#A story in the life

[wasabi-gumdrop]

local ladies man’s signature move totally useless against autistic monster enthusiast. more on Kabru’s fumble era at 6

[baristabomb]

...weird amount of dunmeshi fans have been saying being a caretaker in a relationship is the worst thing ever..marcille must want to killl everyone soo bad because doing things for people suuuucks sooo muchh

it's an act of love, not just a job i promise. we all want someone who's willing to take care of us in some way, just like how senshi shows care for others by cooking for them :'|

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[liquidstar]

Yes, Greece still exists, we didn't all die 2000 years ago. Yes, people speak Greek. You people are so fucking stupid for real. So many of you claim to love ancient shit but can't even acknowledge the actual living culture of the people whose mythology and classics you romanticize. You keep leaving annoying comments about how you just forget Greek people still exist, thinking you're being quirky because you love ancient stuff soooo much that you forgot about the people it came from. You think about it so little you don't even realize that an actual Greek person has to read this shit, making it clear how little you actually care about the culture beyond the romanticized (and westernized) mythology. Don't claim you love Greece, don't use our mythology anymore if you can't acknowledge that we're still around without making it about how little you think about us. It's mind boggling that you'd think a Greek person would read this and think you're anything but obnoxious. Explode.

[inbabylontheywept]

the house i grew up in was a little bit of a fixer upper. for the first 19 years, my dad just sort of slowly fixed it, but pretty early on in college, he came into a large amount of cash and decided to just do the whole thing at once. so he rented a different house for like, 2 months that was just a block down from us, and then got a bunch of contractors to fix original house ASAP. it was kind of crazy, but it compressed many years of work into like, three months.

the sitting in a new house for three months was actually pretty fun. and i shouldnt really complain at all (staying at home while in college is a sweet deal)

but.

but. my parents are fairly hard of hearing, and their bedroom in the old house was in the furthest possible annex from everyone else. wheras in the rental it was just in the middle of the house. so without going into details, i was extremely aware that my parents were having sex like, eight times a day. my dad had just retired and i guess they were celebrating, which is great i guess, having parents that really like each other is way better than the alternative, but also, it did make me envy their deafness. i kept headphones on for so long that year i got literal ear calluses.

at the same time, the house my buddy from the shoe incident grew up in flooded. turbo flooded. they burst like, two pipes at once and the damage was so severe they had to redo all the flooring and all the drywall. his family actually had homeowners insurance, which is either incredible or suspicious for a family that used the drained pool in their backyard to store rusty scrap metal. so insurance was handling the work, but in the meantime, they were crammed into a very small hotel room space. we did the math on it then, it averaged about 80 square feet a person.

so one day i got home, and i was chilling, and then six rolled around, and apparently six o'clock was sex o'clock because my parents decided to flex their cardio. i grabbed my headphones and prayed that god would do for me what he did for beethoven, but that failed to work, and then seven rolled around and my parents were still at it, which again, very impressive, but was pushing me to swap out judas for mozart in those prayers. there's a definitive point where you stop praying to be deaf and instead pray that god could take you to a nice field and pop you like a gore-balloon.

i was about five minutes away from that point when my friend called me and basically said i have been stuck in a 500 square foot space with 6 people and i didn't have many marbles to start but what few i had are gone. please. if we are friends, if we were ever friends, take me out of here just for a moment.

and i was still pretty mad at him, but i had pity on the poor guy. also helped that i was desperate to leave the house. so i drove the chickenshitmobile to the hotel and i picked him up, and then we did our normal hangout activity, which was go to food city and buy produce. his normal house was, on a good day, nasty, and his backyard was, as i stated before, mostly used to store mosquito larvae and rusty metal, so what we'd always done before was just walk to the grocery store a half block away and leer at vegetables.

so we did that and it was like old times again. they had some radishes that were expired, so i could buy like, literally an entire grocery bag of them for about $5. so i did. i really like radishes. he got a coconut because he liked fruit and beating things with hammers.

which probably would've been great except we didn't have a hammer, so instead we spent about 30 minutes stomping itike it owed us money. when it finally cracked we cheered like we just got the winning touchball at the superdome and then he ate some of the flesh, and i ate some of the radishes, and we admired the black, starless sky of the city before i took him back to his hotel room.

and then we got pulled over.

i forgot to turn my lights on because the street all around the food city was ludicrously well lit. so it went from being pretty bright, to pretty bright and flashy, then i pulled into a parking lot and a cop came to ask us for IDs which is where everything went to shit:

i’d forgotten my license at home. 

the cop was was actually kind of chill about it - he said he could get by with just an address. except i did not know my address. i hadn't memorized the new one yet. so i told the cop, my house is getting remodeled, i don't know my address right now. and then he went to my friend, and my friend said the exact same thing. house getting remodeled, staying somewhere else, no address, sowwwwwwy.

