I drink and I know things.

Lyanna Week 2021

Day 1: Book moments or Favourite fancast

Today, on this fateful day in sex ed, I have to teach 25 9th graders how to put condoms on wooden dicks without losing my composure. Wish me luck lmao

Now to find a way to discreetly transport this entire drawer to the other side of the building...

Today went well overall. Lots of great conversations took place alongside some... very silly ones lmao.

Here are some highlights from this morning’s lesson:

Me: *removes the wooden dicks from my bag and slaps them on the table*

Students collectively: o_O

That one student: nice

—

Me: *demonstrating how to put on a condom*

Also me: *puts it on wrong the first time, even though I practiced twice beforehand* So everyone, here we see what not to do. Let’s try that again

—

Me: *finished demonstration, holding a sheathed wooden dick* so what questions do we have about condoms before I unleash you all to practice on the models?

Student: *raises hand* yeah, I’m wondering how you’re feeling about your life choices up until this point?

Me: o-o

—

Student 1: *raises hand* miss, why are the condoms so... slimy?

Me: thats lubricant, it helps get rid of friction that might cause discomfort during intercourse.

Student 2: *raises hand* can you use lube on a slip and slide?

Me: *genuinely considering the possibility*

—

*during a conversation about excuses people have heard for not wearing condoms*

Student 1: I had a guy tell me he was too big to fit in a condom

Me: *opens a condom, puts entire forearm inside and pulls it up to my elbow* here’s why that’s not true

Student 2: I once saw a video of somebody that put an entire watermelon in a condom before, so unless that dude’s got a watermelon shlong, that’s cap.

Me: *slowly losing composure behind my mask* you have the right idea, but let’s refrain from using the word ‘shlong’ in class, please.

—

Me: what are some ideas of things we can say to people who try to pressure you into having unprotected sex?

Student 1: tell them you don’t want their penis cooties!!

Student 2: penis cooties? Pretty sure that’s just herpes

Me, internally: like... you’re not wrong

—

Me: alright everyone, time to return the wooden models up front. Remove the condoms by firmly grasping the base of the model and sliding it off. Don’t forget to throw it away please!

Student 1: FIRMLY GRASP IT

Student 2: idk if I can return it now, miss. I’ve become attached to mine(the wooden dick)

Student 3: yeah, most men are

Me: *trying to keep a straight face*

—

Student 1: miss, why are the wooden dicks so shiny when you take the condom off

Me: oh, that’s just the lubricant from the condom.

Student 2: so you know you put the condom on right if your dick is shiny after?

Student 3: yeah! If your dick is shiny, you’re doing it right

Me: *trying to keep my composure pt. 36716159* uh, yeah that’s not necessarily the case. You see, these models are wooden. Penises are not.

Student 3: then why is it called morning wood?

Me: *internally self destructs*

—

Me: *casually wiping off the lube from wooden dicks w/ a paper towel before returning them to my bag* so what questions do we have about the use of contraception?

Student: miss can you please not make eye contact with us while you do that?

by Rovina Cai Illustrations for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

The zombie genre is like “nice moment of human connection you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if someone came along and secretly bit one of you forcing one of you to conceal your injury and dread and forcing someone else to shoot and kill their loved one”

and it slaps

it explicitly does not slap and this is precisely the reason it does not slap. excessively gritty and survival-y genres are atrocities because they always take the tack of “Softness Is Evil Because It Is Not Viable” rather than the obviously correct “The Thing Preventing Softness From Being Viable Is Evil Because Softness Is Good A Priori”

like I do not need media to come out and explicitly tell me what the moral is but I have never seen a zombie thing do this without a barely-subtextual disdain for anyone not optimizing their entire life for Boring Manly Survival Grunt Who Insists On Saying Firearm Instead Of Gun And Probably Has A Police Or Army Background With Disgusting Massive Arms Too Manly To Wipe The Grease Off His Face Because Heaven Forbid Anything Ever Be Not Maximally Dirty And Unpleasant.

