birchbird

[birchbird]

the gems

[birchbird]

Conversational skill check: Work acquaintance mentions in an offhand tone with no discernible expression that they have recently lost over 20 pounds. They fail to elaborate. A response is expected.

Me, rolling a 6: …On purpose?

[birchbird]

Some steven universe doodles

[birchbird]

I'm sure I'm the last person to notice this but I just remembered that one episode where Pearl tries getting out of her comfort zone by going to a rock concert and meeting human women and she wears this jacket and jeans outfit to blend in......

She never wears this fit again but the next time she regenerates her new base form has a jacket and what looks to be jeans.......

I love you Pearl. Rock on

[birchbird]

today's bug thing are these beetle nails!

[birchbird]

[birchbird]

[birchbird]

you know a joke that never EVER gets old is when a character says smth like “I will NOT go to [place] and that is FINAL” and then it cuts to them in that place I eat that shit up every single time

[birchbird]

the insane experience of missing a fictional character . like you can always go back and reread the book , replay the game , rewatch the show or movie , you can always go back & see them , but you can never experience them & their story for the first time again . its absurd to miss them because they'll always be there , but you'll miss when there were still new things for them to say .

for a small time they were real & growing and changing and you hung onto every new word, but now all they can do is repeat the same story forever&ever & they're not real anymore because you know everything they're going to do. & you miss them. its fucked man...

[birchbird]

each year congress people should be required to go on a field trip where they each get dumped in the middle of a random u.s. town & handed a phone with google maps & forced to find their way back to washington solely through the use of local public transportation systems.

to be clear i don't think this would improve our political reality in any way, but it would be fun to watch

[birchbird]

Physical therapy is wild because they're always like "hey do this weird little movement" and you're like "hmm my brain doesn't seem to know how to activate that movement" and then they'll like trick your brain into doing it by making you do other movements first or making you resist against them moving you or some shit and your brain is like oooooh ✅ new movement unlocked. And then they tell you to do that movement 20 times a day and you do and it makes some part of your body you didn't even know was related hurt less. What the fuck.

[birchbird]

we have to start expressing vocal disgust at 'ironic' homophobia again in a big way. if you can't explain to me how calling a guy a twinky little fruitcake valorises the terminology vs. reducing and demeaning him for perceived femininity I don't want to hear it. nobody is off the hook for this.

[birchbird]

truly the most american thing is Big Drink. more than late stage capitalism, more than an unparalleled cultural focus on individualism, more than 9/11 jokes

what binds all americans together culturally is Big Drink

and you might be saying "is this fat shaming" or "but mayor bloomberg outlawed Big Drink in nyc" or "gays are so annoying about their iced coffee" or some other dumb comment but no open your minds, Big Drink isn't just sugary or caffeinated beverages

every day i see one of you hydration bitches (affectionate) on the train with a water bottle so big a toddler could drown in it. that too is Big Drink. we literally invented a bigger beer can (tall boy) in wisconsin in the 60s in the service of Big Drink

anyway i never feel more american then when i have Big Drink in my hands

[birchbird]

So back when I was a senior in undergrad, my partner went through, like, the craziest nervous breakdown I'd ever witnessed in my life. And like, maybe it makes me a back girlfriend or whatever but I was kind of like, "I'm gonna mind my own business on this one."

So my partner gets super close to two other students in his program. He was a film student so his senior year was being capped off by him making a movie. He decides he's going to make a movie about him turning into a salmon. He gets crazy into it. He starts eating salmon for every meal. He buys a bunch of salmon-related stuff. We found a T-shirt at Goodwill with a salmon on it and he thought it was divine intervention that he was doing the right thing. He walks into the freezing-cold Puget sound fully clothed several times to "get into it." He watches videos of salmon spawning and is like, "Nothing is more poignant than this." He gets a tattoo of three salmon on his arm.

The entire time the two students he got really close to are fully enabling him. It's a folie á trois sort of situation. They're out until six in the morning doing creepy art school shit and encouraging his (possibly no longer fictional) desire to become a salmon. My partner has an answer for everything. "Salmon get eaten by bears," I say. "That's a cool as fuck way to die," he says blithely. "And Salmon are free of the yoke of capitalism."

And if I dared to say, Hey, this is....getting a little odd..., he would throw a full-scale tantrum. I'm not supporting his dream (I wasn't sure at this point if it was his dream to be a filmmaker or his dream to become a salmon). I'm basically like, okay. Be a salmon! Fuck!

We had been dating for five years at this point and this behavior was such a left turn that I just decided to ignore it. And then after all that he basically went back to normal after graduation. Sometimes he'll be like, "That was weird, huh?" and has nothing more to say on the matter.

[birchbird]

"Besides, it was nice to hear the voices of little children at play, provided you took care to be far enough away not to hear what they were actually saying."

- Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

[birchbird]

i really do believe that the answer to a lot of people's self hatred is not to try and reassure them that they are wonderful and okay and enough, but instead to remind them theyre a completely unremarkable regular ass person who is not the center of the universe or especially important so why would they expect themselves to be some superhuman savior. like there really is a kernel of out of control self importance at the heart of thinking youre an evil lazy piece of shit. because why would you expect you be anything but just like some guy. if you wouldnt expect the guy who works at the vape shop or your mailman or whatever to be able to do something then why would you expect yourself to? youre just some random ass person. its fine

[birchbird]

you've stripped him of so many of his qualities that it's no longer "he would not say that". it's "who the fuck even is that guy"