fuckyeahrainbowhair:

fallingfate:

rapeculturemakesmeangry:

This is from the slut walk. One of the arguments is that girls ask for rape because they wear slutty clothes, short skirts, tight, low-cut tops. This girl is an example of the fact that rape victims can look like anyone, you, me, this girl. Rapists. Dont. Discriminate.

I promised a long time ago that I’d reblog this whenever I saw it on my dash. No regrets, it breaks my heart every single time.

an incredibly important message, rape is rape. no one is ever asking for it. a woman has the right to dress how ever they want - it is society that identifies risque dressing as ‘asking for it’, and in my opinion, that way of thinking needs to be diminished.

accelll:

Because one is a tragedy, thousands are simply a statistic.

Amy dressed carefully before going grocery shopping: a tank top and men’s boxing shorts, a long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, and over it all a sweatshirt that hung past her ass, hiding everything. She left the red bracelet carefully arranged in her jewelry box, because she wasn’t fasting this week. She put on the bracelet of clear, colourless beads, to remind herself of her intention to be pure, and to buy only good food.

She shopped for groceries just as carefully. She took forever choosing a whole-grain bread with no creepy additives. She couldn’t find a cereal without added sugar, and started feeling anxious and dizzy reading the ingredients lists, so she skipped getting cereal. She chose skim milk and zero-fat yogurt. In the produce section she splurged, getting carrots and lettuce and a bag of mixed stir-fry veggies, loading up on black cherries and oranges and two bags of apples because they looked so good.

On the way home, the little boy next to her on the bus kept staring at her wrist. Amy, guessing he was looking at the scars, was starting to surreptitiously pull her sweatshirt sleeve over her hand when he said, “You did it wrong. The beads are right, but you used a white string. The string should be blue.”

“Blue?” said Amy.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That kind of blue.” He pointed to an old lady’s scarf a few rows up.

“Okay,” said Amy thoughtfully. She could tell this meant something, but she wasn’t sure what. Feeling like she should give something back, she hauled out one of her bags of apples. “Would you like these?”

“Are you sure?” asked the boy.

“Oh, yeah,” said Amy, handing them over. “They were getting too heavy to carry anyway.”

Betty was standing at the bus stop when she overheard the curious conversation between two children. One, surely too young to be out alone at this hour, said, “At the last meeting everyone was saying now there are angels giving out food.”

“What kind of food would angels give you?” asked the second, even smaller, child.

“Apples or oranges,” said the first one, “But you shouldn’t take it, because they might be demons, and then you’d be poisoned.”

“But what if you’re hungry?” said the second child, wistfully.

“You can only be sure it’s safe in three ways,” instructed the first one. “If you’ve seen the person at a meeting; if a spirit told you the person is safe; or if they know the rhyme.” And then the child chanted the rhyme.

Estelle’s mother was on a Jesus kick, or rather, she was dating a guy who was on a Jesus kick. This meant that Estelle’s mother was spending a lot of time in church, and was only dropping quarters in the video lotto machines when the boyfriend wasn’t there to see.

Estelle didn’t mind. She’d rather spend time sitting in the church than waiting in the car alone while her mother gambled.

One of the church people had handed out colouring books and packs of eight crayons to all the children there tonight. The colouring books had Christmas carols on every second page. Estelle took a deep sniff of the good smell of new crayons. Then, thoughtfully, she took at the blue crayon and tackled the carol lyrics. This time she wasn’t sending a message to nobody; she was just focused on underlining all the bits that she thought were important, the parts she thought maybe people had forgotten.

A church volunteer, picking up the books left behind after all the children had gone, saw what Estelle had done, and her heart was troubled. The fragments of songs haunted her. For her, that was the beginning.

feistynicci:

Oo. Sila. Ang aking blue notebook and blue bear pen. Ayoko sa blue e. Hahaha!

Binili ko yung blue notebook ko last February. Tas yung blue bear pen ko, binili lang ng ate ko sakin. :)

Dyan ko sinusulat lahat. Mga secrets ko. Yung pagkabwisit ko sa isang bagay o tao, may nafe-feel ko, mga…

andythanfiction:

At the suggestion of One Who Knows Such Things, I’m doing a giveaway.

1. Follow me http://andythanfiction.tumblr.com (if this has gotten away from the tiny circle of people who know me by name, I’m the infamous dude behind the Klaine It Gets Better mirror sketch and Dumbledore’s Army and the…

andythanfiction:

This is one of my very few fics that isn’t Daydverse, but it says a lot of very important things about relationships and sexuality for teenagers, and I don’t mean that in the “wear a condom” way.  I mean that in the “school of hard knocks how not to get your heart broken and body used” way. 

