Honestly shoutout to The Social Network for giving us the line “you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole” because if that doesn’t epitomize women’s feelings for entitled male nerds I don’t know what does
I was surrounded by flowers, but all I could look at was the florist behind the counter with the glowing, golden ring hanging around his neck. The bell above the door signalled my entrance, so he looked up at me, smiled, nodded, and got back to setting a vase in order. The colours dazzled me, but I kept my eyes on the ring around his neck.
“Hi,” I smiled. “I’m Devika, I just moved in down the street, so I’m exploring this part of the city.”
The florist’s teeth shone like diamonds. He shook my hand with a firm, but soft grip. “Julian,” he said, “As it says on the signboard outside. Pleased to meet you.”
I pretended to look around, even though the ring was burned in my eyes. “Quite the selection of flowers you’ve got here, Julian,” I said and slowly drew my gaze back to his neck. The ring was lit up as if it was a circular glowstick.
“Yes,” his voice was deep, a little hoarse, very young. “Which ones are you interested in?” His eyes and teeth reflected the light of the ring, yellow-gold.
“Oh, I don’t know the first thing about flowers,” I laughed nervously. “I know roses, lotuses, marigolds, tulips, and err, do you know what a champa is?”
“Plumeria,” he leaned forward and pointed at a corner of the shop. Then he matched his eyes with mine again. “But you’re not here for flowers.”
“No,” I laughed a little more. “I told you, I’m just exploring. I used to go exploring shops with my aunt when I was a kid. Call me nostalgic.”
He bit his upper lip, dissolved the bite into a smile. “And does your nostalgia make you stare at this?” He pulled on the glowing ring around his neck.
I don’t know if I blushed. Let’s assume I did. “Yes,” I sheepishly said, before I knew what I was saying yes to. “No, I mean, sorry. It’s just, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“That’s understandable,” he stood up straight again, turning the ring around his neck with his fingers. “Most people never see a halo in all their life.”
I watched the ring turn around his neck, and I noticed a broken section in the middle. The edges were rough, like the ring had been broken by force. It was still small enough a break that Julian could wear the ring comfortably.
“It looks fashionable,” I said.
“It isn’t,” he said. “It’s a real halo.”
“Are you an angel?” I asked.
He cocked his head and picked out a peach-orange flower out of a vase. “I don’t know.” His smile looked simple now, innocent, a little wistful. “Am I?”
“Your halo is broken,” I blurted. “How did it break?”
“I broke it,” he looked at the flower now, caressed its petals. “Tried to, anyway.”
“Why?”
His smile dropped, and his eyes opened wide. “Because…” he began, but the halo rose and shot back. It dug into his neck, the broken section burying itself into his skin. It drew blood. Julian’s face turned red, and he held onto the counter for support. He struggled to look up at me, eyes open wide, afraid, but not shocked.
My hands covered my mouth. “What do I do?” I asked.
He held his hand up at me, and closed his eyes shut. Holding onto his halo, he struggled with it for a while, whispered under his breath. Tears rolled down his cheeks, onto the counter and the flower.
When the halo loosened itself and dropped back to around his neck, he exhaled the word “God”. It took him a while to regain his composure, breathing deeply and wiping his tears. His adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed several times.
“Might I interest you in a flower or two, miss?” he asked, no longer smiling, his voice still deep, hoarse.
I don’t think this counts as dancing. Or even skipping really. It’s more of an exagerated waddle
So. Let me tell you about the day I took this video. It was the 1 year anniversary of my open heart surgery. It’s about a year old, and I’d say it’s pretty safe to say I’ve improved since then. In case you don’t agree, let’s take a look at some more at my exaggerated waddling.
Waddle.
Waddle waddle.
*rolls across the floor*
Clearly I am immobilized by my own mass.
Oh wait… that’s not it, is it? It sort of seems like the opposite. Almost as though the ability to dance is based on strength, effort and passion and not on being skinny. Strange concept I know, let’s see if you can wrap your tiny little mind around it.
not to mention she wasnt waddling at all.. That was clearly a jete, chasse, and assemble.. not waddling. ballet…
Yo. Professional ballerina speaking here.
