Debra Spence (Australian, b. 1960) ‘After Tea and Cake’, 2022 Pastel pencils on pastelmat, 22 x 30cm
[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly. There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl. The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like: “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.” You live with this child, but you don’t know it. You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas. Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.
/end id]
“Often father and daughter look down on mother together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate”
People ask me all the time what’s the worst thing a customer said to me, or what’s the craziest story I have from work. I always say: I don’t remember. I used to store things like this, anecdotes to share on social media, but by the end, I went into work, I got through my shifts, and when I left, I wiped my brain like a chalkboard. When people ask me this, I get the sense that they’re looking for entertainment. What, I wanted to say, do you think I do this job for anecdotes? People will say that, too. Oh, it must make you a better writer, seeing all these people and the crazy things they say.
It has not made me a better writer. It’s made me lazy. It’s made me love money. It’s made me see that life is more than writing, it’s lessened my chokehold on dedication. I no longer identify as an ambitious person. I identify as a person who wants to make the life that they can scrape together as comfortable as possible.
I do think being a waitress has done one great thing with respect to writing: it has made me understand deeply and fundamentally how many writers are full of shit. It has altered my view of privilege and money and the ways that people complain that mask the fact that in their world, they would never have to do a job that equates to basic manual labor, because their intelligence is worth more than waiting on others. (Side note: Sweetbitter was an overrated waitressing book, Love Me Back is underrated.)
...
For so many years I thought that I was missing an element of secret knowledge about how actual jobs worked, and that therefore I would be stuck forever. But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.
Quint Buchholz (German, b. 1957, Stolberg, Germany) - November Schnee (November Snow), 2019, Paintings: Acrylic on Cardboard
Source: quintbuchholz.de
Sven Kroner (German, b. 1973, Kempten, Germany, based Düsseldorf, Germany) - Mogli, 2020, Paintings: Acrylic on Canvas
Source: svenkroner.de
ok, ok, succession is over. i’ll write some tom/shiv, you got me
Omg everyone was really nice 😭 steps outside ancient, longterm fandom and everyone is so supportive and kind. Interesting, but... *side-eyes longterm fandom*
ok, ok, succession is over. i’ll write some tom/shiv, you got me