I know right now you feel like the stupid, ugly, awkward, hopeless outcast that no one will love.  Your body is a mess, you’re too thin or too fat or can’t figure out how you can seem to be both at the same time in different places.  Your skin is a wreck, your feelings are YES and NO and VERY.  You can cry for hours and not really know why.  The world seems to be more complex every day and yet still so black and white.  You feel too old to be a happy innocent kid and too young to know what to do about anything.  Everyone has suddenly so many more expectations of you but won’t give you any more power or autonomy.  You want to fuck so badly that it makes you sob but you don’t know if you really want anyone to see you naked much less touch you.  You just want it to be okay, like it seems to be to not just everyone older and younger than you but everyone around you, because you’re the only person in the world who is this much of a disaster.  Everyone says you’re so smart but you feel stupid about everything.  Maybe you’ve just discovered that who you are or who you want to love is not what it’s “supposed” to be.  It’s all too much.  You want to help the world but it seems like it’s impossibly huge and everyone’s better than you and how can you and “teenagers” get blamed for all the world’s problems when you’re not allowed to DO anything?  You’ve got crazy amounts of energy and want to sleep all the time.  You hate life and love it and want to die and want to live forever. 

I get it.  I really do.  I haven’t forgotten what it was like.  I’m not that old.

And you can talk to me and I will be totally honest with you about what is and isn’t just your age and what is and isn’t going to be something you leave behind naturally and what will get better. 

The important thing to remember is that there are a lot of these children. You need to know that. No matter which ones we look at, there are a lot more out there. Everyone in this story is real, but none of the names are.

After school, Kooster took her brother Scout to the hospital. They did that every day now, and Kooster was proud of herself for thinking of it. First when they came to this city, she’d wondered what to do. It wasn’t safe to go to the shelter until she was sure their father would be there to protect them. Back when he used to have a car, they’d go wait in the car, and sometimes they’d sleep there, but there hadn’t been a car for a while now. So between school and the time he showed up from working or from a bar, she needed to find them a safe, warm place. It was a good thing Scout was in first grade now, so they got out at the same time and she didn’t have to think about that part.

Every city had a hospital, she guessed, but this one had a hospital right where they needed it, part way between the school and the shelter, and maybe that was a sign. As soon as Kooster saw it she knew they could wait there. Scout was too young to remember, because he was almost three years younger than she was, but back when their mother had been sick the two of them used to sit in the hospital lobby for hours, right up until the day she died.

Kooster used to pray that their mother would get well and come home. Now she wasn’t sure what she could pray for, except that they wouldn’t get caught. But she watched for the signs, which was almost like praying.

Scout wanted to sit closer to the Christmas tree in the lobby, but that was right next to the admissions desk, and Kooster was afraid if they sat there someone would notice them. She’d picked a spot in a corner, near the vending machines; she was watching in case people dropped quarters, because she needed to do laundry soon. “No, we have to stay back here,’ she told him, and feeling bad for him she added, “If you want I’ll tell you a story. But be quiet, okay?” It was only four o’clock but it was dark outside already, and cold. She didn’t know where they could go if they got kicked out of here.

“Tell me about when we were at the hospital,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. This was the story he most often asked for.

“When Mother was in the hospital, we waited in the lobby every night, while Daddy sat beside her bed,” Kooster began. She was pretty sure that part was true, and that he’d been there most nights.

“Because he loved her very much, and needed to be with her,” Scout said, because that was the next line. That was the part that Kooster secretly doubted, because it was hard to imagine. She knew that she shouldn’t let Scout see that she didn’t believe, though, so she nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “And one night he fell asleep beside her bed, and didn’t come for us, so we fell asleep waiting in the lobby. It was just like this, full of people and noise.”

“And that was the night the Blue Lady came?”

Kooster nodded solemnly. “Yes,” she said. “I woke up because people were shouting, because some man had been shot, but over in our corner it was quiet. The Blue Lady was standing beside the bench we were sleeping on, and she glowed, and I knew we were safe.”

“She saw me too, right?” Scout was always anxious at this point.

“She looked at both of us and smiled,” said Kooster firmly, “and I told her both our names.”

“And what did she say to you?” asked Scout, knowing the answer.

“She said we had to take care of ourselves, do well in school, and watch for the signs.”