Clearly she is performing a saute arabesque, chasse, step-step, assemble devant with arms in fifth.
And as a teacher too, I can’t find much technically wrong with it at all.
Which means not only is she a gifted dancer, she has a wonderful technical foundation that she is executing properly and with lovely mannerism.
Being a ballerina isn’t about how much you weigh. Give me this girl ANY day for a student or dancer to work with. Clearly she has the knowledge and the passion, which means she will be a joy to work with.
Also, for those of you criticizing, you clearly have NO idea how difficult it is to execute a develope ecarte derriere the way she is at the barre in one of her later photos. This takes YEARS of dedicated training, as well as extensive natural facility, such as turnout, which she clearly demonstrates here.
So maybe before you peons thinking you’re masters of ballet judge dancers based on weight, you should actually learn about ballet and technique. Because if you had, you’d recognize that this girl clearly has technique—unlike your basic asses.
“Why ableism can fucking suck it” an interpretive modern ballet performed by OP Ballerina.
don’t measure a woman’s worth by her clothes – terre des femmes
THIS NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED SO FREAKING MUCH, TODAY PEOPLE CALLED ME WHORE BECAUSE I WAS WEARING A SKIRT AND WE ARE IN SUMMER, IT’S SO HOT IN THIS COUNTRY AND I HAVE TO USE PANTS SO GUYS DON’T GET ” DISTRACTED ”
respect girls
you may notice not one of those words is positive, not even neutral
its a game where there are no correct answers, just different ways to be told you are invalid, wrong, and should be ashamed. thats a shitty game to force people to play
Japan’s complete lack of understanding of declining birth rates in relation to its work culture reminds me a lot of how America has an assumption that millennials are killing industries when the truth is they are more frugal because of a lack of funds.
Both come from a conservative mindset that neglects the impact that a toxic work culture can have on society.
A 80+ hour work week in order to maintain financial stability isn’t exactly a solid ground to date people and eventually build a family from a healthy relationship.
A workforce comprised of 20 somethings that make between 20-40k a year in entry positions isn’t a good ground to build a reliable consumer base when a huge chunk of that is going to rent, utilities, car payments, and student loans.
This is a fascinating connection, you should write a paper on this
I am convinced that, in general, people want to have families. Many, if not most, would be happy to raise children. But in order to have children and raise them, especially to do so well, people need happy, stable relationships, financial security and time to devote to – you know – actually raising the child. You need both money and time to do that.
If people are not given the time and means to be able to create social connections and strong relationships, to devote to parenthood and family, then they are not going to do it. How can they?
I mean from an even more simplistic point these both represent the failures of the current capitalist class to learn from simple past lessons. – labor power needs time and resources/money to recuperate to do the things that allow them to be productive at work and to reproduce the next class of workers
Oh man, you brought up another subject I love. Etymology! I’m gonna look like I “know everything” again. I swear, I don’t. I have random trivia cluttered in my brain like a hoarder’s house.
I’m going to guess you read a Facebook post about this in IFLScience, which was taken from this article in Science Alert. I even saw it mentioned in Business Insider; it was very popular in 2015.
Well, it’s wrong.
I feel like I need to correct you about those “scientists,” so here we go.
It’s true, old languages didn’t have a word for blue. Greek epics say the sea is the color of
wine and honey is green, Hindu Vedic hymns lack any use of the word blue. In the ancient world, “blue” only existed in Egypt, which was the only place at the time capable of producing blue pigment. Modern tribes in Africa can distinguish subtle shades of green, for which they have many words, but they can’t tell blue from green, since they have no word for blue. This led one psychologist in 2006 to assume human eyes evolved differently. Ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue, since they had no word for it. In fact, eyes are still evolving, and modern tribes in Africa are still behind White People, because they apparently can’t see blue.
I’m sorry, Psychology Professor Person. This is a matter of etymology. Leave your racism out of human language development.
Here’s a hypothesis: maybe if something is super important to a society, it recognizes the subtle differences more and develops words for it, but when something isn’t that important, a society doesn’t notice the different.