now the cop genuinely didn't know what to do. he went back to his car, and i was stressed that i was about to get into HUGE trouble so i started eating the radishes and my buddy started eating more of his coconut, and we actually managed to eat like a quarter of both before the cop came back. we ate enough produce that he could smell something weird in the air, and he asked what the smell was, and i said radishes, and my buddy said coconut, and the cop said which, and then we produced a large bag of droopy radishes and an absolutely brutalized coconut, and the cop was just like

so my buddy tried explaining how he was sharing a 500 square foot apartment with 6 people and wanted a fruit he could fight with power tools, and i tried explaining how i'd actually tried buying my parents like, board games and puzzles and stuff but nothing worked - the only thing my parents seemed to like doing right now was each other, and we both went on long enough and pathetically enough that the cop eventually went:

ok. stop.

and we stopped.

and he said do you know why i pulled you over?

and i said, because of my headlights, and my friend (who is hispanic) and the cop both looked at me like like i was the dumbest person in the entire world. and then the cop said no. that's why i'm allowed to pull you over. i checked your car because this neighborhood has a terrible sex trafficking problem, and i pull over every car i can to make sure no one is buying or selling sex. and you two are obviously doing neither. now i could give you, like, four tickets right now, but that would do nothing to make this area safer, so just turn your lights on, go home, drive safe, and try to be less stupid in the future.

and i said okay but i was thinking, you know, damn, this is just how i live man, i don't have a hidden third gear i can shift into. people can't just get smarter because it would be convenient. it's always convenient to be smart. i am literally trying my best.

but i didn't say anything because i was, slowly, learning how to filter what i said. instead i nodded and the cop left then i dropped my buddy off, and the last thing he said was said he owed me for responding to his SOS. I said he owed me for a lot of things, and he agreed that was true. then i drove home with my lights on, 5 under the speed limit, and arrived to a peaceful quiet home. I could’ve wept with relief but instead I went to bed.

the relief was short lived. i was woken up at 6 am by my parents. i swore, and then i prayed, and when i did not explode, i swore again. then i got up to make breakfast before my first class.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Reading fetish erotica with absolutely pristine and morally upright consent and neat and tidy safer sex practices is like watching a Fast and Furious movie where they stop at every stop sign and signal for every lane change and always obey the speed limit.

[curatorotl]

I think one of the weirdest side effects of being a writer is that while I'm reading, I'll just start subconsciously editing the book. Like, if a sentence sounds odd or off to me, I'll fix it in my head and continue reading as if that were how it was written.

Does anybody else do this?

[and-fishing-equipment]

imagine being real rashid and you work for these weird gay vampires and one day they come to you like hey rashid we're gonna give you a little holiday! armand will take over your duties for the time being, for a cool disguise during my interview, not a kink thing :) and you're like okay these are my weird gay vampire bosses so it probably is a kink thing but who am i to judge. and then you find out they are roleplaying this weird exhibitionist slash master/servant scene with your own real actual government name. fuck interview with the vampire, interview with rashid WHEN??

[tariah23]

The manga industry, especially JUMP, needs to hurry up and do away with weekly scheduling for mangaka. There needs to better regulations put into place for their health and safety because this is pitiful. Two weeks - monthly updates should’ve already been the standard for the manga industry at this point. These money grabbers will only continue to put the lives of these artists at stake for the sake of capitalism unless some serious changes are implemented.

[uwudonoodle]

[coffeetank]

Ideas to Show Secret Pining

"Why don't you join me?"

"I'll give you a ride, don't worry."

*does something they don't like* "What? I like it."

*immense staring at every chance they get*

*thinking of their crush while listening to songs*

"You said you liked it so I brought it for you."

*finds ways to spend more time with them*

*friendly bullying intensifies*

"I'm looking forward to seeing you there."

"Are you gonna be there?"

"How about we sneak off, just you and me?"

"Why don't I cook for them? What's their favourite dish again?"

*aggressive google searches about how to propose to your crush*

"I'll join those dance lessons, maybe then she'll notice me."

*hopeless around them*

*failed flirting attempts*

*increased compliments*

"My problem is that I like them a little too much for my sanity."

*gets jealous* "So, are you seeing them or something?"

"Are you okay?" // "Completely okay!" (definitely not okay)

*tries to sabotage their crush's date*

*gets into trouble so they can be scolded by their crush*

"I want you to come with me, please?"

-ashlee

[marlynnofmany]

Small joys on Tumblr:

When your notes make a perfect cat

[leecheedoodles]

Saw the musical Wicked earlier this summer and it was AMAZING 😭

[flintpunks-mind]

A co-worker of mine was standing outside with me during a break from customers to share a cigarette with me, and told me about how he had lost his brother that he was close with some years ago. He told me about how they used to be in a band together with some friends, and how ever since he'd died, he hadn't played any music because he'd been too scared and anxious. I told him about how I'd lost my brother to suicide some years ago.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

I don't know what the meaning of life is or what my purpose is, but I do believe that love and human connection is one of the most important things in life. It's finding ways to tell strangers you love them and share experiences with others. I think it's all just about love.

[mobius-m-mobius]

#the Nowhere Man who waits and the God of Stories who watches

[outofcontextbokumono]