the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.
three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.
two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.
their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.
one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.
i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.
i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.
and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?
you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.
a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.
someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.
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i refuse to believe it didn't tear sirius apart to leave home. i refuse to believe he didn't pack his bags with a straight face and run away, only to collapse and break down inconsolably when he made it to james's house. he'd escaped, but he left regulus behind. he left his brother. his baby boy.
why did it take him so long to leave home? if regulus wasn't there, he would've left years before. but he couldn't leave his brother behind. i can't even fathom how hard it was for him to leave, even if it was better for him. i imagine james offered sirius refuge year after year and was rejected time and time again.
leaving regulus tore sirius apart piece by piece. the guilt of leaving overwhelmed him and it never failed to collapse any happiness he found at the potter's, even years later. he never truly recovered from running away.
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I tried to make sourdough biscuits to freeze as a test to see if they would bake afterwards, and how, and so I mixed them up and cut them out and carefully preserved them on parchment paper in my freezer and then hours later I bagged them once they were frozen so I could take them to my mom's and then I went to sit down and realized oh FUCK. I fucking forgot the butter. I FORGOT the BUTTER. I skipped a whole ass step.
And I told my mother, shit I forgot the butter, and she goes what do you mean like inside or on top?
Inside!!! Inside!!!!!!!!! I didn't mix the butter in during prep!!! These are unbuttery biscuits!!!
And she goes
I didn't add butter to mine (I had brought her some discard to bake these biscuits with a few days ago)
I said what do you mean?
She goes, the recipe you told me didn't have butter (I told her the recipe from memory)
I FORGOT THE BUTTER TWICE
but wait there's more!!!
She goes, your dad liked them
At which point I'm forced to ask: did he tho. Did he like them, or did he tell you he liked them, the way he LIED to us for 35 years about liking pizza?
Well, she says, I don't know. he did admit tonight to not liking brussel sprouts
Which they've been eating together for years now, literally this man is incapable of telling someone he doesn't like a food which explains a lot of my childhood meals
So I'm like okay okay okay okay. Okay. I know I forgot the butter and I know these biscuits are frozen hockey pucks right now but hear me out... What if I turn the oven on to preheat it, and then put the biscuits under the oven vent to thaw, and then just mix the butter in after? Surely nothing will go wrong with this plan.
So I break out the biscuits, and I turn on the oven, and I start thawing them, and I put the butter into a bowl, and start frantically trying to mash it with a pastry masher. This goes about as well as you might expect, which is to say terribly, because the butter just sort of turns into a pile of butter instead of a stick, and I need it to be pebbles of butter.
So I start sprinkling in flour, just until the butter stops re-amalgamating. The biscuits are basically thawed by this point so I try to mash those in and that goes very very very badly, so I clean the tool and just start folding the butter in with my hands like kneading bread, desperately just trying to mash it into one coherent form. It makes a ball of dough, or good enough to pass for one, and I cut out six biscuit sized chunks.
Put them in. Bake them. My oven light doesn't work so I can't even check on them while they're baking to see if I fucked it up worse.
Finally I pull them out, and I realize I fucked up but at least it was in the right direction. The biscuits don't look like they're supposed to, but they do look like layered biscuits, and they taste fine. I put a bunch of honey on one of them and it was pretty good.
I tell all of this to my partner when he gets home and he listens to all of it in silence. When I'm done his only comment is:
"Well, I guess we know how puff pastry was invented, now."
Yeah, it was some asshole hundreds of years ago trying to cover up biscuit sins!!
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I like the idea that Sabo’s dream to become a writer started as him writing a journal. Because you know, when he becomes a great pirate he’s gonna write a memoir which means you talk about your childhood. He’s just being prepared! Totally not writing about his freaks of nature brothers. Ace on the other hand finds Sabo writing a diary hilarious and has found it fun to tease him by stealing the book and reading it out loud to the crowd of Luffy and himself.
Sabo’s response? Write everything in cursive so his brothers can’t read it. It may have been the most useless fucking skill his parents have ever drilled into him but now he can’t be more greatful. Ace and Luffy genuinely think he’s writing in a different language and have tried to convince Sabo to teach them too so it can be their secret brother code.
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