aallora

[aallora]

into the opal ocean of your dreams

(process shots and the full res version of this artwork are on my patreon)

[aallora]

reblog this to put a silly little wizard hat on the person you reblogged it from

[aallora]

Anastasia Trusova on Instagram

[aallora]

Mrow

[aallora]

the tension between me and the mutual scrolling through tumblr at the same time

[aallora]

Kittens from Impressive Title

[aallora]

  NOW LET’S ALL AGREE TO NEVER BE CREATIVE AGAIN.

THERE’S A TIME AND A PLACE FOR MUCKING AROUND.

now put together for convenient reference

The Notebook - Tony the Talking Clock - design credit

[aallora]

you can deal so much damage by just switching articles. “i’m so hungry, i could eat the horse.” one-hit k.o.

[aallora]

it’s not about that i know how to do laundry. it’s that when i was four i knew how to fold clothes; small hands working alongside my mother, while my older brother sat and played with his toys. it’s that i know what kind of detergent works but my father guesses. it’s that in my freshman year of college i had a line of boys who needed me to show them how to use the machine. it’s that the first door they knocked on belonged to me. it’s that they expected me to know.

it’s not that i know how to cook. it’s that the biggest christmas present i got was a little plastic kitchenette i never used except to climb on. it’s that my brother used it more, his hands ghosting over pink buttons and yellow dials. it’s that when my work needs cake for a birthday, they turn to me. i get it from costco. i don’t even like cooking. a boy burns popcorn in the dorm microwave and laughs. a week later, i do the same thing, and he snorts at me, “just crossed you off my wife list.” it’s that i had heard something like this so many times before that i laughed, too.

it’s not that i don’t love being feminine. it’s that i came home with bruises from trying to be a trick rider on my bike and heard the word “tomboy,” felt my little mouth say, “but i’m not a boy, i’m a girl”. it’s that they laughed. it’s that until i was sitting in my pretty dress and smiling with a big pretty smile and blinking my big pretty eyes, i wasn’t given back the title “girl”. it’s that until i wore makeup and styled my hair i was bullied; it’s that when i don’t wear makeup i’m a slob, that my mental health diagnosis hangs on the hook of being dressed up. it’s that my therapist sees me returning to bright red lipstick and tells me i am looking happier and i have to explain that i am more sad than i have ever been. it’s that i dress myself in as many layers as i can every time i ride a train because it’s better to be laughed at than harassed. 

it’s not that i know how to clean, it’s that my brother’s chores were outside where i wanted to be, and mine were inside. it’s that i would have weeded the garden better than he did if they had just let me. it’s that i am put in charge of fixing other’s messes, expected to comply without complaint.

it’s not that i can’t open the jar. it’s that you ask my brother first every time. it’s that i am pushed into docile positions, trained to believe that my body when it’s strong and healthy is ugly, trained into being less, weaker. it’s that the jar is also science, is also engineering, is also every job, every opportunity. it’s that you laugh faster when he tells a joke, that you take him seriously but wave off me, that when he raises his voice he’s assertive but when i do i’m hysterical. the jar is getting into a car with a stranger as a driver and wondering if this is our last ride. the jar is knowing that if something happens to us, it’s our fault. 

it’s that i’m weak and i don’t know if it’s because i just am or i was trained to be. it’s that we need to sit pretty with our pretty smiles and our pretty words trapped pretty and silent in our throats, our hands restless but pretty when idle, our bodies vessels for nothing but a future white dress. it’s that we are taught someone else needs to open the jar for us.

here’s the secret: run metal lids under hot water, they’ll expand faster than the glass they’re around. here’s the secret: when you keep us under hot water, we do more than boil. we expand over our edges. and we learn how to open our mouths, our claws, our screams hanging in kites over cities. just give me a chance. give me a chance when i am four when i am seven when i am twenty-three. i promise i can be amazing. give me the jar. i’ll show you something.

[aallora]

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March (March 1965)

[aallora]

[aallora]

Tomboyism usually describes an extended childhood period of female masculinity. If we are to believe general accounts of childhood behavior, some degree of tomboy behavior is quite common for girls and does not give rise to parental fears. Because comparable cross-identification behaviors in boys do often give rise to quite hysterical responses, we tend to believe that female gender deviance is much more tolerated than male gender deviance. I am not sure that tolerance in such matters can be measured, nor that responses to childhood gender behaviors necessarily tells us anything concrete about the permitted parameters of adult male and female gender deviance. Tomboyism tends to be associated with a “natural” desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as a sign of independence and self-motivation. It may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of a girl identity. Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy’s name or refusing to wear girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence. Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. Gender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity. Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage (much celebrated in Western literature in the form of the bildungsroman), and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity. That any girls do emerge at the end of adolescence as masculine women is quite amazing. The growing visibility and indeed respectability of lesbian communities to some degree facilitate the emergence of masculine young women. But even a cursory survey of popular cinema confirms, the image of the tomboy can be tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood: within such a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity. Tomboy identities are conveyed as benign forms of childhood identification as long as they evince acceptable degrees of femininity, appropriate female aspiration, and as long as they promise to result in marriage and motherhood.

Jack Halberstam, Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy (via citizenpublius)

[aallora]

I loved so many of the cute animals on vine……

[aallora]

add your own new dog breeds

[aallora]