Amazing good stories out there, reminds me for the thousandth time the power of a good story. I wish I had read these stories earlier, when my friend was going through PPD and before I went into labor myself. I think I was trying too hard to only read and hear stories about easy childbirth and easy motherhood, so as not to "scare" myself. But in the end I went through a desperate labor, delivery, and 2 weeks of first-time-motherhood with no playbook and a sneaking suspicion that it would never get better. Everyone said the words I hated most: "It gets better," and every time I heard that I would hear a voice in my head say, "Only if you survive that long." But here I am on the other side of those promises, just like I made it to the other side of infertility treatments, and probably the only way I made it, like most of the women whose stories I read, is by asking for and sometimes demanding help. Yeah, I pretty much made people help me, except for those who couldn't. It probably saved me and R. But we're not done yet.
This week, we got around to talking about the indigenous peoples of Japan. Concepts that we touched on: - “Assimilation” - “History is written by the winners,” and therefore - “Losers are depicted by the winners.” - “ethnic groups” - “minorities” In the first half of the class, we watched a movie – 『もののけ姫』(Princess Mononoke) – which was the most popular movie in Japan until Titanic came out afterwards. It was also the most expensive animated movie to make, up until its release date (2004), at a production cost of about $20 million. I introduced the movie by talking about the setting – Muromachi Period (1336-1573), roughly contemporary with the Ming Dynasty and the arrival of C. Columbus in what is now known as the Caribbean. The main character of the movie is an Emishi prince, from a clan of natives who have continued to resist the Japanese Shogunal government. (Historians say that the Emishi natives were all assimilated by 1300.) The main character of the movie is based on a historica...
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