Bess and Her Musings

Dreamer, believer. Just living life and reporting back

[a-small-annabeth]

Howdy!

Welcome! Call me Bess. 19F. USA. A convert to Catholicism (from Protestantism). I often struggle with scrupulosity but I am trying to learn to see God's love in and behind everything.

I love all sorts of language/literature/poetry/music/art/culture—all human attempts to make, find, and express meaning. I tend to ramble and be wordy. I (try to) write a lot, and I consider it one of my main callings.

🎀📖🗣️——post where I ramble about all the things I want to learn/do

✝️📿🧎——translation of a beautiful homily a mutual sent me about the sacrament of Confession (could be helpful if you're scrupulous)

📚📝——quotes and/or reflections from books I've been reading

I'm not really a fandom person... but some of the music artists closest to my heart are Twenty One Pilots, half•alive, and Aurora Aksnes.

I'm bad at favorite books but I love pretty much anything by CS Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, or Dorothy L. Sayers. A poet I love is Wallace Stevens.

See @bessrecommends for music rambles and @bessappreciatesimages for visual media I saw here and enjoyed (mostly art with some kpop sprinkled in).

Common tags I might use are #catholicism, #scrupulosity, #college and specific to my blog: #bess rambles, #bess writes, #bess daily, #bess reads. In case those are of varying degrees of interest to you.

May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, both now and forevermore. Xx

Top flower divider by @strangergraphics, crucifix divider is by @pixopix, puppym and wolf chan dividers by @lariesographic.

[a-small-annabeth]

todays schedule

-bottle return

-buy myself donut

-buy shoes

-job interview

-write a little something

[a-small-annabeth]

3/5 done

[a-small-annabeth]

5/5 done! And I wrote 2181 words :D

[sacredlitany]

May you know that you are small and you fit well in the hands of God.

You are weak but He is strong. Sleep now in the arms of God.

[a-small-annabeth]

todays schedule

-bottle return

-buy myself donut

-buy shoes

-job interview

-write a little something

[a-small-annabeth]

3/5 done

[a-small-annabeth]

is the economy/job situation as bad as they say or do I just have really bad luck

I've applied to ten places for my summer job (multiple of which said they were hiring)

Three of them have gotten back to me. I have an interview on Tuesday.

The two I've had an interview with so far both rejected me.

I technically have two years of food/service experience (not the most, like, intense and/or specialized but it was two straight years at the same place and I was at the impression that looked good on a resume).

Am I doing something wrong??? I'll keep at it tho...

[a-small-annabeth]

I have now applied to 26 places 😀😀😀 Of the six that have gotten back to me five have said no and/or the timeframe was different than I thought 😀😀😀 I have another interview today!! Wish me luck...

[a-small-annabeth]

todays schedule

-bottle return

-buy myself donut

-buy shoes

-job interview

-write a little something

[angel-fruitcake]

i can handle one (1) Event™ per day. whether it be a phone call, an appointment, trip to the grocery store, play date with a friend, etc. only one, that's it. any more than that and i am Stressed

[prokopetz]

Not only is having worldbuilding threads that are mentioned once and never picked up again not a flaw in fantasy media, I'd go so far as to say that a lack of such threads is a flaw. If everything ties up in one neat little package, you're missing the point of fantasy worldbuilding. Like, don't do it on every page, or your setting is going to be an overstuffed mess, but every so often you are not only allowed but obligated to casually drop some utterly batshit worldbuilding detail and then just never follow up on it. Maybe some rocks are sentient. You don't owe your reader an explanation. Just fucking go for it.

[a-small-annabeth]

I just saw an Instagram reel of a guy who seems to be in the same place I was about a year ago, trying to decide/discern between churches and crying from the confusion of it all because of how different churches claim to be the only means of salvation and idk. It made my heart break a little bit because I remembered what it was like to feel that way. I've been doing so so well lately, but I felt the same way as him not long ago, the same confusion bordering on despair, and mental wars that feel like they won't ever end. I hope he gets out of this dark spot. I'll pray for him.

