Anyone else ever trap their bestie in an amulet and then panic?
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO DEATH AND THE MAIDEN!
And on top of that, happy halloween, and also TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY so if you haven’t read my webcomic yet, maybe check it out as as birthday treat for me!!
It’s been approximately three years since I started posting Death and the Maiden. I’ve published about 150 pages and I have something like 75 left to draw. I’ll be here next year, but this might be the second-to-last anniversary we celebrate!
Finally - THANK YOU SO MUCH for reading!! This would be pointless without you.
God they cut off all the internet and cellular networks in Gaza
We are isolated now’: Communications lost with many parts of Gaza (from Al Jazeera’s live update, by reporter Tareq Abu Azzoum, 16:25 GMT)
We don’t know about anything that is happening in other districts in the territory. Maybe there are new bombardments taking place in these areas. We don’t know how many victims. We can only hear bombardments everywhere, but we don’t know any anything about the casualties, about the situation on the ground.
We don’t know anything also about the medical conditions of doctors, medical workers, even at the Al-Shifa Hospital [the largest in Gaza]. The situation is catastrophic right now. We can no longer communicate with the international community to send our voice to the world to know what is happening on the ground. I hope that this message might reach and have an access to the world despite what we have experienced throughout the last hour.
We are now in a hospital and we are going to be live by satellite as much as we can and every single hour. So please, if you can hear us, send that message to the world that we are isolated now in Gaza. We don’t have any phone signals. We don’t have any internet connections. We found great difficulty even to communicate and contact with our relatives in different parts of the territory.
Journalists here, even the citizens inside the hospital, they don’t have any access to the networks. They don’t have any kind of communication even with their neighbors. There is a great problem in the network connections. We don’t know how it’s dropped. We don’t know if it was targeted.
The situation on the ground is really terrible. Everyone is afraid, everyone is terrified. Please ,guys, if you can hear us send this message to the world that we are becoming isolated.
Al Jazeera currently only has sporadic communication with correspondents in Gaza following the latest strikes on the besieged enclave.
In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”
