Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
“When Jose Zelaya was 6 years old, while living through the ravages of the civil war in El Salvador, he told his mother that one day he would work for Mickey Mouse. Zelaya made it happen - over 30 years later, he is a character designer at Disney animating The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar.
‘I grew up drawing war pictures with people shooting each other,’ said Zelaya in an interview with NBC Latino. ‘It was so normal to see a helicopter being shot down and then drawing it. I still grew up thinking we lived in a good world because watching cartoons taught me that.’
‘Drawing came really easy to me, especially because it became a means of surviving bullies. I was identified as one of the kids that could draw, so they targeted me and would mess with me until I drew something for them.’
At just 20 years old, Zelaya got his first major role animating for one of Disney’s staple Saturday morning cartoons, Recess. He designed the character Spinelli, whom he based off his friend Mara from middle school.
‘In 1996, when I broke into the industry, animators were regarded as rock stars,’ he said proudly. ‘At the time it was very easy for me to start working because there was a huge demand for animators; it was like the animation boom.’
Because cartoons taught Zelaya to have faith in finding good-natured people in the world, entering cartoon animation became more than just his career. Animation is an opportunity for Zelaya to give children an educational escape.”
Y A S 🇸🇻💙
Hey, this post may contain sexually explicit content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.
I don’t think people get art. I feel like people think art is something created by a tortured soul and you have to go out of your way to go to an art gallery and you have some kind of emotional response and that’s art.
But that’s bullshit
You walk into a grocery store and you’re surrounded by art. Who do you think designs the packages? Fucking artists. Who do you think designed your house? Your bedsheets? Your car? Artists.
Art is a necessity. It’s everywhere, we wear it, we talk about it, we live in it. It’s everywhere. Every color, negative space, font, placement, material, you come into contact with an artist had a hand in that. TV, movies, music, graphics, It’s everywhere, it’s everything
-seriously from california to new mexico is terrifying like it’s eight straight hours of pale red desert and the sky is so large that everything, even your car, even your hands, looks like a tenuously small and fragile diorama placed on an endless pale red table and left there to dissolve.
-a gas station that for some reason has large dinosaurs made out of scrap metal. they are 1000% awesome. sometimes they move. take a million pictures.
-a fruit stand that sells the best fruit you have ever eaten. later you won’t quite remember which fruit. strawberries, maybe? peaches?
-small black birds, subtly different in every state. some have gold eyes and some are a little iridescent and some are black from beak to toes. the sparrows they compete with for crumbs look exactly the same wherever you go.
-a completely empty rest stop. no one eats at the concrete tables. no one plays in the tiny strip of grass or gravel. you will find a small and beautiful stone.
-a hawaii license plate, somewhere around ohio. i still don’t know how they get the cars across the ocean. i don’t know why anyone would leave hawaii for ohio. i don’t know why anyone lives in ohio.
-an incredibly weird duck. you had no idea ducks could look so incredibly weird, and you wish you were still ignorant of how incredibly weird ducks can, apparently, look.
-a small folksy roadside waystation that sells fudge and incredibly tacky statues of eagles and wolves and cowboys. if you like fudge, eat the fudge from here.
-a lizard doing pushups. if you are particularly fortunate: many lizards doing pushups.
-approximately one gajillion starbucks shops. don’t bother counting them. it will make you angry.
-a storm somewhere around oklahoma, if you’re lucky. the clouds tower up in fantastic fluffy castles miles and miles into the air and are painted pink and gold and purple and the sky turns a dozen impossible shades of blue and when the rain comes down over your car it sounds like the world is ending.
-weird burrs will stick to your legs. you’ll flick them out of the car eighty or eight hundred miles from where their parent plant was grown, and not be sure whether you should wish the little hitchikers well or not.
-a dog wearing sunglasses with his head hanging out of a car window. this will be the high point of the trip.
-the world’s most depressing restaurant. you will know it when you wind up there and have to eat the terrible food, and listen to the terrible music, and look at all the listless waiters and want to tell them get in my car, for god’s sake get in, i’ll take you out of whatever crapsack little town this is that you can’t get out of on your own. but you won’t say that because it’s rude. maybe they have family here. maybe they even like it here.
-a painting of a sailboat in a motel located at least a hundred miles from any significant body of water.
-several genuinely hilarious postcards. buy them.
-a cat that will not let you pet it. this will be the low point of the trip.
-corn. so much corn you will get scared. who the fuck is going to eat all this corn?