* * * * * * *

Sent had the best room in the squat to himself. Kessa let him fuck her, so she could share his mattress.

This wasn’t a bad thing. Kessa had known bad things before, and she was very clear that this wasn’t one of those. She wasn’t in love with Sent, but she liked him. In a way he was kind. He fingered her for a while first, so she’d be wet. He fucked her quickly, silently, facing her. He didn’t hit her or call her nasty names or anything, and he didn’t go back on his word and kick her out afterwards.

He liked her, she was pretty sure. Probably he liked her enough to call her “his,”

Afterwards when they were lying on his mattress, listening to the voices from the rest of the building, she braced herself for rejection and asked if she could come back the next night. She tried to make it sound casual. He answered just as casually, but she thought he was pleased. “You can crash here every night, if you want,” he said. She felt really good. Sent was tough; no one fucked with him. He’d survived on the street for, like, ever. She bet he was at least twenty-five. Hooking up with him was a definite move up. She was making pretty good plans, Kessa figured, for someone who was only thirteen.

“So why’re you called ‘Cent,’ anyway?” she asked him happily.

* * * * * * *

Bobbi sat alone in her apartment and wondered if her mother would come home tonight, and if she’d remember to bring something to eat. There was no food in the cupboards. There was no food in the fridge, either, but that didn’t work anyway.

She was falling asleep on the couch, and her mother would be mad when she saw that, especially if she brought someone home, but Bobbi was afraid to go sleep in the bedroom. There was a big mirror there, on the closet door. It wasn’t safe there.

But deep down, Bobbi knew no place was safe.

* * * * * * *

David spent less than a month at the New Horizons camp.

In that time, he did not learn whatever it was that his parents had intended him to learn there. He didn’t learn that drugs and alcohol were bad, because he knew however bad they were, they couldn’t be as bad as sending him to this place. He didn’t learn to respect them, because anyone who hated him enough to send him here didn’t deserve respect. He didn’t learn to obey authority, because being forced to comply with the demands of a bunch of sadistic, moronic camp ‘counselors’ did not count as obedience. Most of all, he didn’t learn self-reliance, because at fifteen David was still a child, and no child can be fully self-reliant.

And he didn’t learn to, in his father’s words, “shape up and plan for the future,” because on his twenty-seventh day at the camp David died of dehydration.

Do you feel young or old?

Ivy found the webpage by accident. She was sitting in the public library on a Monday morning, killing time in a warm place. She clicked on a silver star at the bottom of a page—but afterwards, she could never remember what that page had been. The screen went black, and then the questions started to appear one by one.

She smiled humourlessly at the last question. No doubt the librarians thought she looked young—she had already received several questioning glances, and she bet she knew what the unspoken question was: shouldn’t you be in school?

But Ivy, bone-weary, couldn’t remember when she’d ever felt young. When she’d chosen her answer, the screen turned blue—a deep, soothing blue. A final question, in silver script, scrolled across the screen:

Will you join us?

Which is more beautiful, your appearance or your mind?

Amy, alone in her tiny apartment, rubbed her scarred forearms anxiously. Her mind might not be much by other people’s standards, she knew that. There were only too many psychiatrists and doctors who knew the truth, who could reveal the whole ugly story: the hospitalizations, the suicide attempts. But when she compared it to her body—her fat, loathsome body, she thought, weighting her down, tying her to the earth, making her weak—she knew the answer to the third question. Her mind was sharp and bright and beautiful, no matter what anyone else thought.

Which do you have more of, stories or possessions?

Mary received the questions in the mail, printed in blue ink on white paper. The bottom of the page folded over and taped shut. Mystified, she examined the envelope and the ‘quiz,’ but could find no clue as to who had sent it, or from where. It must, she thought, be some puzzle devised by one of her penpals. She sat at her kitchen table, sipping coffee, and decided gamely to answer the questions before peeling open the bottom of the page.

The fourth question made her smile. Mary had worked all her life, but never managed to save much money or acquire much ‘stuff;’ her family had always needed the money for something. Now that she and her husband were retired, money was even tighter. Not much chance now, she knew, of ever having the fine china and good furniture she’d once hoped for, and her wardrobe grew gently shabbier with each passing year.

But the stories—she had an endless supply of those, and they would never fade or lose their luster, not even now that her children had grown and moved too far away to hear them.

Do you walk in the darkness or the light?

The questions were read out loud to Betty, who was seated in the optometrist’s waiting room. She’d lost her glasses again, and without them everything, including the stranger with a clipboard who’d pulled up a chair facing her, was just a blur.

