It was all a real delight until you stepped on one.
You fondly remember squealing with excitement when you spotted that teal and yellow packaging.
I MUST HAVE IT.
aob / Via ebay.com
francisco7510
francisco7510
Thứ Hai, 30 tháng 11, 2015
44 Mild Thrills That Every Swimmer Has Experienced
Life is so good when your goggles don’t leak.
Patrick Hamilton / Getty Images
1. When your coach gives you the main set and you understand it the first time around.
2. When you jump in the pool and it's not as cold as you expected.
3. When the person swimming in front of you during practice gives off a really strong draft.
4. When you check out a heat sheet and see that you've been placed in the middle lane.
5. When flip turn and you hit the wall PERFECTLY (you know the feeling).
6. When your parents pick you up from practice and there's already food waiting in the car.
7. When you're able to put on a Fastskin faster than you anticipated.
8. When the blocks at a meet are the perfect height.
9. When the blocks at a meet are not slippery.
10. When you think you're about to hit someone's arm when you're swimming butterfly, but you both miss each other.
11. When you put on your cap perfectly the first time.
12. That moment when you just hit the water off the blocks and you realize your goggles DIDN'T leak.
13. When your coach tells you to put your pull gear on.
14. When your coach tells you to put your fins on.
15. When you're walking to the blocks with your relay and you feel like a superhero team.
16. The moment you get out of practice and you feel like you can eat lit'rally anything in the world.
17. Or when you get out of a meet and you decide to splurge and eat out.
18. When you touch out the person in the lane next to you during a race.
Suhaimi Abdullah / Getty Images
19. When you touch out the person in the lane next to you during practice, because you're hella competitive.
20. When you wake up early and realize you don't have morning practice that day.
21. Or when you wake up really early and realize you have enough time to fall back asleep before practice.
22. When you pick out a pull buoy that's the right size and isn't beat up.
23. When you get to the kickboard bin and your favorite kickboard is there (you know the one).
24. When you skip practice and find out later it was a test set.
25. When a really good song comes on the speakers during a sprint set.
26. Peeing in the pool.
27. The first time you dive into the water after shaving for a big meet.
28. Wearing a new pair of goggles for the first time.
19 Reasons Why "Elf" Is Actually The Best Christmas Movie Ever
The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.
It's ever so positive.
No cynicism here. Just pure Christmas magic.
New Line Cinema
Buddy's songs are masterpieces.
And endlessly quotable!
New Line Cinema
This was pretty much the funniest line ever and you're still not sure why.
New Line Cinema
You still scream this every time someone says that Santa is coming to town.
New Line Cinema
If "Love Actually" Took Place In 2015
Love, Prolly.
1. It would be titled Love, Prolly.
2. Benedict Cumberbatch would play David (Hugh Grant).
3. Martin Freeman would still play John, — yes, the character's name is John.
4. John and David would cross paths briefly, and there would be some kind of subtle Sherlock joke.
StudioCanal
5. Billy Bob Thornton would still play the President of the United States.
6. Eddie Redmayne would take a break from all his Oscar-winning dramatic roles to play Colin (Kris Marshall).
7. Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) would have a different, more modern motto when he learned the drums.
StudioCanal
18 Times Pam Beesly Proved She's The Best Character On "The Office"
“I don’t care what they say about me. I just want to eat.”
When she was the only one who dressed up for Halloween.
When she won her Dundie.
That time she couldn't handle Kelly.
When she still didn't know "Closing Time."
14 "Game Of Thrones" Trivia Questions Every True Fan Should Be Able To Answer
Contains spoilers from Season 1-5 if you haven’t watched already.
Here's Why "Love Actually" Is Actually A Terrible Movie
More like NOT actually love.
There's this dude and he's terrible. One of his first lines in the film is "try my lovely nuts."
And, like, it's also annoying he feels he is entitled to having a woman. Bruh.
StudioCanal
Later in the film he's all like, "I'm Colin, god of sex." He also blames his troubles on British women.
Hmm. Maybe it's you, sir?
StudioCanal
And then there's this guy named Mark. Yeah, really cool of you to lay some moves on your best friend's wife!
StudioCanal
Which is interesting considering earlier in the film he was very mean to her, almost like he was a child in grade school.
