I love being an adult because you know what actually happens when you run your car into a curb and scratch up the bumper?
Nothing. You get it fixed, or you don’t. Whatevs.
You know what actually happens when you are depressed or sick or on your period and don’t cook dinner?
Nothing. You still get to eat something, nobody scolds you, it doesn’t have any real bearing on your future success, and you don’t get soft shunned for a week by your family.
You know what actually happens when you break stuff, forget stuff, get sick, fall asleep, are rude, miss a flight, don’t know how to do XYZ thing on fixing cars or canning food or whatever, lose things, get lost because you can’t read a map and forgot to charge your phone, buy the wrong groceries, plant the wrong plants, not make your bed, make your bed wrong, jump on your bed, sleep on your bed, eat crackers in your bed, have emotions literally anywhere?
Nothing.
Nothing happens.
No one is mad.
No one can hurt you, and if they do there are laws saying they can’t and that it’s an actual crime with legal consequences.
All there are are outcomes and different paths and different problems and different situations and you just bumble your way forward into dealing with those and that’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not the wrong choice, having problems isn’t indicative of your inherent badness or inadequacy or lack of applying yourself. It’s just life, and it’s happening to literally everyone.
I’m not even kidding.
You just do stuff and nothing bad happens. Walk around existing? Nothing bad will happen. Wild.
You can cry. In public. And the most likely outcome is not that you will get taken away to receive the beating of your lifetime, it is that people will mostly ignore you and some will be kinder to you. 🤯
On Saturday I got pulled over because it turned out I'd been driving on expired tags for a year and hadn't even noticed.
I got told to "take care of it soon please" and let go with a warning. Today I went to the DMV and paid a $5 late fee along with the 2-year fee for registration, got new plates and stickers and that was that.
A year late. No big deal. No one was shocked or appalled. It was just a thing that happened and then I took care of it. No biggie.
Turns out, people expect you to make mistakes because they're people and they make them too. More often than not, you can just fix them and move on.
Thank you for this lovely positive post!
I wish somebody told me this when I was a kid, then a teenager, and thought that my life was hell, that the whole world was hell, that I am a bad person and it will always be like that. it is literally a life-saving thing to say.
straight people will never understand how therapeutic it is to hear the words “her girlfriend” or “his boyfriend” or how I ascend to heaven when I hear “her wife” and “his husband”
Female customer: “I don’t have a rewards card but my partner might.”
Me, ears perking up: “Great! Can I have their name?”
Customer: “It’s Stephanie ____”
Me: stupidly wide smile and faint twinkle in eyes because holy crap I’m not alone
praise-beebo
These two women came up to my register with their twins and they called each other honey and their kids called them both Mom and my soul ascended to the heavens i was so happy
When I worked as a contractor I knocked on a heavily pregnant woman’s door and she said she’d “have to talk to the missus” in a heeeeavy outback accent and I actually forgot how to speak for a second and had to explain that I’m not homophobic I’m just super gay and hearing her say that launched my souls directly to nirvana
brownskinliam
My soul when I see Queer people visibly and openly living their best Queer lives:
LGBT visibility is so important for this reason and more.
Transcript: It reminds me of the "bike to work" movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographic "bike commuters" and had only pictures of white people with the occasional "Black professional" I asked her why she didn't photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc... id. the Black and [Latine] and Asian people... and she mumbled something about trying to "improve the image of biking" then admitted that she didn't really see them as part of the "green movement" since they "probably have no choice" - I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on. So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards... it's just being poor- but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something." -comment left on the Racialious blog post "Sustainable Food and Privilege: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class) (via meggannn). END TS
Steven Moffat Appreciation Day 2015
Steven Moffat’s poetics is very unique in many ways. There are several characteristic features that come to my mind when somebody mentions Moffat’s Doctor Who. I think of that fairy tale vibe appearing in most of his works, ordinary things as dust or statues turned into scary monsters, exploring the consequences of the Doctor’s deeds, myths and legends, and… poems. Moffat, more often than his co-workers, includes his own short poems in his scripts. They are a lovely touch that perfectly fits Moffat’s lyrical style.
Those poems are very simple, there are no complicated figures of speech. I’d more likely call them nursery rhymes, strict in their rhythm and simple in rhymes. However, these poems are very rich with symbolism. Just look at them and read them again and think about how they accompany the story. Yes, they don’t only accompany the story, they tell the story. They beautifully summarize the central thought or the plot and tell them in a concentrated, but a very accurate way. How beautiful is that? Steven transforms his stories into nursery rhymes which works as intertexts within the scripts.
The four-line stanza from The Time of the Doctor describes the upcoming regeneration, comparing the Doctor’s lives to the clock - yes, some people might consider it too obvious and cheesy, but on the other hand, nobody used this metaphor in the show before. Another thing is the poem from The Beast Below which describes not only the episode itself but could also be considered a characterization of the newly regenerated 11th Doctor and the story arc of series 5. Same goes for the poem whispered by the terrifying Whispermen, reminding us that the Doctor won’t live forever and his journey is about to end at Trenzalore. The quote Such a lovely old song. But is it about him? speaks for itself. The story of the Doctor echoes throughout the universe. There are so many theories about him and River and this is one of them, formed in a catchy rhyme, a story about love and death, read by children’s voices. And perhaps Demons run when a good man goes to war… is one of them, as well; the fight for little Melody, captured in hauntingly beautiful words, read by grown-up River herself – to me, this is the most powerful scene in the whole episode. The last poem we’ve heard was used in Listen, telling a horror myth about something under your bed. A poem that made the Doctor travel to the end of the universe to find out whether there was a grain of truth hidden in the rhyme.
