This is a blog about making connections between different media and ideas. You can subscribe by email or RSS! Those links are below.
I've been mentally busy, but a couple things came together this week. The two pairs are not related though!
I've watched two longer YouTube videos about how parents try to overcontrol their children, regardless of motives. One is about fiction, this is Cheatham Media on the "Black Mirror" episode Arkangel. It's the episode where a neurotic single mom has a brain implant installed in her toddler that lets the mom watch her through a tablet and filter all "danger out of her daughter's point of view.
The second is someone I didn't know before, talking about the home schooled to true crime pipeline. YessaTessa describes her own childhood educational neglect and walks through several high profile crimes committed by homeschooling families. School is sometimes the only place where abused children can be noticed, and pulling children out of school is a way to further isolate them.
Changing gears, the next two things are about bodies.
Niko Stratis wrote about her sore, somewhat neglected body, from a previous lifetime (before transition) where she worked as a construction worker and had little care for her physical form:
This body belonged to someone else, who used it carelessly because they did not desire anything. They pushed it too hard, let it work carelessly, let it live without care, and in the end it was broken. When this body worked, it fell off roofs and ladders, it kneeled on the concrete in freezing temperatures you would not believe. It bled and cut and was stitched back together until it was monstrous.
I was looking through my files for a project, and read this quote I saved from Real Life by Brandon Taylor:
"There are ways to wrangle a body’s dimensions, but these dimensions correspond solely to the physical space it occupies. How to wrangle the body that is unreal? How to wrangle the histories of our bodies, which are inseparable from the bodies themselves and are always growing?"
Wishing you a peaceful week. I'm working on a booklet for my Life Skills Jam that ends next week.