What I didn’t know at the time was that this is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.”
I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow.
I recently had a conversation with my older cousin of 4 years, discussing how my generation of teenagers never got a “revolutionary” musical of our time, as she did with Spring Awakening. Well we did, actually:
Kids born in the late 40′s and 50′s got to experience West Side Story in their teens, a revolutionary show about teenagers in love, stricken by gangs and racial differences.
Kids born in the 60′s got to experience A Chorus Line, a revolutionary show about young adults desperate to succeed in what makes them complete.
Kids born in the late 70′s and 80′s got to experience Rent, a revolutionary show about young adults and the struggle to maintain an artistic and free lifestyle in a rapidly changing society.
Kids born in the early 90′s got to experience Spring Awakening, a revolutionary show about teenagers like them, struggling to communicate and express their emotions with adults, set to modern music.
What do we late 90′s kids get, huh? Well I’ll tell you- we get a revolutionary show …about the revolution. We get Hamilton- a show about young adults who just so happen to be the Founding Fathers. Told in a way that we millennials, even now, can directly relate to.
So just because I wasn’t quite old enough to understand Spring Awakening, and too young to experience the phenomenon that Rent was in the late 90′s, doesn’t mean that I missed out on that “revolutionary” show of the generation. That’s why I care about Hamilton. Sitting in the front row of the Richard Rodgers Theatre on July 17th, 2015, at one of the show’s first Broadway previews, with my favorite person in the world sitting right next to me, changed my life. The very same way that “that one special show” had been changing young adults of the generations before me.
Headcanon that McGonagall is offended on a personal level that Umbridge loves cats.
This literally got 600 more notes just while I was at dinner what the fuck
How has nobody thought about this before tbh
Ok but imagine McGonagall in cat form prowling around the castle, in strategically chosen places so that Umbridge will come across her.
Umbridge takes the cat back to her office and feeds it a little saucer of milk. The cat starts coming back to Umbridge’s office around the same time every night, until eventually Umbridge gets into a little routine of setting out a saucer of milk for the cat before bed.
McGonagall now has all the best secrets on Umbridge, all of the results of the evaluations, and most importantly, is in a perfect position to spy on the ministry for the Order of the Phoenix.
All because Umbridge is obsessed with cats.
The mental image McGonagall lapping up that milk while full of burning hatred for Umbridge amuses me in ways I can hardly describe.
Beg and watch the first teaser for the second season of Marvel’s Daredevil, which features a first look at Elodie Young’s Elektra and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher.
If you call yourself a Kingsman fan, please do yourself a favour and watch this.
Utter perfection.
If you aren’t a fan of Kingsman, but you love perfect video editing, you need to see this. I can’t believe how amazing this is. I’m gonna watch it again.
This. Is. Porn. Admittedly, anything I watch looks like porn to me, but this. Is. P O R N.