Who shows affection to their crushes by putting them down?
StudioCanal
Why I Stopped Running From New York
The following is a slightly edited excerpt from Never Can Say Goodbye, a collection of essays edited by Sari Botton and originally published in 2014.
Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
The first time I considered moving to New York City I was fresh out of college and there was a job on the table: “I know a guy we could deal cocaine for,” my buddy Pete said.
It was tempting. I’d spent the whole summer working on a paint maintenance crew on an island off the coast of New Hampshire, and the idea of moving to the largest city in the country had its appeal. Not to mention that I’d always thought I’d be good at dealing cocaine.
My other option was to work for little money on a long-shot congressional campaign in Pennsylvania’s Eighth District. Much to the relief of pretty much everyone I knew, that’s what I ended up doing. The candidate was Patrick Murphy, an Iraq war vet who would eventually win, become the youngest Democrat on the Hill, and help get rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, only to be voted out again in 2010.
But I wouldn’t be there for any of that. After six months on the campaign trail, sleeping in suits and living in an unheated, unfinished room built out of crumbling drywall on a diet of scotch to help me fall asleep, I, with a fresh degree in political science and episodes of The West Wing bouncing around in my head, realized that I had made a terrible four-year-long mistake. Politics wasn’t for me.
Luckily I had an escape route. I’d met a girl while painting all those buildings in New Hampshire—a girl who had just moved to San Francisco. Like so many of us who don’t know what to do with ourselves, I chased a relationship. While all my friends on the East Coast were moving to New York City, I moved three thousand miles away.
California was totally unfamiliar. My life had been East Coast all the way, from Boston to Philadelphia to Washington, DC. But moving to the West Coast gave me something staying back east didn’t: much-needed distance from my childhood. I had a history with my parents, as any of us who have parents do. A history of a combative household filled with explosive arguments and estranged silence. My parents were married when they had me, just to different people. Their lives weren’t easy. Not enough money or trust, too many tough situations with no way to win. We lived poor in Boston at a halfway house for low-income families run by the Catholic Worker, and then in North Central Massachusetts, white and rural and impoverished.
In North Central Massachusetts, my parents began to reconcile. But I was still a child and unable to understand the difficulties that they had faced. Angry and resentful, I turned to the distractions available to me in backwoods Massachusetts—riding around in trucks, consuming beer and terribly stepped-on drugs in deserted forests and quarries. As the wounds between my parents healed, I withdrew from them, unable to forgive them for being human.
San Francisco was beautiful and new and strange, but my bad habits made the trip with me.
San Francisco was beautiful and new and strange, but my bad habits made the trip with me. A year after I arrived, the girl moved back east to get away from our relationship, which was really more of a drinking partnership at that point. She left, but I stayed, bottle in hand.
I lived in a one-bedroom apartment that I shared with three people, where mice ran across the kitchen table while you were eating like you weren’t even there and pigeons nested in the walls. I waited tables at Buca di Beppo (which was like Olive Garden but worse), slung beers at old, punk-encrusted bars, and at one point was the world’s worst sushi chef. At five a.m. every morning, I got up to make rolls that I would then drive to different tech campuses—Google, LinkedIn, Facebook—stocking their snack refrigerators with the hand-rolled fruits of my labor from a blue beer cooler. In my uniform of a black T-shirt and ripped jeans, and reeking of fish, I’d drag the cooler through brightly lit offices where everything matched except me, as I skulked past beautiful, well-dressed kids my own age having loud sex on the tops of piles of money. At least that’s how I remember it.
The years passed, and crappy jobs turned into less crappy jobs, as they tend to if you stay in one place long enough. Bouncing turned into barbacking turned into a few shifts bartending turned into a trip running medical supplies illegally into Burma out of Thailand turned into a job for a news website that actually had a steady paycheck and health insurance. I quit after a year because a friend offered me an opportunity that was too good to pass up: taking a fifty percent pay cut and absolutely no insurance whatsoever to help him with his new online arts and culture magazine. But, hey. Talking about books online might be a meager living, but it was still a living. And it was talking about books online.
