Things I Learned In Kansas

Things I Learned In Kansas

Store your cups in the cupboard upside down

Sprinkle water when you dust or sweep to settle it

Bring a big drill and a jug of water when you go place graveside flowers

Every house is a bar, don't kid yourself

Small town gossip is a force to be reckoned with

The rest of the country doesn't celebrate Pancake Day for some ungodly reason

We don't have much, but Oz and Superman (and the Winchesters, but nobody remembers)

Rainbow flags mean Oz

There is no Westboro Baptist Church in Ba Sing Se

The aesthetic is dead plants. Wheat, sunflowers, rotted grey farmhouses

Sunday Brunch

Turtle Racing

Wheelchair Racing

There are no vegans in Ba Sing Se, and the beef packing plant smells like the aftermath of Taco Tuesday to the tenth power

Windbreaks are awesome

Here Be Windmills

How to fly a kite the entire day and not get bored

Our sovereign overlords are actually the rabbits

Tornado? Eh, I still need groceries

The hail can and will stone you to death

The river(s) are imaginary concepts, except when it flash floods

Horny toads are adorable, change my mind

Hop on down to the OK panhandle if you wanna see people throw cow pies for sport

The most isolated city in the US is Garden City, and the population density of the state is 52.9 people per square mile. Other people's definitions of "small town" confuse me.

Flatland. Just. Go read Flatland by Abbott

Out Of The Dust is required reading, and will drive even the most fervent bibliophile to numb exhaustion and pleas for mercy

Everybody goes to church, none of that liberal nonsense unless you kill babies for Satan

Gender. Roles. Though tomboys are acceptable, when they're young

Fossil hunting except it's a Ford Model T

Yeah, there are snakes, but you're more likely to be mauled by the weeds. No, seriously.

Mountains are a myth perpetuated by people who don't live in Kansas.

The horizon is beautiful

There is beauty in death

Surly and stubborn and ready to socially destroy anyone who hurts your family

You will learn to appreciate country and Christian music or die, I don't make the rules

Chickens are cute and fluffy and delicious, even if it was pretty much a pet

The closest anyone gets to "exotic art" is a tin Kokopelli on the wall, and that's rare.

Go out into the dunes when the sandhill plums are ripe and bring them home

It's not too strange for the neighbor to show up with a bag of tarts or fruit or an entire casserole

How not to die in the dunes

Your options are love or excommunication

Tongues are more dangerous than guns. But we still have a lot of those.

Of all holidays, Memorial Day is both sacred and full of suck.

Distance is no excuse for not keeping in contact.

Redefine "acceptable driving distance".

We live at the mercy of the wind and the brittle earth, with nothing to do but figure out our fellow man. Don't knock it until you hear the story of the wandering gardener hobo who talks to trees and can do genuinely impressive things to your garden for a price, who's still walking after being hit by a train. Don't knock it until you've been hit full-on by a real dust devil and tasted real wildness. Don't knock it until you've clawed yourself out of the sand and been greeted by the vast blue dome of the sky, searing and immaculate. Don't knock it until you've met the dusty sun-worn handshakes of elders older than their town.

Don't knock it until you see why the state motto is a love letter to hard work and the starry sky.

When we speak of love

It is in crushed roses

Smoldering embers

Black-thick blood

The part of lips

Love in image is such a physical thing

Full of sap and sugar

Drifting smoke

Dimmed lights

Damp heat

And yet here I stand, red as any mortal

Beneath this thorn-scored hide

To tell you that my love

Has eyes like a crooked painting

That eternally slopes to the left

But frames a blue-green sea

In hacked-off strands

Of frayed fur.

My love is the purple

Of twilight whispers

And the black night between us

Breached by the gold of a bracelet around my wrist.

My love is the orange

Of streetlights and detour signs

Caution and warnings

And yellow eyeshadow.

My love is duct tape and cat fur

Asphalt and dappled leaves

Beauty and terror

And stretch marks

Like the imprint of lightning on my eyes.

