Jung Jin Lee on Instagram

This level of romance or don’t even bother

There’s just this sense of life about Manchester, yeah? This wholesome industrious and grey and exposed brick and leather jacket and rainwater puddle and knitted jumper and cotton shirt feel about Manchester, all teen parties quietning down towards Midnight and lying down on a leather sofa with your boyfriend; he’s stroking your face and your marveling at the meaning of life and this meaning of life has found it’s way along to you, to give someone special to you to hold. And it’s getting a little bit destroyed by dumb artisan coffee shops, but that’s alright. Anyone can’t really say they’d prefer a rat invasion over a hipster invasion, even though they’re really the same thing, right?

Can you love me a little bit if you can?

Let’s see how we go

Riding a bike through old factories that your Dad owns, vintage cars with a decent layer of dust and smoke scented leather and wood internal upholstery; Morris minors and cigarettes and dusty jeans that smell like engine oil and coal-fire smoke, and all this stimulates into a love and a life and a culture, daughter’s and father’s and getting along with your own tact while everyone else pursues some goody-goody program. I love Manchester. It’s so cool

valentine’s day coming up means you gotta deal with those annoying bitches who go out of the way to let everyone know they hate romance and valentine’s day. maybe buy a pink teddy bear and eat some candy hearts and you’ll feel better

yeah physically I’m here but both mentally and spiritually I’m in France in the 40s, listening to an old radio play La Vie En Rose. There’s a black coffee in front of me, a notebook full of snippets of poetry I’ll never finish. Outside the window, the sun is golden and shining and it weaves through your hair like liquid sunlight as our eyes meet across the road-

My friend asked how I learned to cook and the answer is I didn't. I know like 5 things about cooking and they are:

If anyone wants to add, please do

Spring Academia Aesthetic🌸🍓🍯🎻🏹

Chiffon blouses and light dresses. Sketching ladybugs and butterflies at the park. Watercolors in the evening while drinking iced tea. Standing on soft grass while you shoot photos of strangers. Soft curls in the wind. Flushed cheeks and fresh reading. Poetry in the park. Shakespeare in the night. Pressing flowers in journals. White button up shirts with soft blazers. Heading to school on bikes or by foot. Eating pastries while studying with friends. Drinking wine and reading Chatterton. Holding hands with your lover. Stealing kisses from friends.

ok now things that were excellent about the hunger games:

-katniss’ character arc

-i mean it like katniss is a) a traumatized woman whose b) pain is never glossed over or overlooked, whose grief and coping mechanisms are put at the front and center of the narrative, and whose trauma is absolutely critical part of any coherent reading of the story

-her emotions are treated as legitimate and valid regardless of what causes them. she is allowed to be irrational; she is allowed to be furious. she is allowed to be complicated and illogical and angry at her circumstances in a way that was (and continues to be) revolutionary for a female character in YA fiction

-her only parent is a single mother whose mental illness and grief in the aftermath of her husband’s death has prevented her from taking care of her children, and the consequences of this in terms of how it affects her relationships with her children play out in a realistic and nuanced way

-katniss’ friendship with gale is just that. a friendship. no matter what happens in the later books in the hunger games she and gale are just best buds who shoot stuff in the woods and forage together. their friendship has no strings attached and it was a breath of fresh air while it lasted

-her relationship with peeta is grounded in an interesting conversation about what it means for people in poverty to show solidarity with each other, and what that solidarity can look like, and how even minute acts of kindness can have incredible impacts to those on the receiving end of them. this isn’t even a huge part of the books it’s just nice to see

-peeta never does creepy shit or tries to coerce her or acts entitled to katniss’ love. he’s nice to her. he like, idk, genuinely acts like he likes her? which is wildly rare for a lot of Y/A love interests?? and he’s in love with her but that’s all, he only uses it as a Games strategy on his end, he doesn’t act like a complete ass about it and the fact that i’m as grateful for this narrative decision as i am is pretty depressing but i am nevertheless

-collins pulls zero punches in depicting the horrors and aftermath of the games themselves. she does not fuck about glorifying or romanticizing the ordeal. she makes all but explicit that the hunger games is a scathing critique of television/reality shows/movies and how they’re tied into capitalist structures, to the point where she all but spells out on the page “THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY’S MANIPULATION AND ABUSE OF CHILDREN IS IMMORAL AND THE FACT THAT WE HAVE ALL BECOME SO NUMB TO IT IS A VERY VERY BAD THING” 

