when you download a pdf and it's called like 1328723486basdf12.pdf but then you gently rename it to what it's supposed to be. that's forming a bond with a hurt and wild mythological creature and reminding it who it is.

grabs you. hey. listen. one day youll get out of your parents house. you will be able to not go to church on sunday. you will be able to cut and dye your hair any colour you want. you will be able to wear crazy eyeliner and black lipstick or whatever makeup you want. you can swear and be openly queer with your friends and transition and date. YOULL GET OUT OF THERE!!!!!!!

Hey you can cry OK? I am taking my pocket knife and I'm cutting my peach in half and handing you the bigger half. The world is full of things that are worth crying over and it can be exhausting trying to listen to everyone saying don't cry. And it can be worse trying not to cry because you don't want bad things to win. Sometimes you gotta just let yourself cry while eating a peach half someone wanted to give you because it was sweet and those things are also in the world too.

unbelievable

my personal favorite

I love scenarios and I hate being in situations

you can be peeling a boiled egg and think to yourself wow. that was so simple. and then you peel another one and it’s like being in the throes of war. shell everywhere. egg mangled. tears in your eyes. that’s how god keeps you humble

CAME OUT OF MY DADS PRINTER AT WORK TODAY..........

you weren’t a “well behaved” child you had anxiety and were terrified of conflict

I wish more people didn’t act like having a phone and internet access means you are / should be available 24/7

like when I was dating my ex, I would sometimes look at my phone in the morning to find a barrage of texts he’d sent at 2am while having an anxiety attack, but the last 5 texts would be him upset with me for not responding … like bruh I was asleep, my phone was off, wake up your roommate next time or call a hotline if you need actual assistance instead of texting your partner who is physically not anywhere near you and also not conscious

I’ve had people get on my case for not responding within an hour or two of messaging me. not considering that perhaps I was in class, or at work, or doing homework, or maybe even just taking a little time to myself where I don’t have to interact with people. heck, sometimes I’ll go a whole day without looking at my phone because I have other stuff I need to get done, and this is treated like a crime. as though having a phone means I’m contractually obligated to have it on my person and on alert all the friggin time. I’m not. and I don’t.

being online doesn’t obligate me to interact with anyone either. and online/offline status isn’t a proper indicator of activity to begin with. maybe I have an app running in the background but I muted it to avoid distraction. or maybe I was using my phone for something important so I swiped your message away without reading it, making it look like I suddenly went offline. maybe I have tumblr open in a separate tab and simply forgot about it. maybe I read your message in the one minute it took me to walk from lunch to my block class and I can’t respond for at least the next 3 hours. 

maybe these are all things that people should be allowed to do. maybe, just maybe, people should be allowed to portion their time and resources the way they need instead of catering to the impatience of others.

also read receipts are highly intrusive and they need to die

something interesting about this post is that I wrote it in 2018, and when it first took off I received a fair amount of angry responses from people who agreed with the other side. I was accused of being negligent and careless, overreacting about read receipts, and told that if I Really cared about my partner and my friends I would always make an effort to text back immediately, and drop everything for them no matter what. there were plenty of assumptions and projection to go around, including the unfounded assumption that I would deliberately leave somebody hanging in the middle of an emergency (something this post is not even about). these responses all came from people my age or a little older - for reference, I am currently 30, so these people were other millennials on the “younger” end.

recently (as of 2022-23) this post has seen a large upsurge in notes, and this time the response is overwhelmingly positive. the main emotion I see cropping up in the comments is exhaustion - tired of the constant demand on our time, tired of the lack of boundaries, exhausted at the increasing intrusiveness of technology as a whole. one person even pointed out that this post is nearly 5 years old and tech has only found ways to be even more invasive since then. notably, most of these responses are from people in their mid-20s and younger - “cuspers” and “older” gen Z.

at first I thought, since I was 25 when I wrote this, maybe that’s just the age when we start really solidifying our boundaries and reaching for healthier relationships. but when I remembered the age range of the negative responses I got 4 years ago, I’m more inclined to think there’s a generational shift in attitude happening as well. this is really encouraging to see, because for awhile I felt like I was in the minority of people pushing back against this “always on all the time” attitude. it was too easy to be accused of sounding like an out-of-touch boomer who complains that 5g causes cancer, and then people just wouldn’t take these concerns seriously.

I don’t have a grand thesis to tie this all together. just, if more people are wising up to the ways social media and fast access have warped our thinking and encouraged unhealthy patterns in relationships, and actively looking to find better balance, that’s a good thing. and it’s interesting to see the difference in thinking between people not even a decade apart.

THE MENU (2022) + letterboxd reviews

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

unstoppable force (wanting to be the kindest version of myself) vs unmovable object (all the anger and hatred I have inside myself)

That intimate moment between you and the book you have just read the last words of, where you sit there taking in the enormity of what you have just finished.

I'm glad we all agree

the best kisses are about the hands

the kiss by francesco hayez // the kiss by gustav klimt // the meeting on the turret stairs by frederic william burton // the kiss by auguste rodin and details

PEDRO PASCAL as Joel Miller in The Last of Us (HBO)