As a child I had always loved books but never had a clue about how they were made. For the first time, surrounded by the amazing artists and writers of the Bay Area, I was thriving in a job that I actually enjoyed. I stopped drinking tequila in the morning (for the most part) and eventually moved into an incredible, illegally subletted, way-too-grown- up-for-me rent-controlled studio that I had all to myself. The city, which initially seemed to reject my very presence, slowly began to tolerate me, and then—it felt like—champion me. And in turn I championed her. “Look, look,” I would say, grabbing everyone who would listen, “look at this, the most beautiful city in the world. This is my home.”
Then my new job began bringing me east, more and more. My parents and I started
getting in touch more often. When I first got to San Francisco, I would call every week on Sunday, like the lapsed Catholic I was. In return, they would never visit. We maintained that schedule for years, until my first piece of writing was published: an essay about letting a woman fuck me in the ass with a strap-on. My father didn’t come to the phone for six months, although my mother and I still spoke. Then, one Sunday, my father picked up the line. We talked baseball, as one does when talking about feelings is too harrowing to consider. Sunday by Sunday, despite the distance, we grew closer. The calls turned into one visit, then two. My parents had moved, and our old home was behind us. The things I held against them, the things they held against themselves, seemed to soften with age. Instead of avoiding them when I was in New York on business, I invited them into the city for dinner.
The things I held against them, the things they held against themselves, seemed to soften with age.
After eight years of living in San Francisco and fighting to carve out a life of my own far away from my childhood home, I moved back to the East Coast. The decision came quickly. My half brother, from my mother’s previous marriage, was struggling to start a new family. He and his wife had suffered a devastating miscarriage on Christmas Day the previous year, a Christmas I wasn’t there for, and they’d been trying to get pregnant again ever since.
We spoke on the phone often. He’d describe fertility tests and drugs I couldn’t pronounce, procedures and endless appointments with doctors nearly as numerous as the miles that stood between the Atlantic and the Pacific. They lived on the New Hampshire coast, near where I’d painted those houses and met that woman who brought me west. I felt useless, wearing my armor of three thousand miles. When he told me that he and his wife had finally succeeded—that they would be starting a family in the summer—I realized that I wanted to be there. That I didn’t want distance to be a part of our family’s next steps. My half sister, from my father’s previous marriage, lived in New York City. She didn’t know a guy I could deal cocaine for, but she would be happy to share the city with me and even help me find a place to live.
I moved in December. The winter was the harshest that it had been in years, or so
people would say as they saw me shiver through the drifts of snow, longing for
the California sun. Like San Francisco, New York did not welcome me with open arms. Why should it? New York is just a place. A city. It has no feelings toward me one way or the other. When I got to New York, I was the age my parents were when they had met and had me. What does anyone know about living life at thirty? About as much as I knew about the subway, I’d have said, as I took the wrong trains, missed my stops, and tried to figure out if Coney Island was ever the right direction to go in.
I saw my parents more in four months than I had in the past eight years. All I had to do was walk outside my apartment and money would disappear from my pockets. I stepped into every deceptively shallow-looking monster slush puddle that seasoned New Yorkers knew to avoid. I was anxious, feeling as though the entire eastern seaboard bore down on my shoulders, trying to push me underground.
The thing about missing eight winters, though, is that you forget that you also missed eight springs. Now, the sun is here. I no longer hide underground, crowded into subway cars that I worry I’ll never get used to. Riding my bicycle over the Manhattan Bridge, I see the city, instead of scuttling beneath it. And it is beautiful. Parks. Markets. Blossoms. People. Dresses. Pavement. This city is alive and full of wonder and I am just one lost person in it, but I wouldn’t want to be lost anywhere else. That’s the flip side to leaving a city that made me feel cozy and comfortable and loved: I get to be lost. I have an entire expanse of concrete to explore, to learn about, to appreciate. And to hell with concrete—I hear there’s a beach, even. I look forward to meeting the Rockaways, and perfect summer midnights and bitching about the heat and the smell of baked garbage. I look forward to meeting all the joys and challenges of a new city remade for a new season. My brother’s daughter will be born this summer. I look forward to meeting her too.
***
Isaac Fitzgerald has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and been given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three out of five of his childhood goals. He is the editor of BuzzFeed Books and co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them. More at http://ift.tt/1upc278.