[a-small-annabeth]

I just saw an Instagram reel of a guy who seems to be in the same place I was about a year ago, trying to decide/discern between churches and crying from the confusion of it all because of how different churches claim to be the only means of salvation and idk. It made my heart break a little bit because I remembered what it was like to feel that way. I've been doing so so well lately, but I felt the same way as him not long ago, the same confusion bordering on despair, and mental wars that feel like they won't ever end. I hope he gets out of this dark spot. I'll pray for him.

[a-small-annabeth]

Up until recently I assumed my OCD only manifested itself through scrupulosity/religious/moral stuff but now I am Noticing...and Wondering...and Realizing.... other things that might also be connected

[a-small-annabeth]

just testing something

[a-small-annabeth]

I have never decided so quickly that I would pay whatever money necessary to have an album in vinyl

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[cannibalcharon]

Western Washington vs Eastern Washington is a good example of a rain shadows effects for fellow writers.

Western Washington:

Eastern Washington:

For fantasy writers, Washington is a really cool state to study because we have nearly every biome from alpine forests, desert, alpine desert, rainforest, riparian forests, wetlands, coastal, and so on. We have two main mountain ranges, the Olympics and the Cascades. We sit on three tectonic plates which give us said mountains (and earthquakes). Our ecology is really neat here.

[merrypaws]

Allow me to go back to the discussion on Mordor.

Tolkien famously drew from many real world things when building his Middle-Earth, and Mordor actually has a very obvious real world inspiration. Look up a topographic map and you notice that there indeed IS a very square mountain range surrounding the valley of lower Danube on the border of Romania and Bulgaria.

I'm guessing that Tolkien noticed this on a map and thought "Oh, that's neat", without getting too much into why or how it had formed, because for all his obsessive worldbuilding, his attention was more on history and language than on realistic geography.

So, yeah, sometimes even the real world just is weird.

[a-small-annabeth]

Threads has gotta be one of the most braindead places I've set foot in digitally

The format/UI makes it even worse somehow, and the fact that it's so connected to Instagram

For me it feels like being stuck in a dark, narrow hallway with an unpleasant odor where a very loud and raucous dance party (Instagram) is happening just beyond a door, crammed amongst a crowd of all the most superficial, unthoughtful, and generally garrulous people you can imagine, all of whom are convinced of their own genius

[autisticandcatholic]

IF YOU FEEL CONFUSED BY GOD, THAT'S NOT YOUR SWEET LORD AND SAVIOR!!

big news! I HAVE A PARTNER!! WHO WANTS TO BE LONG TERM!!! WHO ACCEPTS MY RELIGIOUS BOUNDERIES!!!! WHO WANTS TO BE AROUND ME!!!!! INCLUDING MY MINECRAFT AND STEVEN UNIVERSE INTERESTS!!!!!! AND MORE!!!!!!!

and ive liked him for so so so so so long, he finally reciprocated it back, and after a two hour talk about what that meant, WE AGREED TO MAKE IT OFFICIALLLLL!!!!! AND IT WAS PERFECT!!! HALLELUJAAAHHHHH!!!

right now my brain feels confused because I can finally see him as a lover instead of hiding it from him, ive been so confused and restless over the fact that im uncomfortable with myself, but I know that God doesn't confuse, and His ways are higher than mine. I've told Him I'm ready to fight the big fight, especially since ive prayed over this man for so long, and I'm scared I'm gonna scare him away or he'll lose feelings or something else, but I fear God so I can keep going!

please pray for me so that I may find my balance, pray for us that it will achieve God's good will, and pray for yourselves, single or not, to rise to the occasion

[a-small-annabeth]

Masterlist of #bess reads reflections

Just posts where I share quotes and/or reflections from books I like.

Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking by Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson