I think Sam Gamgee didn't get off as lightly as people often think. Just my interpretation. But the ferver with which he snapped back to doing "normal" things reads to me as a kind of trauma response too. The desperation to return to the status quo. I think he needed to live in the Shire as much as Frodo needed to leave it. It's just - he's so aggressive about it. Mayor seven times, getting married quickly and having so many children, it paints a picture of frantic activity, a need to be kept occupied - perhaps so that you are too tired to think on things best left in the past. I think Sam needed to live that busy, full, life, I think that WAS a form of resting for him. He could not join Frodo, who he loved deeply, until he had had a lifetime apart. As if, having gone on a perilous quest into lands unknown, Sam snapped defensively back into familiarity and refused to leave until his wounds had healed. It took until the end of his life for any tolerance for travel and adventure (no matter how gentle) to return.

tbh the core of cosmic horror isn’t about the approach of unknowable monsters from the depths of space and time so much as it’s about being the only one screaming about it

As someone recently diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, one thing that’s been helping me grapple with the intense shame I have over all my “wasted potential” is accepting that potential doesn’t exist and never did.

This sounds so harsh, but please bare with me.

I procrastinated a lot growing up. I still procrastinate today, but less so. And yet, I got good grades. I could write an A+ paper that “knocked [my professor]’s socks off” in the hour before class and print it with sweat running down my face.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to!

And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

If ANYONE could make their top speed/most productive setting the one they used all the time, anyone could do anything. But you can’t. Your top speed is not a speed you’re able to sustain.

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

So all of this to say, I’m not wasting a ton of potential. I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

And if you have ADHD, I mean this from the bottom of my heart: you do not have limitless potential confounded by your laziness. You have the good potential of a good person, and you can access it with practice and work, but do not accept the story that you are choosing not to be all that you are or can be. You are just a human person.

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon

Message of the year:

“How do you spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.” — Gov Pritzker

"Most people treat ancestor work like it's a trade, a transaction: they help us, we give offerings, and that's that. Lord, if that ain't further from the truth. In this work you will meet ancestors who weren't very good in life, who bring to light the sins of your blood, and you will be faced with the task of healing these generational wounds."

- Jake Richards, "Backwoods Witchcraft"

The divine right of kings but it's a curse

“An “angel” is anything that carries out a mission for God. This includes forces of nature. […] Photosynthesis? That’s an angel. Gravity? An angel. Magnetism? Angel. The Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah (chapter 1) says than an angel only performs one job. That job doesn’t have to be destroying Sodom; it could be peristalsis, centripetal force or condensation.”

— Rabbi Jack Abramowitz, Angels.

in real life you will probably not respond to harassment in a sexy, clever, scripted way where you come out with the upper hand and everyone claps. you will freeze up and your moment will pass, or your voice will shake when you tell them to stop and you’ll realize two minutes later that you’re gross and sweaty and sticky from the adrenaline. maybe you’ll be on the ball and answer in a way you actually think is pretty smart and get ignored, or they’ll get more aggressive when you mouth off to them. you almost never will walk away feeling victorious. you walk away feeling uncomfortable and relieved that it’s over. you’ll think about it later and imagine that maybe you could have said something else. maybe you’ll feel ashamed that you weren’t quicker-witted, weren’t able to cut them down to size, weren’t able to avoid that lingering sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, as though there’s some kind of magical words you could have said that would have left you feeling less powerless. there really aren’t. 

I think it would probably kill God to give a direct answer to anything. And it would probably kill me to hear the direct answer. In this way God and I spare each other the awkward conversation, with both our arms shaking under this ashy rock that won’t fit through my door— this thing he brought me because, drunk, I asked him to.

Natasha Oladokun, “I Asked God for the Moon”

Hamlet as a D&D paladin.

Keep reading

It is a longing so intense that it creates what it desires, it cannot endure any touch of correction; it is, as I say, unspeakable... It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind.

Shirley Jackson, The Sundial

Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems; "On Reading An Anthology of Postwar German Poetry"

[Text ID: I know enough to refuse to say / that life is good, / but I act as though it were, / and skeptical about love, I survive / by the witness of my own.]

Weird question of the day: so what is terfs’ actual endgame?

Like I know the middle game is “everyone identifies with their assigned sex and no one modifies their body in ways that alter secondary sex characteristics.” But then what?

They say they’re feminists, so that would imply the actual endgame isn’t just “the destruction of the transcult” but the end of patriarchy.

But how is everyone identifying with their asab and not modifying their body supposed to do that?

It’s very Underpants Gnomes.

Recruit trans people who doubt.

Destroy the transcult!

…..

End patriarchy!

?????

I'm now at 514 pieces of embellishment (rhinestones, studs, beads) on this baby, not counting the rhinestone trim. Moving on to the front!