***
This essay, originally titled "SF -> NYC," was first published in the collection Never Can Say Goodbye, edited by Sari Botton. Copyright 2014 by Sari Botton. Reprinted by permission of Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
What A Road Accident Taught Me About A Single Woman's Place In India
Rebecca Hendin / Via BuzzFeed
“The poor thing. Did you see her face?”
“I know. Very sad”
“Paavam. And she isn’t even married yet!”
On April 27, 2014, while bicycling to work in Bangalore, I felt a jolt from behind me. It resulted in me losing my balance and my face bashing against the pavement. I never saw the person who hit me. In the following days, I needed surgery to wire my upper teeth in place, fix my facial scars, stitches for the insides of my lower mouth and a cast for my broken wrist. Four of my teeth were fractured and jagged. I would require several more dental surgeries in the months to come, and very painful physiotherapy for my hand. I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t eat anything solid.
To well wishers and visitors, I joked that I looked like a zombie, keeping up a brave face despite what had happened to mine. Quietly, I was devastated. I was angry at life. Every mirror I looked in was haunted by my own inability to recognise myself.
During this period, I had a stream of visitors. People I knew from work, from Bangalore’s cycling community, from the running community, from college. Family, friends, family friends. I was moved by their various displays of support.
But despite their unending love, it was also a time of extreme personal pain and insecurity.
Rebecca Hendin / Via BuzzFeed
Some comments, stemming from places of deep love and sympathy, stung sharper than the fall itself. “At a time when she should be getting married, this happened.”
I was reminded constantly that not only had my body failed me, but I had failed in my duty as a woman.
As if the true tragedy was that I got marred before I got married.
For most of my life, I knew marriage was an inevitable part of my future. My sister and I were raised by working parents in a Tamil Brahmin household where a premium was put on education. But I knew I had to marry by the time I hit my early to mid-20s. My world expected it of me. My grandmother often told me she wanted to see me get married before she died. She died when I was 21. My school in Chennai taught electronics and woodshop skills to boys and home science for girls. While graduating, my all-girls college conducted a seminar that taught us skills on dealing with mother-in-laws and husbands. Our principal promised my classmates that every girl graduating from my college was in “great demand” by unwed men. We were studying journalism but were taught matrimony.
You study hard. You get a job. You get married. Simple.
But I stumbled.
Rebecca Hendin / Via BuzzFeed
What seemed to come easily to my peers didn’t seem possible to me. At 24, I wasn’t mentally ready for marriage, so I didn’t even broach the subject. Quickly, it became an “issue”. My mother started encouraging me to scope for potential suitors. My parents, always liberal, reassured me that they didn’t care about caste but they did want to see me with a companion, a boy of course, before they were gone. The threat of mortality always loomed large over the idea of my marriage. Find a boyfriend, I got nudged. And then marry that boyfriend before we die.
During my recovery, many visitors came prepared with the same script.
“When are you going to tie the knot?”
“We know an excellent boy settled in the US who has done both engineering and an MBA.”
“The second your face heals, we will find you a husband.”
“The accident might delay her marriage. What will people say?”
Rebecca Hendin / Via BuzzFeed
I was asked if I was “in the market,” like a commodity to be sold off before rotting. If I waited too long, I was told, I wouldn’t look young in my wedding photographs. I may have to settle for a – gasp! – bald man. (I didn’t understand the outrage – I have never known my own father with a full head of hair.)
I began to have a recurring nightmare where I, in full bridal get-up, jumped out of a window and ran away from an anonymous groom. Night after night, an entire wedding party chased me into wakefulness.
In our culture, heartaches are endured in relative silence. We speak openly about failed relationships and unrequited love with friends, but are vague with the details to our parents. We get scared that they might panic lest our heartbreaks delay the marital bliss we were reared for. We confide in cousins but under a tacit agreement that our secrets remain contained in our generation. The parental network in the Tam-Brahm universe is strong and swift. News travels fast and across oceans.
After my accident, there was a period of time when I couldn’t shield myself from my own insecurities or the comments made by others. Everything was amplified, cut deep. Since I was bedridden, I couldn’t escape. Any negative word immediately took root and caused me pain. I have never been fair or tall. I once cringed when a crush jokingly recounted how his grandmother told him not to marry a South Indian girl because South Indian girls are dark. My hair isn’t silky or straight. I am petite. And to add real insult to literal injury, my face was now a failure. I stayed up nights as angry tears stung me, figuratively and physically. I cursed at the universe for its unfairness and for my own. I began to second-guess my own decisions. Had I been wrong in putting off marriage? Had I waited too long? Were they right?
