I started Hebrew, which is why I’ve been dead on this blog, but I don’t think I can ever properly convey to you guys the sheer cultural whiplash of spending years learning Japanese from Japanese teachers and then trying to learn Hebrew from an Israeli

Japanese: you walk into class already apologizing for being alive
Hebrew: you walk into class, the teacher insults you and you are expected to insult her back

Japanese: conjugates every single verb based on degree of intended politeness, nevermind keigo and honorifics
Hebrew:
Someone asked my teacher how to say “excuse me” and she laughed for
several seconds before saying we shouldn’t worry about remembering that
since we’ll never need to say it

Japanese: if you get one stroke wrong the entire kanji is incomprehensible
Hebrew: cursive? script? fuck it do whatever you want, you don’t even have to write the vowels out unless you feel like it

Japanese: the closest thing there is to ‘bastard’ is an excessively direct ‘you’ pronoun
Hebrew: ‘bitch’ translates directly

Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score

Jodie Foster, 1977.

“Furthermore, selfhood is not limited just to animals
with brains. Plants are also selves. Nor is it coterminous with a
physically bounded organism. That is, selfhood can be distributed over
bodies (a seminar, a crowd, or an ant colony can act as a self), or it
can be one of many other selves within a body (individual cells have a
kind of minimal selfhood).”

— Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think

The last surviving sea silk seamstress

“My grandmother wove in me a tapestry
that was impossible to unwind,” Vigo said. “Since then, I’ve dedicated
my life to the sea, just as those who have come before me.”

Like the 23 women before her, Vigo has never made a penny from her
work. She is bound by a sacred ‘Sea Oath’ that maintains that byssus
should never be bought or sold.

Instead, Vigo explained that the only way to receive byssus is as a gift. […]

“Byssus doesn’t belong to me, but to everyone,” Vigo asserted.
“Selling it would be like trying to profit from the sun or the tides.”

More recently, a Japanese businessman approached Vigo with an offer
to purchase her most famous piece, ‘The Lion of Women’, for €2.5
million. It took Vigo four years to stitch the glimmering 45x45cm design
with her fingernails, and she dedicated it to women everywhere.

“I told him, ‘Absolutely not’,” she declared. “The women of the world are not for sale.”

The last surviving sea silk seamstress