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LUCILLE CLIFTON

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obsessed w this ("Dostoevsky as lover", Henrik Karlsson)

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the anxiety monster has next to nothing on that midnight pottery wheel x aretha and etta x the mind numbing smell of a pine sol scrubbed floor x substack draft combo

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it’s crazy how much you can read if you read

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I promised myself I could read sunrise on the reaping (and this watch my bestie youtuber’s video on it) as a treat

I have graduated. I have read. I have watched. I have been fed and watered. I have the worlds most beautiful cigarette.

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i've always wanted to visit the beautiful city of chicago because i love their citation style

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it's not a true pet peeve but when certain phrases are divorced from their contexts it does give me a weird little butterfly in my stomach.

like, okay. "hell is other people" is an excellent line from Sartre's play "no exit". it's very short, you could probably read it in an afternoon or two. but the line isn't making a commentary about all people - it's actually specifically about the 3 characters in the play. they're all very bad people who are legitimately being punished in-actual-hell. they are forced into a room together for eternity & have been hand-picked to be as annoying as possible to each other as punishment for the sins they committed while alive.

and that concept is crazy! i don't write fanfiction but imagine what characters would be actual torture for each other! "hell is other people" isn't condemning humanity - it is saying we create hell from other people.

or like - shakespeare's "brevity is the soul of wit"! that is a joke line said by a joke character. polonius constantly talks too much and says fucking nothing of use. while hamlet is having like, the worst year of anyone's life - polonius gives really fucking vague and useless advice, including such popular sayings as: "to thine own self be true" and "neither a borrower or a lender be." when he says brevity is the soul of wit, it is meant ironically for the audience - this is a man who never shuts the fuck up. he himself is not brief, and therefore witless.

stuff like this just makes me wonder like - how many idioms or sayings come from completely different contexts and we just. fogrgot :(

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There is a Margaret Atwood quote about how all women have an internal male voyeur. For women raised religious we call him God, Yahweh, Allah, Heavenly Father.

The most free I’ve ever been was when I truly realized that the only one inside my mind is me. The only one who feels my body from within is me. My thoughts and feelings are only accountable to me and I’m the only one who can send myself to hell for them.

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i have never been fucked on by an essay in this way…. i would rather physically pluck my eyeballs out

Last all-nighter of undergrad: strap tf in yall

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Last all-nighter of undergrad: strap tf in yall

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what reading classical scholarship articles with huge chunks of untranslated text feels like sometimes

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this summer I'll smell of sunscreen and weed

every parents worst nightmare

when I left

i sounded like her

i believed like her

i lived like her

she says i never came back

says she doesn’t know me anymore

doesn’t know my face

doesn't know my voice

says that after a lifetime of cooking my supper of washing my clothes and sitting together on our porch

my clothes don’t smell like a warm summer clothesline and my skirts are too long, not for the child she raised but the child she got. you don’t even eat like us no more, weird foods and weirder voice. do you even believe anymore baby?

she doesn’t recognize the body she built

says I’m a shell of her daughter

I’m every parent’s worst nightmare

seven seconds from L.A. and

100 years away from Reynolds

if only she knew the half of it

if only she knew about the four years reading heretics writing about socialism and revolution, or worse about the seven more I’m walking into. if only she knew about the quaker meetings, and the platonism, and the cigarettes and the piercings and the tattoos

if only she knew about all the women that sat between my too long skirts. all the hair I braided, all the feet I sat at, begging to be heard and begging to listen, all the hands I kissed, and all the worship I did.

if she knew, I’d be her greatest disappointment.

if she knew that her daughter’s shell, her reincarnation, her second-third-fourth chance at salvation wasn’t just the unrecognizable thing in front of her, but another beast entirely.

I have no siblings, no one to watch and no one to kill. no one to hide and no one to bury. but I do have her.

I am her keeper.

Her greatest disappointment

and her greatest joy.

so believe me when I tell you,

don’t worry, for

I am still too loud.

I am still too kind.

I am still too messy.

I am still too soft-hearted for my own good.

I am still a sucker for a soft, kind word.

all the things you could never break me of.

You may not know it, but you know me. How could you ever walk through this city, sit in my home, eat my cooking, and not know me? I have loved this life, this city, this piece of myself, too deeply for that.

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Ursula K. Le Guin

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Imagine being JD Vance, who makes such a huge part of his personality being catholic. The pope himself takes time to lecture you on compassion then promptly DIES. The pope uses one of his last hours on earth to tell you that you suck at your religion on EASTER. And then DIES. Anyway RIP Pope Francis

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— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”