Let’s use coffee. My dad thinks coffee is coffee. He can’t taste the difference between one black coffee and another. He doesn’t go for cream and sugar, let alone flavoring. Going into Starbucks with him is a trip. Meanwhile, I’m a bit of a coffee snob, so I can taste the difference between dark roast and light roast, cold brew and pour-over, and I love experimenting with flavors. To me, there are dozens of words for coffee. To my dad, it’s just coffee. That doesn’t mean my dad doesn’t taste the exact same thing as me when we both drink a Kona light roast, it just means his brain never bothered to log the differences.
Our ancestors saw blue, those African tribes see blue, they have the same eyes we do, but they never needed a word for it, so they can’t tell the difference between green and blue.
Let’s focus back onto the language ancient Brits spoke.
Old English had only six colors: red (read), yellow (geolo), green (grene), black (sweart), white (hwit), and gray (græg). There are no Old English words for blue until the 13th century, at which point we borrowed the French bleu and called it blǣw, which lost in the spelling war to the upper class French in England and became blue.
So why no blue in Old English, Homer’s epics, Vedic hymns, or old languages in general?
There’s a 1969 book, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, precisely about this issue. Two
linguists discovered that ancient languages followed a specific
evolution when it came to naming colors. The most basic of human
languages have at the very least some term for dark and bright, black
and white, “sweart” and “hwit” in Old English, which come to us as
swarthy and white.
The next to be distinguished is always red, the color of blood and meat, followed
by green and yellow, usually at about the time agriculture develops for
that area. Now there’s a NEED to distinguish at least the colors used as
a fruit ripens.
You see, these two linguists discovered that a language doesn’t fully
open up to distinguishing other colors until it has a need to describe
blue as a color. Blue isn’t necessary in agriculture, it rarely appears
in the plant world, it’s the color of the sky and sea, but that’s about
it. Most languages used other ways to describe something that we would
call blue. Either it was lumped together with green, basically a very
broad blue-green spectrum, or like Ancient Greeks, they lumped blue
together toward the darker end of the spectrum and said the sea was the
color of wine. Not because wine was blue or the sea was purple, but
because it wasn’t light, dark, red, or green.
Here’s a twist: the French got bleu from Proto-Indo-European (the mother of all European, Indian, and Iranian languages) and it stems from the word bʰlēw,
meaning yellow. It also developed into blaze, which might be why it applied to the sky, and that mutated into sky-color, AKA blue. So at its core,
“blue” comes from a root word for “yellow.” Wild, right?
In many languages, their “blue” stems
from the word for sky or water, because that’s where we see blue in
nature. Societies don’t form the word blue until they’ve developed a
need to see it as being different from yellow, green, or black.
But even in ancient times, English was a mishmash of languages, so we didn’t develop the same as other places. Brittonic, one of the first languages spoken on the British Isles back in the Iron Age, had four colors: black, white, red, green/yellow. Old English took gray and brown from the Norse Vikings, so we grew to 6 colors. That’s generally what you’ll learn if you study Old English. Then in the 9th century, we find writings that show the color purple (purpul) somehow came in, likely thanks to the Roman soldiers who occupied the land for a time and spoke Latin.
We had purple, but still no blue, which is an oddity in terms of the etymology of colors in developing languages. We developed that bluish concept somewhere around the 1300s. We took orange from Sanskrit in the 1500s. There was no name for that color besides geoluhread which literally means “yellow-red.” Then as the fruit naranga drifted from India and across Europe, so did the name, mutating into “orange” by the time it reached Jolly Olde England.
Pink is practically a modern invention and wasn’t used until the 1700s.
So
it’s not that humans evolved to see blue, but that linguistics evolved
to recognize colors. Once a language “discovers” blue, it quickly begins
to distinguish other colors that were in the in-between spectrum. As a society, they didn’t need to know the difference between green and blue, like my dad can’t tell the difference between an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe pour-over and his Folgers drip coffee.
Languages have to develop a need to
distinguish a color before it invents a word to categorize it.
This could easily lead me into linguistic relativity and the evolutionary psychology of language, but that’s a whole other subject and this reply has grown TOO LONG.
Organized Chaos 