Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“We'd been living under a dictatorship since 1964, and all the country's companies, schools and clubs were run along military lines: someone at the top gave the orders and you just did what you were told. We had to invent democracy by doing democracy.” - Walter Casagrande, Brazil

“The flow is constant. Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.“

“It's vital we learn to navigate interactions marked by conflict, and practice standing firm in the face of negative reactions from others. As long as we haven't abused anyone or violated their rights, it's okay for our actions to make others unhappy. After all, neurotypical people step on conversational toes and continue breezily along all the time.”

“Ever since, there has been a sense of soccer trying to recapture the spirit of 1970 […] The 1970 World Cup looks different from every subsequent World Cup because not every surface is covered in advertising. The marketing was not slick, the presentation was imperfect, and in that ramshackle aspect there was perhaps a charm: The soccer, by and large, came first.”

“Here, overtly, was the imperial lion transformed into something cheeky and welcoming—but it was also a commercial ploy, a mascot whose image could transform anything from T-shirts to tea towels into a salable souvenir: imperialism first defanged by an increasingly classless irreverence and then repackaged as commercial junk.”

“What is a love story without immense columns of flame rising into the Florida night?”

May was the Tallahassee + We Shall All Be Healed chapter.

“Brazil is a land of myth, a place where objective fact struggles for traction, and few have been so mythologized as Pelé.”

“But when we look at time as a series of cycles or spirals with goals that are ever-shifting, we can recognize that the learning and reflection we put into an aborted project (or even into masking) often pays off, just not in the way we expected. Every disappointment or failure teaches us something about what we want, and what is best for us.”

“For if it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.”

“If an adult fills their evenings after work learning to code or creating jewelry that they sell on Etsy, they're seen as enterprising. But if someone instead devotes their free time to something that gives them pleasure but doesn't financially benefit anyone, it's seen as frivolous or embarrassing, even selfish.”

“Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France. That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.“

“What non-Autistic folks often don’t realize is that Autistic people experience intense sensory input as if it were physical pain.”

“Hiding self-destructiveness behind a mountain of achievements isn't functioning, not really. The very concept of ‘functioning status’ is predicated on the logic of capitalism and the legacy of the Protestant work ethic, which both have trained us to believe that a person's productivity determines their worth.”

“Apparently the Radical Liberty answer to, ‘Help, I'm dying,’ is, ‘Well, you should have packed better.’”

“My hope is that one day, each of us can accept ourselves as the wonderfully weird, mold-breaking individuals we truly are, and live as ourselves, without fear of ostracism or violence. […] When you stop judging yourself according to the neurotypical gaze, everything from your relationship norms and daily habits, to the way you dress yourself and design your home is free to change.”

“All Hail West Texas is probably my most political album; its politics favor the people who don't have the means to escape the grinding gears of the system. Those are still my politics, which I was learning to articulate as things got, I think it's fair to say, worse.”

“As it turns out, even waiting expectantly for a sudden, violent death gets boring after a while.”

“How did ‘indie’ music get from Pavement to Carly Rae? After retracing that path—the softened Hollywood version of ‘indie’ that emerged after The O.C., the eclectic influence of MP3-era technology, the way a thrift-store fashion sense and the hipster archetype worked their way into mass culture—what sticks out most are issues of social class and self-definition.”

“The short answer is that I've always believed it's important to accept the people in your life for what they are. There's no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there's any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you're going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.”

“We look too much with our eyes, and not enough with our spirits.” - Rita Mestokosho

“How we imagine the matter of water matters. To recognize its ceaseless migrancy is to recognize that we live in a fundamentally decentralized world, engaged always in multiple forms of relation - and that power can be crucial in determining the capacity of those relations to animate or to exhaust their participants. The hydrological cycle comprises violence as well as vapour, injustice as well as precipitation.”

"To change a landscape for the better, you must first have the ability to dream — to dream a good dream. […] Before the people of Ennore Creek can shape a good future for this place, they need to be helped to dream again.”