The gross, Malthusian, doomsday-prepper-esque fantasy of Harshness, Toughness and Individualistic Toxic-Masculinity-Oozing Intolerance Of Compassion And Sympathy being All That Will Remain After The Apocalypse is annoying, anthropologically and evolutionarily unlikely, and born of assumptions about human nature that are neither correct nor good for us, sure.

but I don’t think this trope must communicate that, nor do I think it necessarily does.

“Softness” may create conflicts with no easy answers in extreme circumstances, “softness” may be hard or impossible to keep viable in extreme circumstances, “softness” may even be incompatible with survival, but none of these things = “softness is evil/bad/wrong,” and in general looking for any variation on “X is evil/bad/wrong” as The message of a work will miss a lot of nuance.

What I mean is. Your loved one has been bitten. They are still your loved one, and still loved, and yet not. What is good in you, what is human in you, demands that you save them, but you will endanger everyone else. To what does your human nature make you loyal?

You see, zombie fiction is a good genre because humans survive through social cohesion. They protect their own. They cherish their disabled and tend to their wounded. Writers who lean into an individualistic interpretation on surviving the zombie apocalypse are taking the comfortable route.

It’s because you are human and you cannot make it alone. Even if you could, what kind of life would that be? You are driven to be with and defend the lives of others. In the zombie apocalypse, this nature is an existential threat. At what point do you finish killing that which makes you soft, and what is left? Perhaps you learn not to hesitate, to take deadly aim at faces which are still human and still beg for your mercy, and you survive.

And just as there’s a poetic inevitability to seagull chicks perishing with their stomachs full of plastic and sea turtles mistaking the glare of city lights for moonlight on waves, there is a poetic inevitability to a human hesitating to kill the loved one that has been bitten, because that is our nature. You did your best, seagull, you could not have done any better. You had to care for your chick. You simply were given a rotten set of options.

You are human. You have to defend the people you love, even when it is a liability, even when it is certain death. You are human. You have to feel compassion when you look into a human face that asks for mercy. You have to hesitate. You are human. You have to be soft, even when it will kill you, unless you excise that part of you completely, but you can’t. You can only start a process of tearing it out, of tearing out things that are fundamental to your survival in order to survive, and one day you will either heal or you will find that nothing you have preserved is what you wanted to preserve in saving your own life.

It’s a rotten set of options, it is the point at which the human spirit loses structural integrity, and this isn’t necessarily a criticism of that; perhaps it honors the human spirit, because if we were infinitely willing to sacrifice what we hold sacred, it wouldn’t be sacred anymore.

In moral conflicts, sometimes there is an option that “makes sense” mathematically, but would we be better if we possessed the capacity for that kind of efficient moral reasoning? “Would you rather kill your own child or cause 10 innocent strangers to die” is a question with a clear mathematical answer, but what kind of person would find themselves capable of immediately giving that answer? You are human. You cannot answer the question. You cannot answer the question not because you are broken, but because the universe that asks it of you is broken.

This is, of course, a statement it takes titanic balls to assert, and yet we, as a species, assert it. Suck our titanic balls, universe.

How is that not an affirmative commentary on human nature?

It slaps.

look, I know it’s ~problematic~ for all kinds of reasons but I do kind of love when there’s a character with few or no scruples who outsources their moral compass to someone else

it’s sort of the equivalent of when a cat jumps up somewhere they shouldn’t be and you just pick them up and move them off it, only with murder or whatever. 

character a looking at character b like “okay is this a situation where I can do a murder” and character b like. “no. we’ve gone over this.”

