One of the more profound things I’ve heard recently came from a Mr. Rogers documentary. In a clip from his show, Mr. Rogers had just visited with a musician, and tells his audience that some people play music, and some people don’t, and that’s okay.
And then he said, “The important thing is to find something you feel good about doing.”
That phrasing struck me. “Something you feel good about doing”. Most people would have phrased it as “something you enjoy doing”. Or “something you’re good at doing”. But Mr. Rogers’ subtly different phrasing leads to a profoundly different connotation. “Something you feel good about doing” may not be enjoyable–people who work in hospitals or in disaster zones might not enjoy much of their day, but they probably feel good about helping people. “Something you feel good about doing“ may not be something you’re particularly good at–you may be a terrible artist by any objective standard, but if you feel good about making your art, then it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Looking for “something you feel good about doing” can help you find a truly satisfying life path.
That phrase is also helpful with daily decision-making. Too often, I can make choices based on “what feels good.” I put aside tasks that are too stressful or avoid activities that seem too difficult, in favor of mindlessly browsing the internet. And I enjoy myself. I feel good while I’m doing that. But at the end of the day, I don’t feel good about how I spent my time. However, reminding myself to do “something I feel good about doing” can motivate me to accomplish those more difficult tasks. It can push me to do something outside of my comfort zone, to try something new that I might not be much good at. And maybe this is a blindingly obvious philosophy to everyone else. But I’m grateful for the reminder.
One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.
I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.
It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.
I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.
I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.
Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”
Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.
In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."
Every single one of them. There’s always something they did Wrong. There’s always a reason to doubt. There’s always something else they could have, should have done. When my clients admit things and their bodies and voices are full of shame, I tell them this. And then I explain their behavior back to them with emotion words instead of fault words.
Instead of doubting yourself, punishing yourself, relieve yourself of the burden of perfection. Ironically, this also makes it much easier to take responsibility for your role in things that go bad later on; if you aren’t perfect, failure is not a threat to your identity but just a process of growing and learning.
PTSD puts your body permanently in survival mode. One of those modes is FIGHT. It leads to violence all the time. Unbelievable numbers of my clients who have violent charges have some level of PTSD. They have to grapple with this part of themselves. I’m actually pretty used to talking people through it, I realize as I write this.
Doing harm does not make you an irredeemable villain, but it does place a burden on you to find out why and get yourself on a road to healing so you can stop it from happening more. The great news is you can start lifting that burden instead of the shame and anger any time — it is never too late.
I think one of the funniest things about Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice is that people act like Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet are complete opposites.
They’re really not.
Yes. On paper, they couldn’t be more different.
Elizabeth is witty. Jane is reserved. Elizabeth grew up surrounded by family. Jane grew up alone. Elizabeth’s story is bright, social, and full of banter. Jane’s is gothic, lonely, and haunted. But underneath all of that, they’re fighting the exact same battle. Neither of them will let someone else decide what their life should look like.
“I refuse to marry someone I do not love wholeheartedly, and I refuse to do something just because society says so.”
Elizabeth refuses Mr. Collins. Not because he’s poor. Not because he’s cruel. But because marrying someone she doesn’t love would mean giving up the right to choose for herself.
Jane refuses St. John. Not because he isn’t respectable. Not because he isn’t kind. But because she knows marrying him would slowly erase who she is. And I think that’s where the two novels quietly agree.
People tend to describe Elizabeth as someone who marries for love. I don’t think that’s entirely true. She marries for respect. Love follows.
The reason she rejects Darcy the first time isn’t because she doesn’t love him. She doesn’t know him well enough to love him. She rejects him because she believes he lacks the qualities she refuses to compromise on. Only after Darcy changes—and only after Elizabeth realizes she judged him unfairly—can they meet as equals.
Jane follows the same pattern. People love talking about Rochester’s redemption. But I don’t think Jane Eyre is actually Rochester’s story.
It’s Jane’s.
