back2daydreams

[back2daydreams]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[back2daydreams]

"this makes us human, that makes us human" im more interested in what makes us creatures tbh

[back2daydreams]

My two yr old is looking through a book about prehistoric art and she saw a picture of those cave painting of hands and she held up her own and said "hand!" And I gotta be honest. That hit

[back2daydreams]

trans women, i love you.

you were a woman yesterday. you're a woman today. you're a woman tomorrow. you're a woman forever.

trans women have existed long before those stuffy bigots sitting in a court room have. trans women will continue to exist long after they're dead and rotting in the earth.

[back2daydreams]

“okay but what about women, this is real feminism!”

blah blah blah. feminism wouldn’t exist in the way it does today if it weren’t for trans women.

intersectional feminism would not be a thing if it weren’t for trans women.

if you think for one second that cis women are safe, that this isn’t step 20 in a long list of terrible steps towards stripping all women of their bodily autonomy, reducing their rights and posing major threats to their freedoms, you are deluded and you’re in for a terrible shock.

i’m so sorry to say this - people in power politically, socially and systemically have never cared about protecting women. only about controlling them. you are not now nor will you ever be exempt from that.

trans women are not a threat to cis women. in fact, it is overwhelmingly the other way around. and isn’t that disgusting?

[back2daydreams]

JOINTS IS PAIN

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suspicious of any religion claiming humans should deny themselves enjoyment and earthly pleasures. like no every person I have ever met needs more of those actually

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lock the fuck in?? no way dude. I am TUCKED the fuck in :) good night

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aro culture is only being able to give 2 pieces of advice to ur allo friends about their relationships: talk about it or break up

communicate, establish boundaries, break up, in that order.

[back2daydreams]

Once I figure out how to differentiate between romantic and platonic feelings, it’s OVER for you bitches.

[back2daydreams]

[back2daydreams]

You need to start saying "it's a spectrum, some arod date and some aces have sex" about characters that are canonically allo cause if that's how it is with canonically aro and ace characters then I'm sure it goes both ways

[back2daydreams]

hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? "thou art wearing shoes," "i will wear shoes for thee," okay?

you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean "your" so "thine own shoes," "thy shoes," okay?

and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, "ye members of the brotherhood of shoes," okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i'm personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community

[back2daydreams]

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

[back2daydreams]

🖤🩶🤍💜

JUST FOUND OUT THAT IT’S INTERNATIONAL ASEXUALITY DAY TODAY!!

hoping that april 6 is treating my fellow ace people well because we own this date 🔥 friendly reminder that you are valid and deserve all the best. don’t let anyone say that asexual people or people who fall under that umbrella aren’t part of the lgbt community. we are. and we always will be 🖤🩶🤍💜

[back2daydreams]

wanna exist but not in a body

[back2daydreams]

Hey gang, what if we didn't talk about relationships like they were hierarchies