In Farsi, we say jaya shomah khallee when a beloved is absent from our table—literally: your place is empty. I don’t know why I waste my time with the imprecision of saying anything else
— Kaveh Akbar, from “Forfeiting my Mystique,” in Pilgrim Bell
the gimmick blogs are like tumblr’s rogue gallery. yes we’ve got some heroes, yes we’ve got some villains, but more importantly if you look over here you will see some freak who devotes all their time to counting the number of “t’s” in a post
T Count: 15
Letter Count: 198
Your T Percentage: 7.58%
Average T Percentage: 6.95%
You used the letter T 1.09 times as much as average!
YOU EXIST???
Sometimes you create a guy and it turns out they already exist
Sometimes that guy has skills beyond your comprehension @identifying-cars-in-posts
1993-1997 Mazda 626
Gotta get married so I can avoid situations with a “oh sorry I can’t, my wife needs me home asap” and then go home to my beautiful wife
on trust and manipulation
Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -
And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”
And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.
Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.
The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.
I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.
I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.
I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.
And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.
Felice never played a trick on me again.
Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed.
And I feel like this is information worth sharing.
shawty got them evil bottom jeans
boots with the curse
The whole necropolis was looking at her
Crow Time - Statue 1
Please like, comment, follow!
It brings me joy! It validates my bird obsession!
sex isn't sexy unless it's a little bit gross. have you forgotten that you are a divine ape? plastic smooth skin, plucked hair, painted faces, scripted reactions, scrubbed til only the smell of perfumed soap remains, proportions that are conflictingly cookiecutter yet unattainable, none of this is even a little bit interesting.
you can laugh at napoleon's "home in three days, don't bathe" letter to his wife, but there's more sexuality in that one line then there is in the entirety of the hypersexualized but painfully unsexy internet.
they probably cant love me back in a human or even mammalian sense, but my goldfish with their smooth pea-sized brain have learned to trust that i will make them better when they are sick. i feel like crying about this often
Ppl who had time for romance in high school we are so different. i was busy fighting for my life in my head
atla prequel novels are so much fun for me because the more recent avatars would question themselves and their methods, thinking "the great kyoshi and yangchen would never have stooped this low!"
but here we have avatar "legally a daofei" kyoshi and avatar "self-taught in espionage" yangchen, who still feel inadequate compared to their past lives. and as for the very first avatar? he was a homeless guy who defected from a spirit hunt! wan KNEW he wasn't worthy to host raava but she chose him anyway!
i'm sitting here just obsessing over how perfect it is that the harbinger of balance between worlds is, in nearly every case, someone who strikes that balance with their actions. fc yee just GETS it.
"This story is a tragedy because it didn't have to end this way."
vs
"This story is a tragedy because it was always going to end this way."
POV: mister Devon Price, PhD, telling me that I am right about everything
Source: Unmasking Autism, discovering the new faces of neurodiversity
on death with 1. lilies abounded, @petfurniture, twitter; 2. frances molina, “o’death”
[ID:
first image: tweet by @/petfurniture that reads “i hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. i hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.”
second image: text that reads “The thought of a Grim Reaper never scared me very much. If someone offered to walk you home in the dark, wouldn’t you accept? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a hand to hold?”
End ID]
dwergas-deactivated20180817
me: oh no, i’m dying… i feel so sick and weak
(eats food and drinks water)
oh, i’m fine… and i have powers now
You should feel proud of your writing.
You shouldn’t cringe when you reread your own writing. Cringe culture, especially in writing, is so overrated. Love your writing. Remind yourself what made you so passionate about your WIPs to start with.
You’ll be surprised how much more motivated you feel to write when you allow yourself to space to actually be proud of and love what you’re doing.
things you might’ve missed while reading through:
floor _
a short comic about struggling to find yourself.