ME TODAY IN THE FURIOUS RAIN JUMPING IN THE PUDDLES CUZ I AIN’T GIVIN NO SHITS

lots of camera filling up my desk space. not enough space in drawers. michelle is loser.

i got taught how to belly dance at lizzy’s birthday dinner and i charmed the whole restaurant into loving me.

eating all my feelings with sexist homophobic ice cream BUT IT’S SO GODDAMN GOOD.

alexander technique is the best class at toi whakaari

WHO NEEDS FRIENDS WHEN YOU HAVE WINE AND CHOCOLATE

i wanna bring these photos back because i’m showing this to class and want to condense my thoughts in type and just rant.

these two photos were used in the cover of last year’s salient, the gender issue. it caused a bit of controversy as they’re both pretty confronting images. i noticed that they didn’t do a half week publication again, and the editor said that he found a stack of 20 magazines in the trash. 

i was in a photo recently with a friend and someone i don’t know commented that we should’ve posed less rigidly because you gotta bend your backs to work in the rice fields, intending it as a joke. i got pretty pissed off and retaliated quite aggressively. the commenters friend then explained to me that i should’ve taken it as a joke because of the relationship of the person mentioned before and the other girl in the photo, pretty much telling me that i should get over it, and offensive jokes are okay.
the reason i was so upset over the comment was not that it was racist and sometimes it sucks to be brought up in a white middle-class society when i’m not white, it was because someone was making a joke about what my family was forced to go through. i’m not talking about generations ago but of my parents, 30 years ago, fearing for their life. it was a joke about the poverty my parents faced, and i was expected to brush it off because it was an “in-joke” between friends. if my family wasn’t lucky i wouldn’t be in nz, or be educated or have made it into a fucking good drama school. i would be in the rice fields earning money to support my family and that’s really funny.

today in class we were having a discussion about faith. one point made was that a group of people who all share a common faith, strengthens their own faith. i then thought of when someone strays away from that faith or belief and has another one, or contradicts it with a belief of their own. they then become the enemy, that their view is not important. for example, feminism is sometimes seen as a bad word to those who don’t know what feminism is, but only see the difference of their views and that is bad.

it’s a fucking scary thing to stand up for what you believe in and fight for it. speaking out about that comment was the first time i was propelled to stand up for myself but what really hurt me the most was that i wasn’t supported by people who witnessed this happening.
at toi we have a few values that are really being pressed to the whole school and can be used in different contexts generally working things out as a group. one is support: when an offer is put out then it needs to be supported, even if you are unsure about it. the teachings that we learn at toi is something that you can’t really put aside when you leave school, it affects everything you do and how you look at things. this photo was associated with my classmates and i know that a few of them saw it, or were filled in on what was happening.

so the photo was deleted because she didn’t want a large conflict of something that she wasn’t apart of. it’s been 5 or so days since that happened and whenever i think about it i still get upset or angry and i was unsure about why removing that photo didn’t sit right with me. i guess it was because i didn’t get any support. i was kinda there alone. that my anger is justified because i’m an angry feminist who has really strong opinions and i like to make arguments. all i wanted was a group of people to support me, to strengthen my faith in this issue so i could be more sure of what i was fighting for. i wasn’t fighting for a larger issue, i was fighting for my family and for my history.

it makes me so sad and so angry that some stupid facebook fued has made talk out this issue to my friends so i can be okay with this, it’s made me cry today outside our screen class because we were casting ourselves because of what we look life, it’s made me write this stupid post on stupid tumblr so i can be okay with this. it’s made me so sad that i’ve had to justify why this has upset me so much when all i needed to say was “fuck off, racism isn’t funny”. when all that should have been said was nothing at all because this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

ed. about not supporting: it’s not an attack, it’s an observation which i’ve seen in myself, i saw in people around me who just nodded and said, “oh man, that’s really terrible.” what i was asking is a big thing and not my call at all to say. 

(Source: moretimeto)