oooohhhh ok. the more you deny yourself the more you lose yourself

whenever I confess to people that i feel like I am just roleplaying as a normal person they're always like noooo you don't strike me as someone who's roleplaying as a normal person at all!!! :) and every time internally im like well yes that's because I am excellent at it

lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.

what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?

pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then

...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.

Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.

I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.

If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.

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there's so much i don't know. how do i learn everything by tomorrow

(x)

Be the first woman in your bloodline to choose herself challenge

i need trans allies to really internalize the idea that masculinity in girls and women is punished by society. gender nonconformity is never rewarded. women being allowed in some circumstances to wear pants is not an example of "masculinity" being rewarded. women had to fight for a long fucking time in order to be able to wear pants and in many western households and non-western countries, women are still forced to wear dresses. we are still a long ways off from any kind of gender equality or acceptance of gender nonconformity.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

5pm on a lovely winter's day

Saehan Park

Clarice Lispector, tr. by Benjamin Moser, from her novel titled The Hour of the Star

I HAVE TO DO THE WORK SO THAT MY LIFE CAN BE DIFFERENT AND I CAN REAP THE BENEFITS