We trace forgotten scars

In the bitter quiet

And laugh into the bubbles

Of a sugar rush.

My love

Is the feeling of a head tipped onto my shoulder

Hair against my jaw

Laying my hand on strong, bruised knees

And realizing that this wild panther

Does not slip away from me like smoke,

But would rather solidify to listen to the sound of my heartbeat

My heartbeat

And no other.

(And so,

When she stirs restless,

I let her go.)

Look, if Richard Parkinson can translate the entirety of Peter Rabbit into Middle Egyptian, I can translate the Spongebob Squarepants theme tune into it too.

Plus I used a Conditional phrase. My former advisor should be proud of me.

When you go to a haunted house, it may seem like you’re being funny by trying to scare the actors or jump out at them when you go through a second time, but guess what? ITS NOT FUNNY.

You pay us to scare you. It is your choice to go, so don’t fucking go through if you’re going to ignore the rules and get too close to the actors as a ‘joke’.

These bruises happened because over the course of 4 hours, several people ignored the instructions that CLEARLY stated that they were to wait in the front room until told otherwise. Rather than listen, they ran into the next room and slammed into me- effectively throwing me into the wall. This didn’t only happen once. It happened ten times at LEAST.

Then we had this asshole who thought that once I ‘died’ for the haunt, he could pretend to kick me to see if I’d moved. I, being used to people abusing me- jumped back and slammed my head into the concrete wall.

YOU ARE NOT FUNNY BY BEING RUDE AT A HAUNTED HOUSE. WE ARE PAID ACTORS THAT YOU CHOOSE TO COME AND SEE PERFORM. YOU PAY US TO SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU, SO DONT HIT US WHEN WE DO

I feel that this is relevant considering it is October and more Haunted Houses are opening up. I know it seems funny to scare the ‘monsters’ but all you do is hurt real people. So stop.

a short comic about witches and wishes and wanting things.

(all my comics are here!)

Mattu and Sha-Nanaya (UET 5 87)

This is another short Old Babylonian contract in which a woman legally takes responsibility for another woman.  I commented on the last one that it wasn’t good evidence for same-sex marriage, but the practice depicted in this contract is much more intriguing.  In the process of creating a polygynous marriage (one husband, two wives), a woman first legally attaches herself to another woman, and the contract makes it clear that their bond as “sisters” supersedes their individual relationships with their husband.

It’s worth noting that, unlike certain other polygynous marriage contracts, this one mentions nothing about childbearing or inheritances.  We’re left to speculate about the reason for marrying Mattu and the exact relationships between the three parties, but if one wanted to explore ancient non-heterosexual relationships, this would certainly be an intriguing data point.

Regarding Ms. Mattu [1]:

Ms. Sha-Nanaya hereby takes her from her father Nidnat-Sin and her mother Beltum-Reminni, to be her sister.

Ms. Sha-Nanaya, her sister, hereby gives her to Mar-Ertsetim, her husband.

“Marrying one marries the other; divorcing one divorces the other.” [2]

[1] “Mattu” probably meant “abundance.”

[2] This is a clunky translation of the Akkadian legal phrase āhissa ihhassi ēzibša izzibši: “the one who marries her, will marry her; the one who divorces her, will divorce her.”

In other words, now that Sha-Nanaya has “taken Mattu as a sister,” they come as a pair; their husband cannot choose to divorce only one of them.  In a very similar contract, BIN 7 173 (written in Sumerian, but from the same time period), Tayatum takes Ali-abi as her sister, gives Ali-abi’s parents her bride-price, then “gives Ali-abi to Imgurrum [her husband] for marriage.”  After citing the same legal phrase as this text, it makes it explicit: “If in the future Imgurrum says to his wife Tayatum, ‘You are not my wife,’ she shall take the hand of her sister Ali-abi and leave.”

I just love the image of the two women walking into the sunset together, hand in hand.