Every major choice she makes is a refusal to lose herself. She leaves Gateshead. She leaves Lowood. She leaves Thornfield. Not because she’s running away. Because she refuses to compromise the one quality that defines her. Throughout the novel, Jane is self-affirming even amid the gravest adversities. That quality is impossible to repress. Even when she loves Rochester, she refuses to become his mistress because she knows that love at the cost of her own principles isn’t really love.
That’s what makes both novels feel surprisingly modern.
Neither heroine allows love to become the loss of self.
And I think that’s why both women are constantly described as “stubborn.” It’s funny how literature has a habit of calling women stubborn whenever they insist on having standards. Elizabeth is criticized for rejecting Mr. Collins and initially refusing Darcy. Jane is told she’s foolish for leaving Rochester and later for refusing St. John.
From everyone else’s perspective, they’re throwing away perfectly good futures. Security. Status. Comfort. From theirs, they’re protecting something far more valuable.
Themselves.
Both novels quietly argue that losing yourself is far more dangerous than losing an opportunity.
Maybe that’s why Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet have endured for centuries and are still being shown in media today. Not because they found the perfect man. But because people almost always succumb to peer pressure and allow society to reshape their opinions.
They don’t.
Jane never lets anyone else’s expectations define her conscience. Elizabeth never lets anyone else’s expectations define her judgment. They stay strong and keep to what they believe in, through thick and thin, no matter what.
They don’t become admirable because they fall in love. They become admirable because they refuse to become someone else in order to be loved. And maybe that’s the real romance both novels are trying to defend. Not finding the right person. But refusing to become the wrong version of yourself while looking for them.
Some time ago (I think in 2021) I had to go see a neurologist over really scary symptoms that resembled seizures. I was a nervous wreck about what I was feeling and had barely slept all week, which seemed to be apparent to the doc’s assistant when I sat down in the exam room for questioning or whatever. Dude was pretty young and soft spoken, around my age. He was laser focused doing something on one of those tablet-laptop Surface things as I spoke, presumably writing down my symptoms.
Midway through talking about my symptoms my voice audibly started shaking as I was describing them, clearly upset.
In the middle of my monologue he turns the tablet to face me, closes whatever program he has open and the wallpaper is this fucking collage of pictures of lord farquaad from shrek, lovingly decorated. Dude just sat there placidly smiling at me until I noticed and stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. We sat there in silence like this for like a solid minute before I started wheezing laughing. Before I could even say anything else or process it he picked up the tablet and wordlessly left the room, and I just sat there dumbfounded until the doctor showed up. 10/10 doctor experience tbh
I didn’t own a cell phone at the time to get a photo so this rendition from memory is all I can provide you
ID: a digital drawing of a man in scrubs sitting on a wheeled stool, serenely smiling with his elbow on a rolling cart, where a tablet is flipped open to show an approximation of the Lord Farquaad screensaver. end ID
When I did wrestling, my grandpa showed up to most of my wrestling meets. Wrestling was fairly exciting, and it had a lot of action, so I understood why he did this.
When I did cross country, my grandpa showed up to most of the races. That made less sense to me, as cross country is not very exciting to watch. It is like NASCAR if the cars had an absolute maximum top speed of 12 MPH and could throw up. But my dad pointed out that watching long distance running was sort of like watching people volunteer to torture themselves, and if you were the right kind of deranged you could get really into that. Which led me to believe that my grandpa maybe just liked watching people run until they puked.
Then I did Academic Decathlon, which is standardized testing as a sport, and I cannot emphasize enough how boring it was to attend. We'd all go into big, monitored rooms and fill out scantrons and then go back and stress eat for an hour while the sheets got fed into an auto-grader. And my grandpa would show up to that. He'd sit in the hall outside the test room, and he'd wait for me to leave, and then he'd be very enthusiastic about however I said it went. If I said the test was hard, he'd go ah, so then imagine how hard it must have been hard for everyone else. That's good! And if I said it was easy, he'd go, ah, of course it was easy for you Babs. Of course it was. But for everyone else, surely, it was a challenge.
