To those who have swept or have blown the leaves from the walk, have rinsed the dishes or dusted their screens, Hestia looks on you from beneath her veil. She smiles, then wraps a shawl made of sunlit October air around you.
To those who remain in bed, who are on the edge of crying, who have turned on the tv to drown out the world, Hestia sits on the edge of your bed, patting circles on your back. I know, my love, she says, I know, I know. It can be so hard. My sweet, it’s time to get up. I need you, she says. Let’s make this home a sanctuary. Light a candle. Make your hands to care about this place. Let out the work of love.
you know the advice that if an outfit feels like too much, take one thing away? that’s how Bruce gets ready for WE board meetings. he puts on whatever suit Alfred picked out for him that day and then he removes one thing: one accessory, or even just straight up one article of clothing. sometimes more than one.
examples:
three piece suit? jacket’s gone. what jacket? this was meant to be worn as a set? oh well
no more socks, even with dress shoes. he’s flashing ankles at anyone who looks under the table
ties, Bruce Wayne is actually never seen with one so when he adds one people know it’s serious
dress shirts, he goes avant garde and does the no-shirt deep-plunge blazer look for a 7 am meeting
this all helps carefully balance Bruce Wayne’s image as someone devoted and serious but also whimsical and somewhat ridiculous and therefore not a threat. and it works, every single time.
when i was a kid rummaging thru my mums cd collection to steal Good Stuff i accidentally stumbled across one called ‘songs for bonking’ which was coloured awful negative neon picture of ppls feet on top of each other in a bed and ALL the songs were like fucking ska punk
my uh, close internet friend broke up with his girlfriend over financial things but the more he describes it the more i think its insane he ever stayed. She wanted to be engaged before they even moved in with each other, no prenup, she’s 60k in debt, he has like 100k in assets, she’s a Divorce Laywer. Can you imagine getting rushed into marriage by a divorce lawyer. lmao.
Remember the way they treated MLK at the time, too.
And even when he did march in suits?
And, of course, he was assassinated anyway.
Respectability politics is always a trap, and they will always try to rewrite history to make it sound like they were playing fair the whole time.
I feel like we kinda glazed over the EXTREMELY racist idea that MLK wore a suit because he was “presenting his movement” rather than because they were ordinary and expected dress for his social class.
I’m going to harp on this actually because MLK wearing a suit actually did piss a lot of people off who thought Black people shouldn’t be in suits. If MLK wanted to dress in a way that would piss off the minimum number of (white) people it would not be in a suit because the suits were themselves controversial (among white racists). It wasn’t some cynical ploy to appear presentable to white people and so it can’t have been successful or unsuccessful in that capacity, but you actually could have raised the same argument against MLK in his time dressing in a way that (if you’re the most self-centred and racist person in the world, which the average American was then and is now) can be construed as designed to piss off members of an oppressor class.
MLK was a Baptist minister and the leader of civil rights organisations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the only reason that a guy like that wouldn’t be wearing a suit is because he was Black and thus, regardless of all his other accomplishments, expected to dress in a way that did not convey authority over white people. In public he and all Black people were expected to dress in a way that conveyed subservience, not authority. His suit was a claim to equality to similar white church leaders and people were not pissed off at him despite that, but because of it.
