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Absolutely wild to me how sometimes you don't even realize the way you'd been taught to perceive things as a kid was kinda fucked up, actually, until decades later.
Example:
As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.
As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.
Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.
Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.
We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.
This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"
"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.
My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.
"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."
Right. Of course. Right.
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🌻🌼🌷🌸🏵️🌹🌺💐🍀
Some flowers for anyone not feeling their best today
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i don’t know how to explain to you people that no matter what a country’s government is like i do not and will not support the US indiscriminately bombing that country’s civilians and i don’t know why that’s a controversial take tbh
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i love sluts i love perverts i love dykes i love faggots i love aromantics i love freaks i love librarians i love ibuprofen
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good meowning everykitty!! dogs.. go eat dirt or something
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We aren’t breaking up babe, we are on a break
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really underrated sibling dynamic is eldest freak loser sister no friends no bitches strange and offputting. and her really normal younger sister who loves her and hangs out with her.
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One should always have at least 2 craft projects going. That way, when one of them is messed up and misbehaving, you can switch to another, and let the first one sit there and think about what it's done.
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(never degraded someone before) you have your mother's cruelty. and your father's cowardice.
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when I was a kid I wished I had nosebleeds. I had some friends who had them and I was like. that looks so fucking cool. you're just sitting there and suddenly you're covered in blood. it looks so dramatic. it looks so... and here my language failed me. at such a humble age I did not have the vocabulary to describe the sublime. I just sat in incomprehensible jealousy. I turned out totally normal by the way
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it’s sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.
i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.
so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”
And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”
I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”
And he was so astonished he didn’t even argue he just turned around and left 💀🙏🏻 it was like he suddenly became self aware
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fights I would pay to see: sigmund “everyone is attracted to someone” freud vs John “sexual desire is evil and cereal can and will fix it” Kellogg
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Anyone else remember the episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog about a lesbian bunny who escapes her abusive boyfriend and rides off into the night on a train with the love of her life?
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I love when people are explaining something and they go “stay/walk with me” bc now I’m so with you we’re energetically holding hands keep going girl
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