“After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: if anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls from our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”
Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look, Washington Post, July 28, 2025
Gift link. Written by someone who is clearly one of us.
“And what makes the form feel especially lovely is that each of these stories is a gift. Someone, somewhere has toiled, and perhaps giggled, over their keyboard. The only glory in it for them is the hope that their words might intrigue, arouse or amuse you. They’re stirring the old storytelling soup because it’s nourishing but also, even more important, because it’s delicious.”
Hello! I made a dress from scratch for the Renaissance Faire. It took me six months to make the chemise, hoop skirt, under skirt, over skirts, French knot embroidered bodice, crown and jewelry. I am very excited to wear it this year despite how serious I look in the photos!
One time when I was a kid I had to leave a zombie survival forum because it became all too clear that I was the only one there for whom the zombie apocalypse was a fun hypothetical thought exercise and not a very real imminent apocalypse, like, people there were in the process of actually purchasing bunkers. I think of this because recently on discord I saw a man throw a straight-up tantrum because his idea to use caltrops on zombies wasn’t being taken seriously
I’d just assumed that I’d die early on in a zombie apocalypse but given some of the near-suicidal plans I’ve seen coming out of “survivalists” like “climb the Golden Gate Bridge, blast music to attract them, leave caltrops all over the bridge to slow them, and huck bricks at them” or “start a forest fire to distract them,” I’m starting to think that I could probably survive with my plan of just keeping to myself and not altering my lifestyle in any way, since that plan doesn’t start with scaling a tall bridge while carrying hundreds of bricks
I think that was Mac and Charlie from always sunny
I hate myself for my first thought being that the caltrops of course wouldn’t deter them, because zombies have no sense of pain and no drive for self-preservation. Instead of a slow shambling thing coming toward you, you’d have a slightly slower shambling thing coming toward you with a nail in its foot.
Look, you’re preaching to the converted here, that’s like, the #3 thing everyone told that guy, right after “no matter how strong you are you are not going to be able to hoist several hundred bricks onto the golden gate bridge” and “you stand a better chance of surviving any kind of creature out to Get you if you do not actively lure them to your location”
He also at one point suggested the same basic plan, but this time with a big tank of gasoline that he would pour on the climbing zombies trying to reach him, and then light. He, of course, did not take it well when everyone’s responses fell into the following three categories:
“so now, instead of regular zombies after you, you’ll have on-fire zombies after you. This is, in your view, a safer scenario?”
“gasoline can be used to power vehicles and electrical generators, but you’re going to waste gallons of it on THIS?”
“you described this plan as Flawless but I see a pretty big flaw in it: the part where you trap yourself on a platform and then light a giant bonfire directly under it”
I can admit now that I do know this guy wasn’t trolling, mostly because if he was, he was doing a really bad job. He just came in with such CONFIDENCE that he was smarter than everyone else in the chat, such derision and open contempt for everyone who was like “I would try and conserve resources, remain hidden, and encounter as few zombies as possible,” and you know how guys who think they’re smarter than everybody fall for this trap every single time. All we had to do is ask how caltrops worked and he immediately got in an argument with himself, lost, and immediately came up with a new, dumber plan
Based on this post and the notes, I’m glad “finding out your pals on a zombie survival forum are not actually just having a fun thought experiment” was more common than I thought.