I just find it very funny

“Swimming, Not Drowning 2” by Marcela Bolivar on INPRNT

and:

➳ all the times Frenchie called Kimiko mon cœur (requested by @georginadymova​)

I was bored and messed around with illustrator of course it had to be #Lexa related.  source: @uswntsoccerfans

So this one is kind of a special one, and I really wanted to get it before Clexa Con came around. If you know me, then you know I’m pretty Lexa obsessed, and most of you will automatically think this is for Lexa; most of you are wrong. It’s not a symbol to represent Lexa, or my love for her, but rather a reminder. A reminder of how I should, and need to live my life. How life should be about more than just surviving, but also how sometimes, despite our feelings and emotions, tough choices need to made. How sometimes it is essential to think with your head, but also be able to listen to what your heart is telling you. How walls are good to have, but sometimes it’s important to lower those walls, and trust in people, or you will miss out on great opportunities. It’s not only a reminder of all these things, it is also a reminder, and a dedication, to this fandom, and what they have done for me. A fandom who has let me in, trusted me, and listened to me. A fandom who has provided me the opportunity to attend Clexa Con so I can meet as many wonderful people as possible, and speak in front of those who wish to listen. It’s a reminder, but it’s also a thank you to you, and to Lexa for being there as inspiration and a guide. This is cheesy, I know, but I needed you to know this; when ever I look at this tattoo, I will always be reminded that she was special, and so are you. 

307 scarred me. But I made sure that this scar is visible and shows me that it was all real.

This is a reminder for everything I gained in the last year. This is for the feeling in my stomach when Clarke and Lexa kissed. This is for the strength it gave me and the fun I had in the fandom. This is for every good thought I had, every friend I made, everything I learned about myself.

I won’t forget. Reshop, Heda. Ai gonplei nou ste odon.

the body positivity movement needs to start moving hard into including disabled bodies and this is what I mean by that. yes, it was a good step forward to change the rhetoric from “your body is a good body if it meets these arbitrary aesthetic standards” to “your body is a good body because it completes these tasks for you” (ie: walking, eating, laughing, hugging, etc.) but that rhetoric is still not fully body positive, because it excludes bodies that do not do these things. the same as saying how we need to “focus on healthy bodies not skinny bodies” sounds good at first, but it completely misses the point that unhealthy bodies deserve to be appreciated too. disabled bodies are still beautiful and still fundamentally good, not because “your body is kind to you so you should be kind to your body”- because not everyone’s body is kind to them. but all bodies are still good bodies because they are what houses your soul. your body is what allows you to exist and live your life in whatever way you live it, and for that reason, it is a good and beautiful body. your body is what your loved ones see when they look at you and the love they feel for it as an extension of you makes it a good and beautiful body. your body doesn’t have to look a certain way or behave a certain way to be good. it is good just for being here.

so I’ve been in a relationship for 5 years now. And I see a lot of posts about how people think relationships mean having butterflies forever, your heart beating faster when they walk into a room, about cuddling together every night, legs intertwined, that you’d be so happy to live together you’d sleep on a double bed with each other every night.

And its not really like that, at least not to me.

You stop getting the butterflies when you live together. Your heart no longer speeds up when you see them, but instead, everything calms down. When youre in the room with them, you feel calm, and secure. When you cuddle them you feel your heart beat slow, and the sound of their breathing carry you towards comfort. It doesnt feel like a roller coaster anymore, it feels like home.

You don’t sleep curled up with each other every night, legs twisted between theirs so tight its hard to tell where yours begin and theirs end.

Instead, you sleep comfortably, side by side, sometimes facing different directions. But every night, you find yourself scooting backwards on the bed so you bump into them. You snuggle against their arm, or stroke their hair as they fall asleep. There are nights when my boyfriend, in his sleep, reaches around me and pulls me to him, like a child with his teddybear, like I am his comfort.

 In the wee hours of the morning before the dawn breaks, when the world is blue and you see through cracked eyes, you curl into their chest and inhale their scent before drifting back to sleep. 