-katniss’ hyper-awareness of the cameras and where they are at any given point and in any given scene is a very nice use of detail. like she’s constantly noticing lenses, screens, mirrors, basically anything that could be used as a surveillance device, and it really sets a nice atmosphere of paranoia and supervision that both lets us into her headspace and paints a broader picture of the capitol in general

-the capitol in general is also really well done; the sheer lavishness and luxury is depicted in gorgeous detail, and you can almost feel yourself being pulled into the scene – except collins always holds you back from getting totally absorbed in the facade of the Games, keeping you skillfully positioned at a far enough distance that you can see the horror underneath

-just all the little details about the Games that she included. tesserae. volunteering. the “career tributes.” the mentor system. the stylists. the initial chariot ride. the interviews. the balls. the training. the evaluations. the sponsors. it really does make the Games feel like a real event that a lot of people put a lot of thought into the ritual and ceremony of, horrific content aside.

-and that’s also the point! that you can get so wrapped up in the politicking and emotional dramas surrounding the Games that you forget what they are: an indefinite round of blood sport played out to the death with twenty-four unwilling child participants

-how expertly the gamemakers turn the kids against each other, playing on their fears and insecurities to produce more convincing conflict and rivalries

-how you almost forget that they’re children, except collins won’t let you forget. she keeps reminding you. in death scenes especially there is unique attention paid to noticing how small tributes are, how they look immature, how they’re inexperienced or dumb or make bad decisions, and it all points you again and again to the recurring realization that they’re children. this. is happening. to children.

-the way that the capitol distances itself from the Games by refusing to really confront the reality of death, which read a certain way is a very cutting critique of how western media uses the framing of images and metaphor to distance itself from the tragedies it often uses for content

-basically the hunger games is a nuanced and magnificent text

-literally these books were so fucking good

Dark Academia Interiors

Artist

Various canvases in different stages of completion stacked against a wall. Jars of brushes and pens on a paint-splattered desk, a sketchbook open on a page with a pencil sketch of a nude reclining like a dead body. A pile of wide hardbound books on your favourite artists serving as a makeshift table for a white marble bust. A bare window; you need all the light you can get. A box of drawers holding more supplies. A portrait of your muse hangs across your bed so you can look at her before you sleep. Sheets always rumpled. In the corner is a rag stained with what could be paint... or blood.

Poet

Hardbound dictionaries, spine-creased paperbacks with yellowing pages, thick anthologies, thin chapbooks all crammed onto the bookshelves, spilling over on tables, on the floors... Notebooks and pens always within reach, but there are words written everywhere, in book margins, on the back of torn envelopes, on hotel stationery. A list of words describing the darkness in your soul pinned to the wall beside a photo of Oscar Wilde, and a quote by Sappho. Your plaid jacket draped over the back of your chair. In its pocket is a list of names, half of them crossed out, of all the people you are writing poems about. Vengeance is sweet.

Scientist

Prints from old botanicals or anatomy books on your wall. Or cyanotype photos or x-rays or blown-up microscope slides. Or framed butterflies, wings already turning to dust. A row of notebooks on your table, the same colour and size, filled with your scrawling. Field notes, lab notes, therapy session notes, the consistency of format matters; the neatness of your penmanship does not. White coat hanging from a hook behind the door, front pocket full of pens, one of them bleeding. A skull on your bookshelf (not necessarily human) sharing space with a battered copy of Darwin, Campbell’s Biology, and a stack of pulpy sci fi books.

