Hilary Plum: Abortion is Thinking. Thinking is Banned.

Nan Goldin, Amanda crying on my bed, Berlin, 1992. Source: nytimes.com

When Roe fell, I felt what lots of people felt. My feelings were common.

I felt that the lives of everyone I knew had been made possible, in the forms we know as ourselves, by access to reproductive healthcare. Everyone, most especially women and trans and nonbinary people. The job I have—the shape and status and income and independence of my working life—was barely available to those of my mother’s generation and unheard of to my grandmother’s. This is all so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to state, but apparently these days we must. Contraception and abortion are perfectly material. But the profound ways that access to them shapes us—the structures of our relationships and workplaces and society and politics, the nature of our opportunities, our ideas of who we are—aren’t easy to quantify, or even to think.

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тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ. Cairo's coolest cosmopolitan hotel.

Madeline Beach Carey: Alternative Therapies

Ferdinando Scianna, Umbria, Melezzole, MESSEGUE’s Beauty farm. Source: magnumphotos.com

Olga was a screamer. It’s nothing you would have guessed about her, at least not at first. Or perhaps some would. Maybe almost anybody could have told me to watch out for a beauty school graduate with a military father. But I was shy, and clueless, and young, excited to be in a new place, excited to date a girl.

We met at the beauty parlor on Calle Numancia, near the main train station in Barcelona. It wasn’t just a beauty parlor, it was a huge complex, three floors, opened from ten am to midnight Monday through Saturday and until three pm on Sundays. You could get anything done there: nails, hair, waxing, electrolysis, Thai massage, California or Swedish massage, Botox injections, fish pedicures. Olga did waxing and I was both the massage guy and the handyman. I fixed broken lamps and collapsing massage tables, dealt with circuit breakers, repaired all sorts of broken nail-clipping tools. The owner, Adele, a French woman who weighed about 45 kilos, hired me the August I arrived from Buenos Aires. She liked that I had long hair, a thick black ponytail. You seem New Age, she said, and asked if I’d be interested in maybe teaching her tai chi.

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тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ. Cairo's coolest cosmopolitan hotel.

Karissa Lang: New People

Chinese ancestral worship postcard postmarked Shanghai 1908. Source: worthpoint.com

We all descend from someone ancient, and contrary to what is generally believed in the West, they never leave us. Whether you are mystical or logical in nature, the idea sticks. For the former, ancestors spiritually guide us from beyond the grave. For the latter, science now dictates that we genetically inherit their memories and phobias. Either way, an ancestor is someone who passes on information—be it through stories, values, behavior, DNA, or supernatural means—and what distinguishes a good ancestor from a bad one is the quality of this information: a good ancestor hands down wisdom, a bad one gifts us with their pain.

My mother is a bad ancestor and her mother was a bad ancestor too, and if I can’t be a good one, I’d at least like to be better. I come from a lineage of mothers who did not want children. Mean women, selfish women, indifferent women who resented where they came from and had no idea how to nurture what they’d created. Women who buried their aborted babies in the backyard. Women who abandoned their children to others. Women who raged without really knowing why. Absent women who felt unwanted and unloved and unconsciously groomed every last one of their descendants to experience the same.

Posted by тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ | ختم السلطان

тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ. Cairo's coolest cosmopolitan hotel.

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