exiting a uquiz halfway through when it becomes clear the creator’s narrow and immature world view and cultural knowledge leaves them totally unequipped to tell me which peanuts character i am with any degree of accuracy or insight
secondhand time: the last of the soviets, by svetlana alexeivich
[He didn’t like being questioned… He had this bravado… always trying to make light of everything… this prisoner’s habit of hiding everything serious behind jokes. The bar is higher for them. For instance, he never said the word “freedom”— it was always “the outside”. “Here I am on the outside.” At rare moments, he’d tell stories…. But he’d tell them so vividly, so avidly…. I could just feel the happiness he’d taken out of there: like when he’d gotten his hands on some tire scraps and tied them to his felt boots. When they were transferred, he was so happy to have them! Another time, they’d gotten half a sack of potatoes…. And somewhere “on the outside,” while they were working… somebody had given him a big hunk of meat. That night, in the boiler room, they made soup: “And it was just so good! So wonderful!” When they released him, they gave him a reparation payment for his father. They told him, “We owe you for the house, the furniture…” It ended up being a lot of money. He bought a new suit, a new shirt, new shoes, a camera, and went out to the best restaurant in Moscow, the National, where he ordered the most expensive things on the menu, and cognac, and coffee with their signature dessert. At the end, when he’d eaten his fill, he asked someone to take a picture of him at the happiest moment of his life. “Then, when I got back to my apartment,” he recalled, “I caught myself thinking that I didn’t feel any happiness. In that suit, with that camera… Why wasn’t there any happiness? At that moment, the tires and that soup in the boiler room came back to me— now that was real happiness.” And we’d try to examine it…. like…. what makes happiness? He wouldn’t have given up his years in the camp for anything in the world…. he wouldn’t have changed a thing about his life…. That was his secret treasure trove, his wealth. He was in the camps from when he was sixteen until he was almost thirty.… Count that up…. I asked him, “But what if they’d never arrested you?” He’d make jokes to avoid answering. “I would have been an idiot zooming around in a bright red sports car. The latest model.” Only at the end… the very end, when he was in hospital…. For the first time, he discussed it with me in earnest. “It’s like when you go to the theater. From your seat in the audience, you see a beautiful fairy tale— a carefully decorated set, brilliant actors, mysterious light, but when you go backstage…. As soon as you step into the wings, you see broken planks, rags, unfinished and abandoned canvases… empty vodka bottles, food scraps. There’s no fairy tale. It’s dark and filthy…. It’s like I’d been taken backstage… Do you understand?”]
I can’t speak for other social media webbed sites but I really enjoy how tumblr seems to just completely spin a wheel on whatever media is hot right now. Like yeah sometimes it’s a new show that’s big and actively coming out but also sometimes there will be a solid month where half my dash is Columbo memes. Defy authority. Get really into an book from the 1800s. Watch shows that haven’t aired in 40 years. Celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Molasses Flood. Become unmarketable
ALT