Rebecca Hendin / Via BuzzFeed
During this time of confusion, I was also acutely aware of my privilege. As a woman from an educated middle class household, I have been shielded from the prejudice and abuse piled on millions of girls in India. Did I really have the right to complain?
Now, it’s been a year and half since my accident. My scars have healed and quietly disappeared. I look pretty much the same. Some even joke that I look better now. People have discreetly asked me for my plastic surgeon’s contact details. I returned to cycling and running. In many ways my life has gone back to what it used to be and that means the question of marriage still looms large. And I still have no answer.
There are days when I feel lonely. Those days I blast Taylor Swift and I dance. I take comfort in the friendship of other women, both married and unmarried. We have created our own support system that is free of judgment. I have come to learn that even the married women are in no way spared from the patriarchal expectations of Indian society. But thanks to this sisterhood, I know I am not alone. In that sense I feel settled. And as far as marriage goes, I want to marry someone I love and respect. Someone who loves and respects me. And if that takes me a lifetime to find, so be it. Time has taught me patience.
What It's Like To Be A Black Woman At A Gun Show
On the first Saturday morning in August, I stepped out of my car in a suburban Indiana parking lot and watched three middle-aged white men aim squinty-eyed suspicion at me from two spaces away. As a Wisconsin native, I’m used to squinty-eyed white Midwestern suspicion. But since we stood several hundred feet from a lot of guns and I figured the guys were probably armed, my feet froze. I had to drag myself to the entrance of the Kokomo Gun Show, where a brown-haired stocky white guy in his twenties talked to his friends while resting his elbow on a rifle butt as if leaning on a gun was the most natural posture imaginable.
I passed hundreds of parked cars on my way to the front door. This was a couple months after Dylann Roof was accused of killing nine people in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and a week after John Russell Hauser was accused of killing two and wounding nine in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. Gun purchases in America tend to spike after mass shootings and terrorist attacks, because such events heat up the gun control debate.
On this Black Friday — less than a month after the terrorist mass shooting in Paris — gun sales were projected to spike again. There were 50 gun shows listed across the country, and the FBI predicted that gun sellers would run a record 190,000 background checks in a 24-hour period — not that prospective buyers need to undergo a background check to buy guns from private vendors at the Kokomo Gun Show or those in dozens of other states including Florida, Texas, and Ohio.
But background checks are required in Illinois, where my teenage cousin joined a gang and shot someone in 2010. He took his lawyer’s advice not to talk about his case, so I channeled my sadness into learning how Chicago gangs like his get their guns. More of the guns used in Chicago gang shootings come from Indiana than anywhere else.
On paper, buying a gun in Indiana is extremely easy. Go to a gun show, decide on a gun from a seller’s private collection, hand over an Indiana ID and some cash, leave armed. But I didn’t think I, a black woman, would be welcome at a gun show.
Four people sat at the registration table: one white guy in his fifties and three women in their twenties, one of whom was black. Her blackness threw me off nearly as much as the mood outside. We made the sort of eye contact that meant we’d acknowledged each other’s blackness but we weren’t going to bond over it. I paid the $5 admission fee and told the guy, who called me sweetie, that since I didn’t have a gun I didn’t need to check mine while I shop. I turned away from him toward tables filled with more guns than I’d ever seen, forgot how to breathe, and retreated to the bathroom to calm myself behind a locked stall.
Americans like to use big tent metaphors to describe our political affiliations. We paint our values with broad strokes and then point to the many types of people on our side as evidence that we are open-minded, accepting, and correct. Pro-gun advocates are no exception: People in favor of lax gun laws say that since the majority of gun owners are law-abiding, reasonable people, we can overlook the bigots, the criminals, and the domestic terrorists like Robert Lewis Dear, who is accused of killing three people and injuring nine more at a Colorado Planned Parenthood on Black Friday. As long as the lone criminals are white.
Gun ownership is seen as an upstanding white person act.
