The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
when did I lose that? the delight of success? when did winning become something I needed in order to survive? something I did not enjoy having, so much as panic without?
I wish we had more female characters like Eleanor Shellstrop. One of the most unlikable people you’ve ever met. Read a Buzzfeed article on most rude things you can do on a daily basis and decided to use that as a list of goals. Makes everyone’s day worse just by being there. Dropped a margarita mix on the ground and tried to pick it up, only to get hit by a row of shopping carts which pushed her into the road where she was hit by a boner pill delivery truck, killing her instantly. Cannot keep a romantic partner despite being bisexual. Had a terrible childhood but will die before she gets therapy. Best employee at a scam company. Just the worst but also can’t help but root for her to improve.
Absolute loser. Girl-failure. Bad at almost everything. Literally perfect female character.
i genuinely think that snow looked at peeta in the first hunger games and saw another boy with golden curls who was enchanted with a songbird that had a skill for survival. and i am sure that he was convinced that once peeta realized katniss was only using him for her survival that he would turn on her. he was so confident that peeta would realize that he could only trust himself… because that was the only narrative that worked in snow’s life.
but that didn’t happen, and peeta continually put katniss above himself over and over and over again. even when he was being tortured in the capitol, he was still enchanted by katniss’s voice and it could bring him back. it almost seemed like peeta’s nature was to love katniss. and that did not work with snow’s narrative of love.
so, snow decided to warp peeta until he could barely recognize himself. and then snow thought that peeta’s capitol-induced hatred for katniss could prove snow’s belief about love correct: that love can only end in tragedy, that it is a weakness.
but the love that grew between peeta and katniss proved snow wrong. proved that there was not one single solution to snow’s ending. that snow’s ending was not inevitable. that snow was the one who made the choice to kill his love. snow couldn’t handle the truth of his actions that he had previously chalked up to inevitability.
because peeta and katniss proved snow’s narrative wrong. that love really could be unconditional and selfless and pure. that love didn’t have to end in tragedy. that it could grow from circumstances of survival and still be genuine. and i think that haunted snow to his grave.
Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.
Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.
YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.
This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were
1) so vital, and
2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.
“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”
