider same-sex or other forms of attraction. Although it is likely a lot of the attributes will stay the same, some might change which is very important if something like this is to be measured. Then there’s the possibility that androgyny as a measurement of gender is outdated as well.
I’m not saying that we should all remove androgyny from our vocabularies altogether, as it is a good adjective for someone who has physical attributes of both sexes. What I do think, is that it limits psychological studies of gender as it still somewhat adheres to the idea that there are only two real classifications/identifications of gender. Realistically, a study such as this is really more useless than anything. In today’s world, there are so many gender identifications such as non-binary that completely exclude masculinity and femininity altogether. It might even be better to exclude gender identification in psychology altogether as it is extremely difficult to study something that has an actively growing number of variables.
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