Butterfly in the sky
I can go twice as high
take a look, its in a book
reading rainbow six
i finished reading Jackie Wangās Carceral Capitalism this week. definitely worth reading, but itās a bit dry and i found it hard to make my way all the way through, which makes me feel bad, because the content is super important, but it was one of those things where it took me way longer to finish than it should have.
now iāve moved on to Edward Snowdenās autobio.
iām not sure entirely what i expected, but iām finding it enjoyable, if not a little bland and possibly cloying. the first few chapters seem to reveal how Snowden is obviously (and understandably) paranoid about how heās perceived, as heās spent most of his time speaking about his childhood and his heritage. re: childhood, itās the typical āmillennialā (he and i are the same age) thing, where he talks about getting a Nintendo in 1989, and then getting a dial up modem, and how that felt etc. so, you know, making himself relatable.
from there he also details how his family is Mayflower stock; you know, American lineage kind of thing. the intent seems to be that he wants the reader to know that his whole family has been enlisted in serving the country since the start which he needs to point out, i assume, to detractors who label him a traitor and whatnot.
anyway, itās probably a good read for someone who knows very little about Edward Snowden, i guess. iām assuming the book will pick up once he starts detailing all the ludicrous things he started seeing at the CIA.
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this book is fantastic, i donāt think itās all that dry for the subject area. highly recommend it.
^she published a solid video essay thats built out of one of the chapters in the book (iirc)
I dunno anything about Eddie, but when I do this itās 100% to point out how much of a piece of shit I am
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Same, actually. Like knowing my family history is great for whenever anyone wants to talk about how white people are horrible monsters. Like sure we have some good ones, but we also have some terrible ones.
Great example: currently the town of Brandenburg, Kentucky is advertising itself as the place that will take all the Confederate monuments every town is getting rid of. And guess what my middle name, my momās last name, is? Yeah, we are descended from the brother of the founder of Brandenburg, fuuuuuck.
my paternal grandmother is descended from nice hardscrabble Swedish farmers and happened to marry into what was as far as I can tell an unbroken lineage of Episcopalians who all either died in wars or eventually went crazy. My dad looked almost exactly like Michael Ironside.
my motherās family history is just a bunch of stories about people cutting down trees so theyād fall on othersā houses to spite one another, like the Amos and Andy episode when the Italians move in
Like man, I know we have at least one ancestor who was murdered by her slave, plus people who 100% fought for the Confederacy.
On the plus column, we also have a bunch of Quaker abolitionist folks and some plain boring Indiana stock (my great great uncle was Larry Birdās Junior high basketball coach; so you know Indiana af).
But yeah, all sortsa shit in the family line.
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my grandfather was once asked to leave the county fair due to his reaction when he was approached by a canvasser for Michael Dukakis
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the greatest thing about having indiana ancestry is you are 100% guaranteed to be related to at least one of the like, 5 celebrities from indiana
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On my motherās side itās mostly Germans who came over ~100-150 years ago but somebody traced my paternal grandmotherās family back to a couple generations before the boat circa 1600.
The First Grandma Ancestor To Step Foot on American Soil had a French father who married an English woman from X village, then he married an English woman who was also from X village and shared his momās maiden name.
So my first known ancestors to live on this continent were Two Cousins Who Definitely Fucked?
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I mean, Iām sure we all come from cousin fuckers if we go back far enough.
But I have documentary evidence of several hundred year old cousin fucking.
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Iām descended from a dude who attempted a different gunpowder plot than the one youāre supposed to remember, and then kept gritting his way through the new world.
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My dadās dad is 100% Armenian (which makes me 1/4). So, heās probably in the U.S. because his parents brought him here, fleeing the genocide.
And then he grew up to abandon his first wife (my grandma) and their 3 sons and 1 daughter. My father was 2.
Dude has a whole other family, now. His newer son is one year younger than I. And his newer daughter is mid 20ās.
I met him once, when I was about 10. But I guess my Dad didnāt end up wanting to reconcile, so we never saw him again.
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on the paternal side of the family, iām not really sure of the details/history too far back. supposedly we obtained our last name from the name of one of the aeolian islands off the coast of Sicily, which would make sense, as my last name is pretty uncommon outside of that, but it raises even more questions, because that island was primarily used as a penal colony for anarchists during the 19th century. i want to believe that thatās where my origins lie, but i canāt be sure. there is, though, a town in Sicily (Mazzara) where i stayed where apparently i am at least sort of related to everyone in the town, and yeah, thatās a little weird. but my dadās dad came to NY in the early 1900s when he was 12, which is nuts, walked all the way from Ellis Island to Harlem, by himself, and then became a house painter, met my great grandmother (a seamstress who worked in sweatshops in Williamsburg) and produced nine very unstable children.
on the maternal side, again, one half from Sicily (Castellammare del Golfo), the other from Calabria. my momās grandfather was the head of the barberās union in NYC, and was known for his radical leanings. he also worked as the Consigliere of the Bonanno crime family during this time. his son, my grandfather, went on to become a chemist/pharmacist, and then was unwittingly looped into working on the Manhattan Project which, of course, he had no real conception of at the time.
prior to the late 1800s, i donāt really have any family information, unfortunately.
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I donāt like reading characters eat in novels
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ā¦a house painter or a āhouse painterāā¦?
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But what about Redwall
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hah! no, only the maternal side of my family was mobbed up; paternal side was just impoverished.
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is it describing the meal or describing the eating that bothers you? i always get weirded out when a characters personality is supppsed to be established by the way theyāre described to be eating
busted let me borrow red plenty and im finally starting it. im completely powerless to not experience something when the person doing the recommendation says āyoull probably hate thisā
CUZ THEYāRE NOT SURE SO I GOTTA FIND OUT
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