gingerlicious

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

every day should be like i wake up & my first thought is a beautiful idea of a fun & new activity & i spend my day accomplishing it

i do want to live like them like so bad

please watch my favorite game changer clip ever

I want Jeremy and Neil to be on the same team after college, they would unnerve each other so much

I want Jean and Andrew to be on the same team after college cause they would say 2 words to each other the whole time and consider the other their best friend as a result

TBH any combo of these four would be gold. Throw in a Kevin too for fun.

I am haunted by the detailed, completed map of Hell that Edwin took notes on. You don’t understand, it makes me sick. It’s one thing to have a basic layout, a vague idea, or a rudimentary map but it was meticulously detailed. Down to doors and what they do and where they go. Down to secret spaces in the walls. He even knew what ringing an innocuous bell would do. It can only mean one thing. We don’t know when Edwin began trying to escape, but assuming he started from the get go, it means that he spent all his decades in Hell trying to find a way out. He never stopped running. And that is assuming he never stopped. From his second trip, we could see he resorted to his old ways and ran. But he was eventually caught, reduced to pieces. Even when Charles showed up, he didn’t seem very optimistic about their chances. He could feel every second of those 70 years. There were likely many times he fell to hopelessness, trembling in the corner watching himself be desecrated knowing it was going to happen again and again. How long? How many times did he try to be so, so quiet, hoping he would have a few moments before the next round? How many times did he muster the ability to run, just one more time? How long did it take him to run, discovering the ends of each ring? How many times did he sprint up, down, north, south, east, west, trying to escape? And what happened when he finally escaped? How long did it take for him to be able to relax, even a little? Because he can never relax. He must always outrun Death and her constituents because he can’t count on them to be fair. How many times does he look over his shoulder, waiting for the monster to claim its eternal meal once again? His breath of fresh air, his first taste of companionship in ages not only keeps him company, but sticks by him. And then, in that blessing there comes a curse, because now you have something to lose. Because when you taste ambrosia how can you return to starvation? He feels safe with Charles. Happy and comfortable, but the threat always lingers. And he knows that Charles couldn’t fend off Death. He never considered he could fend off Hell beasts; after all, he’s just a ghost kid. He watches innocents be slaughtered on repeat, unphased by the level of violence but no less affected by it, because no one has even a clue what it takes to be this kind. Even at his most happy, he has so, so much to lose and he goes back to Hell when hope was dangled in his face like the fruit of Tantalus. When he returns, he’s subjected to Hell once again, sustaining through torture that obliterates souls, only to watch his best friend, his confidant, his platonic soulmate, die horrifically. This woman who gave him sea-glass courage, so powerful and yet so fragile. Allowed him to be himself, gave him permission to do so. Was the openness to his closed self, and now she is gone. And he retains his composure, his stiff, British posture because it is what has saved him from madness and Despair, protected him, and now the world is darker without Niko Sasaki in it. But surely he saw this coming. After all, humans are messy. And yet, he shows up for their souls, time and time again.

Edwin Payne is THE character.

ITS GREAT LAKES AWARENESS DAY!!!!!

On this excellent day, be aware that this is the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, covering over 95,000 square miles and reaching depths of over a thousand feet. They are beautiful freshwater seas.

Also when you die in these lakes, the very cold, oxygen-poor conditions at the bottom preserves you perfectly for all eternity. You will not rot and nothing will eat you. You will exist for as long as the Great Lakes do. Many shipwrecks still have the crew on board. Be Aware.

that last paragraph only applies to Lake Superior, the northernmost Great Lake! to be fair though, Superior is bigger than all of the other Great Lakes combined.

and that's not to say that the other Great Lakes aren't equally dangerous! each of these things earned the 'Great' descriptor for a reason, and the only reason they aren't all classified as inland seas is because they're not salty.

Lake Michigan in particular is really good at creating waterlogged corpses and hiding them in weird places, and every single Great Lake is full of shipwrecks and ghost stories.

and you know what? 10/10 I would let these things eat me anyways.

be aware!

fun optional addition, LAKE SUPERIOR VS THE EAST COAST

you could drown an entire small country in this thing

Great lakes! It's like living by the ocean but it smells better!

Two best buds

(Source)

as a child I wondered why adults were so stupid (doing things out of habit/routine/heuristics rather than reasoning explicitly about what to do based on their goals) and the answer is that adults are unimaginably fucking tired all the time

tags via @gallusrostromegalus

more orvilles :)

Dolce Far Niente by John William Godward (1897)

MY KINK IS KARMA CHAPPELL ROAN

i hate that even self proclaimed radicals think "people shouldnt have to work to survive" is too radical. yes yes advocate for fair wages, but dont forget those wages, even if fair, are just a prize you get for being better at capitalism than ppl like me

patience is such a compelling dynamic in relationships sorryyy it’s the peak of romance to me

“i’m not ready” “i’ll wait” and i’ll be in shambles

Right now I’m a little obsessed with the dynamic where they’re both/all ready but there’s something Big Happening or they have Responsibilities so they have to be patient and wait for the right time.

The pent up desire so they can deal with shit followed by the loss of control when they finally come together is just delicious to me.

i love the emt dick grayson headcanon and i think it's so much more apt than the cop plotline for a lot of reasons but i'm also obsessed with the fact that in this scenario, injured bludhaven residents scared that they're dying are being treated by a guy whose examples for medical bedside manner are "detached englishman" and "bruce wayne under psychological stress"

The genius behind Zendaya's red carpet looks. One of the greatest stylists to ever do it. Law Roach!