-a small stream in some small woods and the light will come down perfectly and the water will be beautiful and the grass will be beautiful and there will be flowers maybe or the leaves of the trees are starting to turn gold and there are birds chirping and it will be so perfect you will want to stand there and stay forever and live in this little magical painting off the side of the highway and be some kind of highway druid. but instead, you’ll get bored after a while, and get back in the car.
if anyone ever wonders why i love america so much despite its many political and cultural flaws, this is why. this post explains it perfectly.
Though the women at Seattlish all hover around 30, we often look to teens to teach us things because a.) teens know a hell of a lot of stuff and everyone should listen to them, and b.) this particular generation is feminist AF and they’re going to change the world. We have a lot of faith in today’s young people.
So when NUMEROUS people sent us the links to this incredibly powerful shirt—made by local teens!—we were like “fuuuuuuuuuuck we need to ask these teens some questions.”
And we did! And they answered! And surprise: They’re really smart and powerful and we love them!
Here’s the interview.
Tell me who you are. (Name, how old, what you do, etc).
Our names are Greta (18), Alex (17), and Taya (18). We are high school seniors at the Northwest School in Capitol Hill. Greta founded the Northwest School Literary Magazine and can usually be found hanging out in a forest. Alex spends her time taking photos and talking about politics. She is a dedicated viewer of Shonda Rhimes’ TGIT shows (all of them). Greta and Alex are co-leaders of the Northwest School Feminist Interest Group (FIG). Taya is a soccer star who plays for Crossfire Premier. She loves to watch Shameless and she wants to be an OB GYN. We all have a passion for reproductive rights.
Who designed the shirt? Where did the idea come from?
We were assigned an open-ended activism project in which the only requirement was to create change within our school community. The three of us immediately realized our common interest in reproductive rights. The uterus concept was a group idea. From the start our project, we wanted to focus on depoliticizing reproductive organs. Greta drew and designed the shirt. When we discussed the text to go beneath, we discussed how we’ve felt our bodies fought over politically our entire lives, and wanted to include a message that could help to fight back against that.
On a not-so-happy note, we were also influenced by how pressing a matter reproductive rights is today. We see this in the recent Supreme Court case that threatens the rights created with Roe v Wade, the physical and governmental attacks on Planned Parenthood, and policies such as the tampon tax.
At least 15 people sent me this shirt because, like, people know what I’m into and uteruses is on the list—which means probably I imagine the response has been huge. Have you been surprised by the response?
It has come as a big surprise to us. When we ordered our first batch to sell at the school, we were worried about being able to sell all 65 shirts; however, we sold out entirely within the first day and had a waiting list 35 people long. Due to this large interest, we decided it would be most expedient to set up a website for people to order their shirts. We expected something like 30 orders, but have received about 1000 (and counting!) in the 5 days since we set up the website. We are really excited about the level of interest we’ve received––we have a folder dedicated just to nice emails people have been sending us. Big shoutout to Donald, who emailed us to let us know he bought 5 shirts “even though [he is] a MAN !!!”
What does your school think? What about your classmates?
Our school and classmates have been hugely supportive. We are so privileged to go to a school that not only prioritizes teaching students about social inequities, but that allows for us to take initiative within our activism. It is hugely telling that this started out as a school project, because this is exactly the kind of thing Northwest wants us to be able to achieve during our time at the school. As for our classmates, the fact that guys in our class bought and have been wearing the shirt just as much as the girls says a lot. It’s been a project that has spurred interest across gender lines, and our class has been great about actively participating.
Heroic teens (from left to right) Taya, Greta, and Alex
What are you doing next?
For the moment, we’re just catching up to this influx of interest. However, we’re planning on opening up our horizons more in May. We can’t commit to anything publicly just yet, but we can probably say that we’ve gotten a really remarkable number of requests for tote bags and stickers.
If you could tell everyone who’s been sharing the shirt one thing, what would it be?
We’d tell them to keep talking. Equally as much as we hope to be able to make a large donation to Planned Parenthood, we hope that these shirts can start conversations. We’re excited to say that we’ve seen this begin to happen already. We personally have had the privilege of being able to engage with anti-choice believers who have deposited themselves in our inbox, and we’ve received anecdotes from our friends and family that confirm that this shirt has been a conversation starter for them as well. One of our siblings was just informed by an administrator that the shirt was “toeing the dress code line” (this is after he had to teach the administrator what the image on the shirt depicts). If we want to see serious change in this country with how we handle reproductive rights, then we need to normalize these conversations and stop treating our bodies as taboo subjects.
Anything else we should know?
This isn’t just a women’s fight or issue. We want our customers to remember that issues of reproductive rights cross gender lines––men, women, and people outside the gender binary all suffer from the attacks on Planned Parenthood. We’d encourage people to check out the ‘resources’ page on our site to learn more!