Last spring, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher trespassing on federal land, faced off with federal agents while armed and suffered no consequences. Same goes for the Oath Keepers, the militia that showed up heavily armed to Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson over the summer, angering local law enforcement — though evidently not as much as unarmed, black Michael Brown. The previous year, John Crawford, III, 22, and Tamir Rice, 12, were shot and killed by police while carrying toy guns in Ohio, an open-carry state. And in the past few years, other unarmed blacks have been killed for offenses such as selling hand-rolled cigarettes and asking for help after a car accident.
Black people aren’t part of the big tent of gun ownership. We’re never assumed to be law abiding, reasonable gun owners. That kind of gun ownership is seen as an upstanding white person act; a picket fence closed to outsiders like blacks. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the slats separating me from perfectly honorable, white people gun show attendance.
The exhibition hall was 27,000 square feet, or about half a football field. The lighting was fluorescent, the folding tables cheap, the guns sold alongside ammunition, knives, extra-strength flashlights, beef and turkey jerky, and lots of camo. There were plenty of private vendors standing behind signs that said Private Collection, Cash Only, No Questions Asked. One vendor tried to sell me one of his lovely retro guns, .38 specials with pearly stocks and long, tapered silver barrels that would look just right in a woman’s hand in a '60s art film. But most of the guns in the room were standard black handguns and rifles.
Kashana Cauley
The room’s demographics: roughly 300 people total, overwhelmingly white guys in their forties to seventies. I saw three white female gun vendors, one South Asian male gun vendor, one black guy selling knives, one black woman selling guns, and one 10-year-old black kid scanning the tables with his white dad. This was a lot more diversity than I expected, but not enough to stop people from staring at me.
“I don’t want to know what it’s like to use them.”
The first person who seemed happy to see me was a biracial female gun vendor who asked me not to print her name. G is 45 years old, half black, half white, and works part-time at a gym. She didn’t often see black people at shows like this, and she was eager to talk about the racial demographics of gun shows. The atmosphere is “conservative,” she told me, and “can feel unwelcoming sometimes.”
Growing up in Indianapolis, G didn’t see the need for guns. Then she moved to Kokomo, less than an hour outside the city, and met her white fiancée. He educated her "on guns and why they’re useful,” and manned the table across the aisle from us. She owns guns, practices shooting them at a nearby range, and keeps them around for protection. “I don’t want to know what it’s like to use them,” she told me. “I’d rather not know. I need the information, but I don’t want to use it.”
Kashana Cauley
I took another lap around the show. The most charitable way to describe the mood was quiet. Gun shoppers are not a talkative group. White men looked at me with cut eyes and pinched mouths, but also at each other. I saw one guy wearing a T-shirt that said It’s Not Racist If It’s True, and looked back at G from halfway across the room. She seemed perfectly comfortable sitting behind her table, and I ached for her anyway, having to see T-shirts like that at shows like this.
I met one friendly white guy, Scott. He said he sells a lot of guns to black women in Ohio and gushed to me about the AR-15. He picked one up, put the gun’s butt on his chin and told me that thanks to its lack of recoil he could fire it in that position if he wanted. I knew I was supposed to get excited about a gun I could fire from my face, so I added some oomph to my smile. He recommended a nearby brewery for lunch. Then I made eye contact with another round of flinty white men and re-entered the malaise that gripped the entire room.
My black dad is a sincere supporter of the Second Amendment. He owns two rifles and two handguns. The rifles are for deer hunting, a typical Wisconsinite passion. The handguns are for home defense. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, a roughly 250,000-person university town, where it was not uncommon for my high school classmates to miss an extra day or two around Thanksgiving to hunt deer. I enjoy venison, especially when cooked in butter. I do not own a gun, but I could.
Kashana Cauley
I’m equally familiar with the uniquely white Midwestern combination of down-home friendliness and suspicion that I encountered at the gun show, in alternating rounds. It’s subtle, but it’s constant, and I felt it for the 23 years I lived there. Sometimes it bubbled into something more, like the fourth grader who called me a nigger at school. But mostly it was the high school and college friends who told me I “wasn’t that black,” and confided in me about their love lives and career dreams. It’s the dizzying swing from Scott and his lunch recommendations to the men who stare at me as if blinking might physically wound them.