I’m patiently waiting for this year’s nursery rhyme. This series is about to end very soon… Will it appear though? Will there be a goodbye poem for the impossible girl?
grief, i’ve learned, is really just love. it’s all the love you want to give but cannot. all that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and the hollow part of your chest. grief is just love with no place to go.
-1:25am
Some very sweet elephant behaviours I read about in Carl Safina’s Beyond Words:
- a young elephant kneeling down in front of their car in a playful way and throwing zebra bones at the researchers, trying to get them to play with him
- an 8-month-old elephant trying and failing to pick up some grass with her trunk (the author: “it reminds me of someone learning to use chopsticks”) and whose mother then pulled a sheaf of grass and ate it while making sure her daughter was watching the demonstration
- baby elephants suck their trunk for comfort (as we all know!!) but also like to swing and whirl it around as they try to figure out what it can do and how to use it, and sometimes accidentally step on their trunk and trip over it
- “often, babies reach with their trunks into the mouths of family members, taking a bit of what they’re eating”
- all the female elephants in a family rushing over to help when someone’s baby trips and falls, while making comforting vocalisations
- an enormous adult male elephant walking up to a family group and making an exaggerated display of nonchalance, with his trunk casually draped over his tusk, to show the other elephants that he’s not scary
- researchers messing with an elephant family by collecting a bit of urine when the elephant walking at the back of the group stopped to pee, then driving some distance to leave the urine ahead of them. “When they encountered fresh urine from an elephant they knew was behind them, they seemed truly baffled, as though thinking, “Wait a minute—how’d she pass us? She’s back behind us!”
- mothers instructing their babies to switch to the other side of their body and walk in their shade when the day is very hot
- an elephant child trying to climb all over a bigger male teenager who was lying down for a nap, receiving a kick in response, and running back to its mother in alarm—then the teenager followed and lay down flat beside them as if to apologise and invite the child to climb onto him again
- elephant children throwing tantrums when they are being weaned and their mother blocks them from nursing (“He got so upset, pushing her, poking her and tusking her, […] it was like, ‘Ooh, I hate you!”)
- researchers followed a family that included a baby who was born disabled, with twisted forelegs that he couldn’t straighten. The entire elephant family (from the adults to the baby’s 8-year-old sister) nurtured him, patiently helping him up every time he fell over, “slowing their pace to his disabilities, continually turning to watch his progress, waiting as he caught up from behind” until (after a few days) the little one managed to straighten his legs and learn to walk normally
- a researcher once saw an elephant pluck up some grass and place it in the mouth of another elephant whose trunk was badly injured. Also adults are sometimes seen carrying sick baby elephants on their tusks
- a researcher saw a baby elephant who was wary of going into the water, wrap her trunk around her mother’s tusk as her mother patiently entered the river with her, like a child nervously grabbing her mother’s arm
- “little elephants show lots of concentration while working to master such tasks as picking up sticks. A youngster might twirl and twirl its trunk around a single blade of grass, finally grasp it, drop it and have a hard time getting it back, then simply place the grass blade atop its head”
I feel so so strongly about this I cannot emphasise enough that you don’t have to MAKE MONEY in order for your time to be well spent. Nor do you have to receive payment in order for your talent to “count”.
I don’t think a lot of people understand that no matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that’s so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you’ll say “Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you’re right,” and that doesn’t mean you were “morally toxic” before, it means you’re a non-omniscient human capable of growth.
Also, some preferred terms for things will change and evolve, and terms we prefer now might eventually be considered gauche or even offensive, and that doesn’t mean you were a bigot at the time for using them. It means we evolved as a society and chose new terminology to reflect that change.
Nobody is a fully formed realisation of progressivism that can predict all shifts and modes of thought. The world will always change, and hopefully you will, too
You know what? The writers do owe you. They demand your time, they demand your attention, they demand your money. You go to cons and you buy their merch. You recommend the shows to people. You create fanart and write fanfictions and make fan videos and gifs. You directly and indirectly promote the show. The writers do owe you. They owe it to you to tell a good story. To deliver on their promises. To stay consistent. To do justice to the characters. They do owe you that.
As a writer, I approve this message.
We certainly can’t make everyone happy, and we can’t let fans dictate all the specifics. But it is literally our job to deliver on the basics of cohesive and engaging storytelling and in-depth understanding of characterization. And when it comes to certain fan-friendly and fandom-fueled types of content and properties, it’s vital to understand our own audiences. And also to be willing to adjust, to evolve and to adapt based on a combo of actor chemistry, organic character and story development, and audience response.
crewdlydrawn-deactivated2022072
A very accurate and timely twitter thread. 👌
[Twitter user @unsolvedtwt is also on tumblr: @kindaunsolved ]
***TERFS AND TRUSCUM DO NOT INTERACT***