It was actually very sweet, albeit, quite confusing, because I didn't really see what he was getting out of it. And I just kind of left it as one of life's mysteries until the big state meet in my senior year, and then I did ask him, point blank, why he showed up when it was so clearly incredibly boring to watch. And he just looked at me confused because of course it was boring, but what did that matter?
"It's just where I'm supposed to be," he said. "I like being where I'm supposed to be."
My grandpa had always had this sort of alien quality to him that I didn't know how to describe as a kid. I still struggle with it as an adult. But I got part of it then, part of what made him feel so strange, and it was that he found meaning in duty. He liked having fun, but it wasn't why he existed. He wasn't trying to have fun. He was trying to do what he was supposed to do, be where he was supposed to be, and if there was any fun in it, that was just a sort of pleasant byproduct. But doing things for fun seemed as strange to him as sawing boards to make sawdust. Peeling oranges to get orange peel. There is enough work to be done. Fun will make itself along the way.
You would not believe how much I've envied him for that. To be blessed with such an incredible sense of purpose. The Boomers never found anything like it. They saw responsibility as a weight holding them down, an unwelcome burden, and they shrugged it off every chance they got. Now they're old, and the only thing I see them doing is amusing themselves to death. Stuffing their faces full of orange peels and sawdust.
I was still processing that when he gave me a good thump on the back, and asked how the test was. Hard, I said. Good, he replied. Then imagine how hard it must have been for everyone else!
---
My grandpa remained, frankly, in great health up until his late 70s. Even in his 60s, he could hike with me for 10 miles without really worrying about it, or throw a football twice the distance I could. He'd grown up on a farm, and it had made him strangely invincible.
But sometime in those later years, time caught up to him and it was. I don't know how to describe it. It was like he'd aged a year a decade, starting from age 50. Then, he started aging a decade a year, starting at 75. He got tired just walking around the neighborhood. He had to sit a lot. We could sit and talk pleasantly, but he wasn't the machine I'd known growing up.
Then that started falling too. He slept more. If you talked to him, he'd start to get tired just from thinking. He still had his moments. My grandma is frankly one of the few non-autistic people in my family, and she's deeply tied to her communities. She joined the Republicans when that meant being staunchly anti-racism. She participated in the Civil Rights movement, went to protests, took risks. She didn't want to leave the Republicans just because they were "temporarily in the wilderness."
But he talked her into it in a way I don't think anyone else could.
I graduated college in the middle of that. I knew he wasn't doing great, but my first year out, I just kind of jumped into my job and lost contact with the world around me. It's very easy to lose track of things in your first year of being an adult. I don't want to make excuses, I could have talked with him more but it was a fair year for being busy. I scrimped like a maniac to make an emergency fund, to build a safety net for myself, but after that first year I got a job offer in Utah that came with a frankly enormous pay bump. So I went. The downside was that moving was going to eat into my emergency fund.
And… it did. It took my wife longer than she thought to find a new job. The move cost more than I predicted. Things added up. And then, one day, I got a call from my dad, telling me that his dad wasn't doing well. My grandpa had only ever had one kidney (just born that way), and it had been slowing down as he aged. Then, from nowhere, it just turned off. He could've extended things with dialysis, but he was okay with just dying. He just wanted to do it gracefully.
He was only semi-lucid at the time of the call. My dad told me there was a good chance he wouldn't be lucid at all by the time I arrived. He was surrounded by his kids. His wife was there. He already had a small army of grandchildren present. My dad wanted me to know so it wouldn't blindside me, but he wanted me to also know that I didn't have to be there. That I wasn't expected to be there.
I wasn't a full time hire yet. I was still a contractor. I could have taken the time off, but it would've been unpaid, and my savings had been shrinking at an alarming rate since the move. I eyeballed it, and I listened, and I went: Okay. I won't go. I'll sit this one out. Thanks for letting me know.
I didn't feel great about it. But I made my choice. And then something really, really weird happened: My grandpa's kidney restarted. Better function than it had in years. He went unconscious, started dying, then woke up okay.
I was so relieved. We'd both been given a second chance.
