yotsubamessenger5

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Yotsubaaa 🍀💚🌻

Wanted to mess around with doing something in a more collage-y style, it was fun!!

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Confetti. by Uroad7

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embarrassment has good bones

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Yesterday, one of my preschoolers came up to me very concerned, and said, “Miss ____, this book doesn’t have any pages!”

Now, this kid is only three, and I can’t always understand what he says because he’s still so little. However, he carries himself and has the conversational lilt of an 80-year-old academic, so I absolutely believed him. Also, like any library, not all of our books have been as gently used as one might like, so there’s always a chance that the pages of the book this kid was holding actually had fallen out somewhere, and he was only holding the cover. I hurried over to see if this was the case and he opened the book for me, still very concerned.

He had only opened to the end sheet, that blank page at the front of a book. I turned the page for him to reveal the title page. This look of absolute relief crossed his face and he went, “Oh, silly me. I didn’t look hard enough!”

I love kids.

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My two yr old is looking through a book about prehistoric art and she saw a picture of those cave painting of hands and she held up her own and said "hand!" And I gotta be honest. That hit

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Mississippi’s first interracial marriage, August 1970.

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🐊🤠

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I got to help this amazing couple at work. It was just pure chance, but I was who they walked up to. They said they wanted jewelry cleaned and that they had a hold they wanted to check on.

Let me set the stage. They were a couple in their fifties or so, he was wearing motorcycle leathers, he had skulls rings, tattoos; he was bristly and unshaven. She was dressed to the nines, full length dress, platinum blonde, $500 shoes, nails, all of it. The cognitive dissonance looking from one to the other was staggering.

She thought she needed to get her ring cut off, but I walked her through the best way to see if we could salvage it and we were able to get it off. I put it into the shop to be sized up, and then we got to work.

He handed me a solid gold pendant he’d been given from a mobster that was Jesus’ face with rubies for eyes and a ruby and diamond crown of thorns. (Dear god why didn’t they use any stone but rubies for the eyes?) And then they had me get their hold from the back. It was about 5k worth of diamonds in her ring, and an even thousand for his. It was for their 30th anniversary.

They left smiling and happy.

Today I had to call her and tell her that her ring couldn’t be sized up without destroying it, and that I’d have to specially order his ring in his size or we’d destroy that too. It’s a nerve wracking call to make, people can get so angry about bumps in the road.

But she just laughed and called me a dear. She came in bringing a small bottle of champagne for me and my girlfriend and we picked out a different ring to house her diamond. She radiated charisma and charm the whole time.

After a while she realized she didn’t have her car keys. She went outside to check on where she’d left them. After investigating she blithely came back in and asked for a step ladder so she could get through her sun roof as it turned out she’d locked her keys in the car. I loaned her one then she went and heisted her way headfirst into her own car while wearing a sundress. It was fucking hilarious and amazing.

While we were shopping afterward she was all sunshine, bubbles, and shoe recommendations. She told me that had brunch coming up with a frenemy and she needed her new ring to really hold its own.

Near the end she got quieter. She looked at me and told me she had almost gotten divorced from her rakish biker man. That she had filled out papers and everything. A new paramour had literally bought her a god damn house. But she realized she was still madly in love with him, and they had to make it work. And she told me they had to have a lot of talks, and communicate, that they’d allowed themselves to drift apart and that they made a choice to come back together.

I was obviously just hanging on her every word. I was walking her to the back to pay by that point and she hugged me, thanked me, and then turned her smile back on. Without missing a beat she turned and instantly overwhelmed my customer service rep by telling him she’d gotten in through the sunroof of her car without flashing anyone.

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using google keyboard alchemy to create the most miserable emojis possible

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the world is getting so ugly and bleak and it’s hard not to feel so hopeless. but we have to remember that they want us to feel that way.

it reminds me of this quote by dan savage - “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

joy is resistance. it’s really scary times but we are all in this together.

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One quiet day on the farm, the Little Red Hen found some wheat seeds and decided to make bread.

"Who will help me plant these seeds?" the Little Red Hen asked.

"I would." said the Horse "But I'm a workhorse, and I'm too busy moving carts around."

And so the Little Red Hen planted the seeds by herself. And they grew into bountiful golden crops.

"Who will help me harvest the wheat?" the Little Red Hen asked.

"I would." said the Dog "But I'm a guarddog, and I'm too busy keeping away burglars and predators."

And so the Little Red Hen harvested the wheat herself and made it into flour.

"Who will help me bake the flour?" the Little Red Hen asked.

"I would." said the Pig "But I'm a mother of 5 newborn piglets, and I'm too busy taking care of my young."

And so the Little Red Hen baked the bread herself into twenty beautiful loaves.

"Who will help me eat the bread?" the Little Red Hen asked.

"We would." said the Farm Animals. "But we're ashamed, for we didn't do anything to make the bread."

"Nonsense!" said the Little Red Hen. "You, Horse, helped move around the stones that built my oven. You, Dog, kept me safe while I worked. And you, Pig, are raising a new generation of Farm Animals, who will too contribute to our Farm one day. You've all helped me so much by simply being you."

"Besides," the Little Red Hen added. "I couldn't possibly eat all the loaves on my own, most of them would go to waste. Come, eat with me."

And so the Little Red Hen and the Farm Animals ate the bread together. And all saw their own, and each other's, worth.

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kind of weird how parts of your soul are left in various locations without any warning… like yes i’m always at the top of that hill, sitting at the bus stop, in the cool light of the Japanese restaurant, standing at the pier etc etc

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““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””

— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)

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Mary Oliver, Everything