“These are really badly-written questions,” Betty said grumpily. “Awkward. Clumsy. What is this for, anyway, some kind of school project?” She wasn’t sure why that had popped into her head, except that her questioner had a young voice. She answered the questions anyway, scowling slightly at question six.

“In darkness,” she snapped. “More darkness every passing year. Just wait ‘til you’re my age, missy.”

Do you side with the weak or the powerful?

Emma, working late in the library, found the questions when she was shutting down the computers. People were always leaving odd pages open on the screen; she wasn’t sure why she began answering.

But she was hooked at the second question, because it reminded her of the children.

There were two kinds of children who used the library, and Emma, a middle-aged contented single with no offspring of her own, had been amazed to realize, after some months working there, that she vastly preferred one group to the other. It wasn’t anything she’d have expected to have an opinion on one way or another. But she did.

The first group—the ones, Emma had noticed, that got the lion’s share of her colleagues’ time and attention—were well-behaved, well-groomed, well-dressed and, usually, well-supervised by at least one, but often two, suitable parents. They came in to do research for school projects, or to choose, with careful parental input, stacks of the ‘right’ books. They were polite to Emma, and sought out her help and opinions. Their taste in books was much like Emma’s own, and they went home with stacks of well-written, beautifully illustrated volumes as charming as the children themselves.

Emma was surprised to find she loathed them—the children, not the books. She loathed them silently and secretly and politely. She reproached herself for it every single day, because she knew it was irrational and unfair to dislike them because they were privileged, lucky, and loved.

The second group? They were the children who came in alone, or with parents even less ‘right’ than they were. They had none of the advantages of training or manners or, usually, taste, although Emma tried gently to broaden their horizons, steering them towards the best the library had to offer. They came to everything, these kids, though Emma realized their attendance had more to do with a need for a place to hang out than a love of literature. They were there for every storytime, every free movie, every children’s party. They talked too loudly, often looked grubby, and gobbled free food. Even the quiet ones among them, the ones who sat silently and did their homework and barely looked up when she spoke to them, seemed more downtrodden than polite.

If they’d been books, Emma knew, these kids would’ve been stamped “discard.”

Emma found herself rooting for each and every one of them, fiercely.

“The weak,” she typed in now, almost angrily.

Would you rather fight on the side that’s going to win, or the side that should win?

Anne knew she was in trouble from the very first question. ‘This is why I’m such a loser,” she thought wryly as she selected “the side that should win.”

Can you make a home anywhere, or not?

Molly was asked the questions face to face.

She hadn’t meant to interview the child, much less be interviewed. She’d only crouched down to ask the moppet—boy? girl? Molly couldn’t tell—for permission to take a photograph, a courtesy she’d been lately making an effort to extend to all the street children she featured in her work. Not, she knew well, that anyone would care whether she photographed them or not; the children captured on Molly’s film were throw-aways, like litter. Still, it mattered to her.

But this one had looked up at her earnestly and began asking questions, chanting them like something long ago memorized. Molly, who’d only hoped to finish off a roll of film before heading back to the hostel, found herself answering as honestly as she could. She told herself she was humouring this child with the strangely serious face, but that wasn’t quite true.

Question five chilled her. For an instant she remembered, with a queer panicky feeling, a string of cheap hotel rooms, hostels, empty dormitories in summer months. Then she recalled, with relief, the calm of falling into bed—even a strange bed—feeling satisfied with the work she’d done, and looking forward to the next day’s efforts. Moments like that, she felt at home in the world and in her skin. “Yes,” she said, and it was the truth.

When the questions were done the child had thrust a crumpled piece of loose-leaf paper into Molly’s hand and bolted. Molly, left alone in the alley, smoothed the paper out against her thigh and read the penciled question.

Will you join us?

Do you feel young or old?

Ivy found the webpage by accident. She was sitting in the public library on a Monday morning, killing time in a warm place. She clicked on a silver star at the bottom of a page—but afterwards, she could never remember what that page had been. The screen went black, and then the questions started to appear one by one.

She smiled humourlessly at the last question. No doubt the librarians thought she looked young—she had already received several questioning glances, and she bet she knew what the unspoken question was: shouldn’t you be in school?

But Ivy, bone-weary, couldn’t remember when she’d ever felt young. When she’d chosen her answer, the screen turned blue—a deep, soothing blue. A final question, in silver script, scrolled across the screen:

Will you join us?