i have to make a post about dolly parton i just. need to find the words
i know this sounds like an exaggeration, but as a queer southern kid, dolly parton would have been the only reason i could be convinced to believe in jesus again. she was our princess diana. she was the best of us.
if you don’t know east tennessee like i do, it’s hard to fathom how we failed and continue to fail our own. large swaths of the population left to rot in illiteracy and addiction with a lack of access to hospitals and infrastructure and education and jobs and a way to get out. to say ‘dolly parton is from a small town’ is an under-exaggeration to the extreme.
but dolly parton didn’t just get out in the way that so many of us dream of doing– leaving behind the worst places, watching the dust settle in the rear view. instead, she took the place that built her into her arms. she gave millions of free books to children who hungered to learn. she funded a cancer centre in a region without one. she built a foundation that gave monthly stipends to people in the smokies affected by unprecedented wildfires in 2016 which effectively rebuilt the region. she basically built pigeon forge, gave the city an economic stability it never had prior.
and i could enumerate everything she’s done elsewhere and otherwise, because it is a list that deserves enumeration, but i need to sit with what she did for the south in a minute and i need everyone here to do the same with me.
so many of us were given up on and continue to be given up on. i see people all the time write off the south as this hellscape wherein every person is an illiterate bigot monster incapable of change, growth, or compassion. it is easy to then justify the mistreatment of these people, these grotesque representations of everything wrong with our society– it is easy to abandon them.
dolly parton refused to. she could have taken the money, the fame, the luxury and run– she never did.
and she never backed down when it came to her love. she stood up for the lgbt community long before it was ever popular or even safe to do so as a celebrity. she celebrated drag artists as inspirations. she thoroughly believed we were all god’s children. when she spoke of jesus, it was never to invoke his judgement– it was always to invoke his love.
and that’s a wound rural kids have, too, beyond the physical systems of oppression. we are failed by our own who have internalised the narrative that we cannot be saved on earth and thereby have to put stock into a heavenly system that heavily punishes its own, just as we have been punished by our own. jesus’ love was taught and weaponised but never practiced, never realised, always a bandaid and never a stitch.
dolly parton spoke of salvation as something we were obligated to give each other, of forgiveness as a deliberate and continual act of explicit love that we were capable of every day. the only thing we ever had was each other, and we could abandon each other as we had been abandoned, or we could love each other as we were never loved. and she chose the latter.
it has been so easy for me, for so many, to leave our country kid past behind the second we could. to mask our accents, to choose the next largest town or city over to claim as our hometown. to dream of worlds larger than the holler, where everyone loves us and no one hurts us ever again, because that could never happen at home.
dolly parton said it will happen here. it did not for so long, and i am so sorry, but it will happen here. i was made here, too, and i love you. i will always love you.
Yayoi Kusama began hallucinating spots atop the surfaces of her world at a young age. In these dots, at once simple and boundless, Kusama found a way to break away from the self and look into infinity.
ok i want to tell my favorite science story. so this happened within a somewhat niche field of study that the storyteller was a part of - bacteriophages that target actinobacteria.
basically: these are viruses that can infect one particular group of bacteria - and oftentimes it’s highly specific. like “this virus will only infect this one species of mycobacteria and nothing else.” which is helpful if you want to kill only that bacteria - highly useful in medicine, for instance, if someone has an infection from a really bad, antibiotic-resistant bacteria. leprosy is part of this group. tuberculosis is, too. the idea is that phages will eat up the problem bacteria and then fuck off, leaving you, the human patient, disease-free.
so in this field of study, the scientists are trying to be as collaborative as possible. they’re pushing to share everything they find, because the benefits for human health are huge. it should be as easy as writing someone a letter politely requesting a sample of a new virus, and then you can build upon their existing work. this is how things happen for a lot of labs - they reach out to someone else in the field, ask for help, and people are happy to oblige.
but there’s one PI who’s not interested in playing ball. he doesn’t want to be “scooped”, he wants to publish his own groundbreaking findings, etc etc etc. he’s known for being a dick for this reason. and someone writes him a letter.
it’s really key, here, that i’ve been saying “writes a letter.” this happened decades ago before personal computers and email, so everything is done by traditional mail, and you’ve got a physical piece of paper that you’re reading on your desk. and naturally the polite way to reply to a letter is to write your own back.
the rogue PI gets this letter asking to please, if he could, share one of the important bacteriophages that he just found. i like to imagine that he’s sitting at his desk in his lab, turning the letter over in his hands and thinking to himself, all while smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich - things we aren’t allowed to do in labs anymore, for obvious reasons. he gets out his own stationery and pens a letter back to the requester, saying No, you can’t have my virus.
the letter goes back to the requester, who opens it and reads it.
something that should be said about phages, being viruses, is that they’re very…sticky. they stick to surfaces and can hang out for a very long time depending on what they are, and it’s somewhat known that once you have a phage in your lab, it’s very, very difficult to completely eliminate that phage from just, everywhere. and this was the wild west of science research where people were still pipetting things using mouth suction, no single-use plastics, no wearing gloves, and, of course, they were eating and smoking and writing letters in their lab. right next to their bench where their important research happened.
the requester receives this denial letter, and he says, “fuck it.”
he shreds the letter into tiny pieces, and he treats those pieces of paper in solution.
he filters the solution from the moist letter pieces and processes the filters to get a clear liquid.
he grows plates and plates of the bacteria he wants to kill, and he drops the shredded letter liquid on them.
and finally, after so much labor, he discovers that there it is. he got the virus that he requested.
still relistening to The Adventure Zone and something i can’t stop thinking about is like. okay so the McElroys basically had a cult-like stranglehold on a pretty specific type of nerdy millennial in the mid-2010s (I was one of them) and listeners could support the show by paying for “jumbotron” messages that would get read out loud on the podcast during ad breaks. and a lot of these messages are from quirk chungus to jakey or whatever, couples, basically going “hi honey! i love you so much that i had our good good mcelboys say it! love you, goof! can’t wait to listen to this episode together!”, right. but these jumbotron submissions had a pretty considerable time-to-air due to production timelines and the size of a backlog. and so after the fifth or sixth one of these all i can think about is, like, surely and statistically at least one of these couples went through an absolutely grueling and nightmarish break-up in the time between submitting a paid ad read about how lovey-dovey they are and griffin actually reading it out loud. and like could you imagine going through that and then hearing one of these men read your old self’s words back to you to an audience of thousands and then chuckle to himself and say “aw, so happy for you” while grief surges through your entire central nervous system. and then they go right back to bits and goofs. meanwhile, you are alone. the sun is setting. it’s dark and it’s getting cold. and you can use the promo code ZONECAST to save 15% on your first order of underwear from MeUndies
girlfriend keeps a kyubey plushie just to beat up when she’s angry so sometimes i’m running down the list of questions to ask to help her figure out what would make her feel better and “do you want to hurt kyubey” is often one of them
i fucking hate the “this is the good luck post.” Girl stop contributing to a superstitious environment with ur anecdotes there’s a million goddamn notes on it it’s statistically reasonable that a bunch of people remember the good things that happen after they reblog it
this is the statistically reasonable post, reblogging it will have no effect except for putting this post on your blog
guys this post really works! I reblogged it and it really did put the post on my blog! you need to try it!