It was a 25-year-old woman named Sarah’s job to collect the entry fee and make sure people didn’t steal the guns, which she told me they try to do “all the time.” Sarah didn’t own any guns herself, but she shot friends’ guns in their backyards. Earlier I asked Scott where he shot his guns and he said the same thing: in his backyard. I imagined entire Midwestern towns of people wandering out the back door on summer days to aim bullets into dirt.
Ask white suspicion what it’s afraid of and it smiles frantically.
Later it occurred to me what was missing from this picture: the kind of hunting culture that indicates people plan to shoot something other than each other. There was no mention of deer, or skeet, or fun, or even a significant profit. Scott said he only brings in $40 or $50 a gun. All I found was a vague, room-wide fear that explains how G can be into guns and not want to have to use her guns. The gun show is where that white suspicion arms itself.
Again, my dad’s a home invasion guy, so I kind of understand their fear. And yet I don’t. Ask white suspicion what it’s afraid of and it smiles frantically. It evades the question, and it doubles down on its right to be white, suspicious, and armed. One gun show table held pamphlets for the Oath Keepers, the non-partisan militia whose mission is to protect Americans from being disarmed — using assault rifles. But what it feels like people are most suspicious of is me.
I turned a corner and found an overweight man in his sixties with a thin halo of hair and suspenders holding up his jeans behind a table full of bumper stickers. Confederate flags screamed redly among the black and white right-wing slogans. Here, in the Union state of Indiana, which outlawed slavery in 1820, gun owners embrace the national symbol for being willing to go to war for your right to abuse black people.
“Never Give Up!” one said.
“Deal With It!” said the other.
Looking at those stickers was like being slapped in the face.
I stood there paralyzed long enough to give the impression that I was seriously considering buying something. When I realized that I feared the guy sitting behind the table too much to whip out my phone and photograph the stickers on the spot, I bought one of each so I could take my pictures at home.
Kashana Cauley
I attempted to give off an “I am a badass for standing here and buying your Confederate flags even though you hate me” vibe. But I doubt it covered the nervousness that made my armpit sweat pour down like rain. The vendor didn’t care to make eye contact with me, even when I handed over my $3. He furtively put the cash in his pocket and found a wall to contemplate with great passion.
I stared down hate and it wasn’t worth it. The transaction ended quickly and not soon enough.
In defiance of Confederate flag number one, I gave up. I walked outside and took my first deep breath in hours. But the calm that settled over me upon leaving the gun show disappeared when I remembered the flags in my purse. I was disgusted at myself for giving $3 to a man who despised me, a feeling that made my hands shake on the wheel. For the entire 700-plus mile drive home I never took more than five minutes’ rest from cursing myself for donating money to the Confederate flag cause.
31 Celebrity Fashion Trends That Sadly Didn't Make A Comeback In 2015
So. Much. Satin.
The world saw its fair share of celeb fashion moments in 2015. Taylor Swift and her #squad jumped at every available opportunity to show off the fact that they ~never go out of style~...
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Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images
Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images
27 Things Everyone Who Grew Up In A Russian-Speaking Household Understands
Selyodka pod shuboy, anyone?
The first thing you must do when you get indoors is take off your shoes.
Republic Pictures / CBS Television Distribution
If you don't do that, you risk freezing your ovaries.
Which is apparently real and the direct consequence of walking around barefoot, according to your mum.
Noisey / Via youtube.com
Actually, any ailment is the direct consequence of not wearing your slippers.
Cartoon Network / Via despicabletree.tumblr.com
Should You Marry Lucas Or Nathan Scott From "One Tree Hill"?
♪All you have to do is think of me and have peace of miiiiiiind♪
This Is How Much The NYC Subway Has Changed Over 100 Years
Besides the fare hikes…
1870
Three Lions / Getty Images
1900
Hulton Archive / Getty Images
1910
Hulton Archive / Getty Images
1915
Mac Gramlich / Getty Images
These 1980's NYC Area TV Ads Will Cause The Best Kind Of Flashbacks
Come with Cookie Puss on a voyage into the past.
Who can forget Cookie-Puss?
Young People's Day Camp
Beautiful Mount Airy Lodge.
