WE ARE THE ONES WITH THE PROBLEM HERE

I want to give y'all a history lesson.

Actually, I want to give y'all a thousand history lessons, but I'm not sure if I can. I don't even know if I have that many inside me, just the desire, and I could extend this one, singular history lesson all the way to like, Mesopotamia if I tried, but we're gonna shorten that time length so I don't lose you--all the way down to the 1800s.

Mainly, the British Raj period, with the colonization of India. I know you're sitting there behind your screen, thinking to yourself, "Jo(e), I am devastatingly in love with you and all that you have to say, but I gotta ask, what's the point in this?" And I'm telling you, I'm getting there. It'll be worth it.

If there's one thing that can define the British, it's their incessant attempts to colonize literally everywhere, and while it's not only the British, that's what this lesson is on, because the British were there in the 1800s with their petticoats and blouses and Christianity, and they attempted to eradicate other cultures and spread their own religion everywhere, including India, which is why they refer to cilantro as the objectively wrong term of coriander, and it's this giant messy period of colonization that also lends itself to a lot of shared language. The word for pajamas is from India. In Japan, curry is recognized as a Western dish because while it is from India, it was brought by the British, so it's associated with them. Hilarious stuff, but not quite the point of this story.

A relatively small example--traditional Indian saris were unstitched bits of fabric only meant to cover the lower half of the body. This makes sense, because India is not typically categorized as a chilly place, and especially if the woman wearing it was a mother, the fabric could easily get in the way. Enter British colonization, and they insisted that this was indecent. Inappropriate. Now saris have blouses--and this seems like a relatively small example of what they've done because we have things