My brother, my captain, my king

I have finally reached a very satisfactory end to a relatively shitty day, shitty in both the literal and figurative sense. I went to two doctors today, one of whom gave me no real advice on my stomach ("Try eating no food except popcicles for a day and see if that makes it better." "Alas, you seem to have forgotten that I JUST TOLD YOU that I have eaten nothing but nothing since FOUR WEEKS AGO, and I have to go to work tomorrow without fainting, but whatever.") and the other of whom advised me that I might have a yeast infection as a follow-up to my other mysterious infection, contrary to the opinion of a different doctor. Good times abounded. I came home and ate some crackers, and felt quite nauseous.

And then.

LORD OF THE RINGS. HOLY EFF.

Here is the only thing nerdier than going to see The Fellowship of the Ring remastered in theaters for one night only with your younger brother:

Composing an essay on the environmentalism of Jackson's interpretation of Tolkien's fantasy world in your heard during the entire movie.

While composing your own answer, should you choose to do so, you might want to reflect on certain scenes, which might help if you're seeing the whole thing remastered and on a gigantic screen, so you can drool at the awesomeness of the gigantic landscape shots and the BEAUTIFUL landscape contained therein.

Things to consider would include:

-The Shire's/the Hobbits' obvious connection to nature
-Saruman = evil = a symbol of industrialization and the destruction of nature (cf "a wizard should know better")
-The GORGEOUS landscape shots throughout, as previously mentioned

HOWEVER, you should also consider that:

-Even though the Ringwraiths are destroyed by natural elements--fire, water--they still ride horses, who seem down with that even though all the other animals are afraid of them, like that one cute dog, who backs away while wagging her tail frantically. Good dog. Good acting skillz.
-The Ringwraiths have a weird affinity with nature too--see the Nazgul and also that super weird time when the little hobbits are hiding under a log and all these bugs come out and Elijah Wood's face gets all fat, so that's weird
-The Crebain! From Dunland! They are aminals/nature, but they are EVIL AND MEAN
-Also, why do Jackson's Uruk Hai get borned out of mud? Because that suggests a connection to nature too, albeit a kind of gross one, which messes up my whole nature is good/industry is evil paradigm.

My conclusion is that like good and evil in the film, nature is polarized too, suggesting that EVERYTHING has free will and agency but also that good and evil are fairly black and white. But since it's Tolkien and since we're a Western audience, the evil things are crows and wolves, things Westerners have typically vilified, so there's that too and it's kind of unfair. Typically, though, nature is good (cf the Ents) and industry/mining is evil, which makes perfect sense to me.

OTHER THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE BEAUTY THAT IS THE LORD OF THE RINGS:

-I have SO DESPERATELY missed the sound of a theater full of people sobbing quietly while Gandalf and later Boromir die tragically.
-I myself was tempted to cry at these scenes for the first time in my life, but the best I could do was make weird sobbing noises which just made me want to throw up rather than cry. Probably I'm too dehydrated for tears.
-I feel like I FINALLY GET IT. Because when I saw these movies ten years ago and I was all little, I loved the ANGST and the VIOLENCE and the EMO PARTS OF IT, but I feel like it just clicked in my head that this movie/these books are a reflection of the world as it is. Just like The Road. They're fictional places and characters and worlds, but the things the characters go through--the confusion, doubt, fear, despair, whatever--are just reflections of our own lives.
-I tried to make a list of all the things the Ring could symbolize, but mostly (and predictably) I just settled on how having it is like having depression.
-Why does Aragorn son of Arathorn wear a black glove on his RIGHT HAND ONLY. By the end of his awesome battle, though, his left hand is so grimy that it's black, so maybe that counts.
-I spent the entire troll battle scene trying to figure out if it was wearing a loincloth like I'd always thought or if I had just seen these giant dangling troll balls. Turns out it's a loincloth--but a rather diaper-ish and therefore quite bulging loincloth, so it almost doesn't count, maybe.
-Also, the first time I saw these in theaters, the characters weren't my bros yet. Now, after we all successfully got through high school together, we really are bros. I want to reach through the screen and give my bros a hug and tell them it's going to be okay and sit there and cry and cry and cry. Or at least make weird little sobbing/vomiting noises with my poor kidnapped/ring-carrying/arrowed/Heir of Gondor-esque babies.

In conclusion, Lord of the Rings once again saves both my life and my testimony. Aww.

AND I CAN'T BELIEVE I WAITED A YEAR IN BETWEEN EACH ONE no wonder I saw the first one nine times in theaters HOW AM I GOING TO WAIT A WEEK EVEN THOUGH I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS GAH.

The end.

Africa pics + apologies for this post being so long

Once upon a time, I went to Africa. I put a bunch of boring pictures on my facebooks, but here are some pretentious artsy pictures that aren't very good because my darkness compensation setting was waaaaay too high. Or low. Whichever one means that most of them are too dark. Also, JUDGE ME I'M SO SORRY THIS POST IS SO LONG but it's just pictures and not words so try not to be too overwhelmed. MY HEARTFELT APOLOGIES NONETHELESS.

First of all, pictures from the kids' schools at Touba, the Mouride holy city:

















Now pictures of the giant super old mosque at Touba.

First, Flor, a girl who worked for/was related to the Senegalese author who set this all up for us, being super hot:



Now some dude sleeping by one of the entrances, because mosques are cool because people just go there to sleep and hang out and be generally awesome:



Peeps from our group:



Beggar kids outside the mosque:



And now for ten thousand pictures of the cutest kids in the world, i.e. the kids in the Peul village that we visited while we were in Saint Louis. On our first night there, they had a huge celebration and all the kids dressed up in traditional clothes and had a huge dance party, so here are the pictures of that.















Kids looking at Mme Thompson in her new boubou, probably because white people don't usually wear boubous, which is the traditional and super awesome clothes that people wear all the time. Boubous are GORGEOUS.













OH HEY ARE YOU STILL THERE KEEP HANGING IN THERE THE END IS ALMOST NIGH
By which I mean there are still like fifteen more deal with it.

Here is a woman at the dying tiny village on top of a mountain where it was pretty and windy:



And Charles, a little boy who followed us around the whole time we were there and balanced this lumpy thing on his head perfectly, while scrambling up and down the rocky mountain:



In Saly, at poet/president/incredibly crazy person Leopold Senghor's house:



At seashell island, aka the island made entirely of seashells, even though I don't know that you can tell how seashelly it was in these pictures:







Pretty flowers by the hotel pool:



And some final pictures of Dakar:







The end! Congrats if you made it to the bottom of the page.