Kisses aren’t always romantic and firey anymore. But there are so much more of them now. There are cold kisses when you’re eating ice cream in the summer, and sticky kisses over breakfast pancakes. There’s “im leaving now” kisses, and “one more kiss before you go” kisses. There’s sleepy morning kisses before work, when you don’t remember the alarm going off but instead the press of their lips against yours is what brings you into the day.

There’s kisses before sleep, and, you are so sweet with the things you do kisses. There’s kisses because you treat animals so tenderly, and I’m so glad i’m with you and not someone else kisses. There’s quick kisses in the aisles of the grocery store, when its loud and you gravitate together, when instead of having your own personal space and their own personal space, its both of yours together, and you step into their chest to take up less area together. 

You don’t always text each other with confessions of love and care like you used to, because that’s a given now, and you’ve moved on to quirky inside jokes about the life youve built together. You share looks of exasperation and amusement in public, your own little world against the outside one. 

Relationships aren’t always a fairy tale. They’re not always fireworks and sparks, at least, after the start.

But they are a quiet rhythm and hum of love and care. It’s not a fire in your soul, but one in your hearth, keeping you warm and comfortable, comforting you as you drowsily drift into sleep.

And I love that.

While walking down the street one day, a senator is tragically hit by a truck and killed.

His soul arrives in Heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.

“Welcome to Heaven,” says St. Peter. “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you.”

“No problem, just let me in,” says the senator.

“Well, I’d like to, but I have orders from higher up. What we’ll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity.”

“There’s no need! I want to be in Heaven,” says the senator.

“I’m sorry, but we have our rules.” And with that, St. Peter escorts him to the elevator, the doors open, and he rides the elevator down, down, down. When the doors open again, the senator finds himself in the middle of a beautiful green golf course. In the distance is a club, and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him.

Everyone is very happy and in formal dress. They run to greet him, and they reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar.

Also present is the Devil, who is a very friendly guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that, before the senator realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves while the elevator rises. The elevator goes up, up, up, and the door reopens in Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him.

So 24 hours pass with the senator joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by, and St. Peter returns.

“Well, you’ve spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now, you must choose where you want to spend eternity.”

He reflects for a minute and then answers, “Well, I would never would have thought it, I mean Heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better satisfied in Hell.”

So Saint Peter escorts him to the elevator, and down, down, down he goes into Hell. Now, the doors of the elevator open, and he is in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. And it’s hot, hot, hot, and the odor is just horrible.

Sweltering hot. Hot and miserable. The Devil comes over to him and smoothly lays his arm around his shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” stammers the senator. “The day before I was here, and there was a golf course and club, and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now all there is is a wasteland full of garbage, and my friends look miserable.”

The Devil looks at the senator, smiles, and says, “Yesterday we were campaigning. Today you voted for us.”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (via chthonic-cassandra)

*steps one degree of separation outside my normal tumblr orbit* oh wow you people are all out of your minds

#i'm quietly ice fishing with my mutuals but sometimes i perceive the shadows of lovecraftian discourse monsters passing below the surface

Victor Frankenstein: I’ve created life but I refuse to put any effort into helping that life develop. I won’t teach him, love him, or defend him even though I forced him into existence with a fully operational adult brain lol. Peace, bitch.

The Monster: Am Eloquent Baby

Boomers: He’S NOt thE ViCtIM, HE’s tHe MOnsTEr

An ironic parallel considering the idea of “tough love” parenting that plenty of boomers like to use. If they buy into the idea that their kids just have to toughen up and face the real world without guidance or emotional support, I’m sure it does scare them to read a story where someone who wasn’t given any support began to resent their creator and turn on them.

it’s like that post that’s like ‘knowledge is knowing that frankenstein is the doctor; wisdom is knowing that frankenstein is the monster’. like the whole point of the post is that frankenstein’s monster is a victim of viktor frankenstein’s own monstrosity.

mary shelley did not lose her virginity on her mother’s grave just for people to misunderstand her best known work over a century later.

Great post everybody