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I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

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Ah these children who always create problems for poor mothers....

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If you like the word “queer” reblog.

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Arugula is some crap they found on the ground for real

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the oceangate rabbithole is un-fucking-paralleled. what do you mean they left that thing outside in the snow in canada for the entire fucking winter. of course it imploded literally the next time they put it in the water. holy shit.

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internet politics and real-world politics have gotten so separated, and pretty soon all this internet weirdness is gonna come crashing into real life and politicians are gonna start throwing around words like “SJW” and “anime communist” and “dark enlightenment” and it’s just gonna be the most ridiculous fucking thing

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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.

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my cat hates taking his pills. the only way we can get him to eat them is to turn it into an elaborate pantomime - we take the packet out of the cupboard slowly and hold it up, saying “oh!! what’s this? what’s this? a TREAT? a TREAT for louis????” while making surprised faces. we offer him a pill… then, before he has a chance to sniff it, we wag our fingers at him and replace it in the packet so it becomes a Tantalising Forbidden Mystery. we continue doing this until he’s so confused and excited that he will eat the pill as fast as possible, just so he can find out what it is before we can take it away from him again. as soon as he’s eaten it he looks utterly disappointed and betrayed, like a child who just ate a delicious sweet only to find it was a chocolate-coated brussels sprout. it never gets old

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Reminder:

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Speef is real to me. I'm sorry for that.

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One like = one smooch on his little head

One reblog = granting him access to the nuclear launch codes

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The good news: Soulmates are real.

The bad news: Reincarnation is also real, and the vast majority of souls on Earth are not presently incarnated as humans. If you are a living human, statistically your soulmate is currently some sort of beetle, or possibly a small salt-water crustacean.

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bro shut up i’m trying to recall the details of my prophetic dream

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We sharing anaesthetic stories?? I had to have dental surgery when i was in middle school.

According to my mom and sister the very first thing i did upon waking up was BOLT upright and proceed to try and shove my ENTIRE fist in my mouth as fast as possible.

I had to be physically stopped, and i proceeded to sob my eyes out for the next 20 minutes. Somehow, i didnt damage anything 🤣

sorry that imagery is so vivid i just..

?????LOL

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The agony of thinking you’re finished doing the dishes only to turn around and to your horror: the pot.

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extremely cool article you should read if you haven’t already