Theatre Folk

Posters from various productions either up on the walls or rolled up and shoved in a cardboard box. Your velvet cape swinging from the fancy coat rack you found in a thrift shop. A cloche hat with a feather on a marble bust. A piece of the backdrop from the last play you were in serves as your headboard. A script, lines highlighted, on your bedside table. A full-length mirror. A vanity table with your extensive makeup collection. A knife in the drawer, a prop you kept from the murder mystery where you played the last victim. It still gleams red.

little things to keep forever:

- tickets and guitar picks from concerts

- embarrassing diary entries 

- pretty rocks and shells you found on a beach

- old photographs, birthday cards and letters 

- notes your friends wrote to you during class

- train tickets and souvenirs from an enchanting city

- pressed flowers and leaves

- little objects that symbolize a lovely memory

- anything that makes you smile

I want someone who travels a lot to send me a piece of lace or a ribbon or a pressed flower from everywhere they go just to remind me how much they love me, and so I may travel the world with them

let’s take stroll through the cobblestone streets of an old european city, where wafts of freshly-baked pastries mingled with a faint scent of cigarette smoke linger in the air and sounds of delightful laughter can be heard from the nearby cafes,  while we have a lengthy discussion of subtle yet slightly obvious incidents of homoeroticism in 19th century literature 

go to florence. look in the eyes of michelangelo’s david, chiseled in stone but softer than rosemary. they say he wore a crown of gold once before it was taken from his head. he is planted in stone but his eyes are too human for your liking; they beg you, put it back.

the antinous mondragone, the marble smooth and cold like winter ink. you remember it was unpacked with lipstick marks on its cheek; someone at the louvre with lips smeared cherry red had made herself hadrian and kissed it. you remember thinking, who could blame her?

sappho and erinna in the garden at mytilene, captured by simeon solomon. it’s been a while since you’ve cried at a painting. you’ve gone to museums armed with ways to analyze what you’re seeing; you know what clouds are saying, you know the language of flowers. but you looked at the painting of those two women clouded in their embrace and didn’t even realize you were crying until you looked at your notes in your lap and the pen was smudged with tears.

the universality of love. it hasn’t changed: two boys swathed in light, two girls in a garden teeming with flowers, a gaze from across a room. in the statues and paintings we are captured in our gentle, tender humanity, in the places where we think no one is looking, where we are allowed to feel vulnerable. where we are finally able to say, look, this is me, this is you, this is everything that love should be. i want to make you feel it.

Ya'll might wanna grow some hyperaccumulators (such as sunflowers, oyster mushrooms, mustard greens, vetiver, etc) around your house and/or in your garden for a few years before you plant leafy vegetables so you don't end up consuming heavy metals.

I have a very strange relationship with cereal. I'll forget it exists for months at a time, then I remember that not only does it exist, it is one of humanity's perfect foods. Then I'll eat like 4 boxes in one day before some eldritch god takes the knowledge from me again. (Probably for my own good.)

Get yourself a girl that will explore abandoned places with you…… while also summoning demons

Can we normalize doing nothing, please?

I work with kids. These kids are at my program before and after school, and then some of them have sports/dance/music sometimes all of the above before they finally go home, eat dinner, and go to sleep. Then rinse and repeat everyday, and games and more classes on the weekend, etc.

I’m all for extracurriculars, but this turns into the teen who is not only in the school play, but they’re on the newspaper, the football team, and seven different clubs. In college they take double the courseloads, and then once they graduate…what?

They work themselves raw because they arent used to downtime. They’ve been told they can always be doing something, and they don’t know how to relax. This turns into the adult that has anxiety because there’s nothing left to clean, the adult that desperately wants to watch that TV show but can’t force themselves to sit long enough for it.

Then they turn into the moms and dads who spend all their free time ferrying their kids to extracurriculars.

Like, these kids don’t know what downtime is? I told a kid I did nothing last weekend, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He asked what I was doing this weekend and I said “Probably sleeping, mostly,” and he actually gasped. Then he rattled off a bunch of things I could do, to which I had to stop him.

“No, you don’t understand. I plan on sleeping. I’m booked.”

“But you could–”

“Nah. I’m just gonna rest.”

It was as if I had said a bad word or something. I asked what he does when he gets sick, and he says he goes to practice anyway. I asked him what he does if he doesn’t feel like going, and he said he goes anyway. I asked when he takes time to rest, and he said when he sleeps at night.

Bring back lazy Sundays. Bring back Saturday morning cartoons. Bring back the idea of relaxing and soaking in your day before moving into the next thing. Bring back the right to breathe, the right to rest.

Bring back mental health days, and taking a break. Bring back taking a walk or watching a show or setting a timer to remind yourself to stop cleaning and relax.

If you’re running at 100% all the time with no time to recharge, then your battery is going to die spectacularly, and probably at the worst possible time.

Mood