Victoria Beckham Has Blessed Kim Kardashian's Posh Spice Costume With Her Approval
Let us pray.
Long, long ago, in a prosperous and magical era known as the '90s, a little band called the Spice Girls ruled the world with Girl Power and platform sneakers. It was beautiful.
Bertrand Guay / AFP / Getty Images
If you were blessed enough to live during that time, you know that everyone — EVERYONE — paid homage to the queens by dressing up like them with their four BFFs.
Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty Images
If you had red hair, you always had to be Ginger, if you had blonde hair, you were Baby, etc.
Johnny Eggit / AFP / Getty Images
And it seems Kim Kardashian was no different. She was, unsurprisingly, a Posh.
Instagram: @http://ift.tt/1l2nDqX
21 Dirty "Friends" Jokes That Probably Went Over Your Head The First Time
Time to re-watch.
This wildly inappropriate burn.
Warner Brothers
This super-sly quip.
Warner Brothers
This filthy misunderstanding.
Warner Brothers
This self-fulfilling prophecy.
Warner Brothers
Kiss, Kill, Fuck: Teen Television Edition
WARNING: this quiz is HARD.
NBCUniversal Television Distribution
Warner Bros. Television Distribution
Warner Bros. Television Distribution
43 Things That Mildly Thrill All Students
*Goes to careers office to steal pens*
BuzzFeed/Channel 4
1. The day your student loan comes in when you can go to the supermarket and buy cheese again.
2. When a business does a recruitment talk on campus and you go because there's free food, even though you have no intention of becoming an accountant.
3. Getting free pens from the careers office.
4. Cleanly tearing a piece of paper out of a notepad without ripping the top off.
5. Getting your favourite seat in the library.
6. Making eye contact with ~that~ hot person in the library.
7. Having an entire fictional relationship in your head with ~that~ hot person.
8. When you're broke but have the exact amount of printer credits left to print your essay.
9. Finding a textbook you need for your course at a reasonable price online and/or in the library.
10. Not doing the required reading for a seminar but managing to contribute because you once watched a TV show on the topic four years ago.
11. Waking up five minutes before a lecture starts and discovering it has been cancelled.
12. When someone arrives late to a lecture and the lecturer publicly shames them.
13. (Especially when it's one of your friends).
14. When you get to do a group project with your course friends.
15. Spending a Thursday eating biscuits in bed because YOU CAN.
16. Staying up really late because nobody is going to tell you to go to bed.
17. (Even though you definitely regret it the next day).
18. Getting paid to do weird psychological tests for the university.
19. Getting free toasties from the Christian union and running away before they can get to the Jesus bit.
20. Going to the freshers' fair every year to stock up on pens and condoms even when you're not a fresher.
21. When someone you know is in the student paper.
22. When something scandalous happens at your uni and makes it into the national press.
23. Getting a student discount in a really random shop.
24. Buying something exceptionally fancy from the discount section of the supermarket like smoked salmon or an entire cheesecake.
25. Discovering that the fancy thing you treated yourself to hasn't been eaten by your sneaky housemates.
26. Inventing a new way to cook noodles that doesn't look and taste like vomit.
27. When there is a fire alarm in your student halls and you get to see who sheepishly comes out of someone else's room.
28. When your housemate cleans.
29. Eating pasta straight from the saucepan because fuck dishes.
30. When a local neighbourhood cat decides to bless your student house and visits you every day.
31. Putting the central heating on.
32. When your parents come to visit and take you out for dinner.
33. When your parents take you to Sainsbury's and you act like you're on Supermarket Sweep.
34. Buying two pints in a student bar and getting change from a fiver.
35. When proper vodka is on offer so you don't end up drinking that horrendous Basics one that tastes like paint stripper.
36. "Inventing" the Basics Vodka and Basics Squash cocktail.
37. When two of your housemates get off with each other.
38. Purposefully saying something ridiculous during Never Have I Ever so you can catch your friend out.
39. Waking up after a heavy night without a hangover.
40. Setting an alarm for a 17-minute nap.
41. Reading weeks where you do nothing for six days and then do all the reading on the last day.
42. When you come up with your dissertation title at the last minute and your supervisor doesn't immediately laugh you out of the room.
43. Actually handing in your dissertation.
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