I made it back to Arizona for the holidays that year. Grateful as hell for that. Got the chance to see everyone, but especially got the chance to see him. He was still old, and still tired, but he was fighting it extra hard. Made the effort to sit next to me and chat for a bit. I'd never seen him that unfiltered before. I think it was too tiring for him to think about what he was saying. He just had to say it.
When he got married to my grandma, her family was a mess. It's not exactly my story to talk about, but he came from a loving, caring, functional home, and she came from an impoverished, abusive, chaotic one, and he worked hard to show her what a better life could look like. And I'd made a similar choice with my wife. I cannot overstate how horrific the home she grew up in was. Her father belongs in prison. He's currently being prosecuted for it. And my grandpa just sat down with me and said that working with that background was hard, but it was worth it, and he was proud of me. That one day, I would be surrounded with as much love as he was at that moment, based on the choices I was making today.
My grandpa had the kind of autism where he didn't much like physical contact or shows of emotion. But he hugged me for almost a minute when I saw him last. I think he knew we wouldn't get another chance. I think I did too.
---
It was not totally unexpected. I called my dad frequently, and he'd give me updates on his dad every time. My dad retired early, and was able to do a lot with his dad in those final years. My grandpa never had to spend time in a nursing home because my dad was there anytime he needed help.
But he needed a fair amount of help.
He had some falls. Had his kidney slow down again, enough that he started getting major swelling in his legs. He got oddly anxious. His whole life, he'd been almost unnaturally calm and then at the end he started getting afraid.
One day, that kidney just went off. He went to the hospital. I got a call from my dad. Similar to the time before: He's likely to be unconscious when you get there. He has an army of people around him. You don't have to drop everything to be here. He's a very loved person.
And I took him up on it again. I'd rebuilt my safety net, but my dad was serious when he said that he didn't think my grandpa was ever going to wake up, that he probably wasn't conscious, that there just wasn't much to do. My dad was a former ER doc, he'd seen a lot of people die. It wasn't a mystic moment to him. If you lived your life right, the last day or two didn't matter a whole lot. Like the last twenty seconds of a test. He'd told me this many times. I thought I believed it. I went to bed, and tried ignoring how odd I felt. Repeated that the whole next day. It wasn't until I got a call from my dad the day after telling me that my grandpa had passed that I realized what the feeling was.
It was the feeling of not being where I was supposed to be.
---
For a fairly long time that was the story. My grandpa died surrounded by his loved ones. I could have been there. I wasn't. It was okay. I didn't feel okay about it, but it was okay, and the feelings were bound to match that eventually. I could wait for that eventually.
I waited a very long time. It turns out that eventually is not particularly fast.
I thought about it a lot. There was a lesson in it, you know? Sometimes you don't get do-overs. Sometimes, being right isn't enough. Sometimes, intellectualizing doesn't work. These were all important things to learn. I think my grandpa would be proud to see me learn them. I hoped at least. And coped.
Then, around a year ago, my job gave me a chance to do a business trip to Germany.
Apparently, the normal thing to do on business trips is to visit a lot of restaurants. But the trip was for education purposes at a conference, and the conference was an intensely social experience, and by the time it ended every day I didn't want to see another human for several hours. So I wound up going to the corner grocery store and buying snacks I could hide in my hotel room so that I would not need to leave for dinner. I could stay in and snack and recover from the horrifying ordeal of interacting with academics.
It turns out that fancy cheese is quite cheap in Germany. Cheap enough for me to buy several large wedges of gorgonzola. Cheap enough for me to get back to my hotel room after one particularly strange day of feeling both oversocialized from the conference, and undersocialized from the language barrier, and eat all the cheese in one sitting. Maybe I was also eating some grief away too. I don't know.
Then I fell asleep.
I truly don't remember the dream very well. I remember running, and it feeling like I was running at freeway speeds. I ran all the way down Utah, then back to Arizona, then into a hospital, and I pressed a button, and the elevator went to a floor, and it opened, and there, predictably, was my grandpa.
I don't know what I'd expected in a hospital, but I hadn't expected to see him.
My grandpa had this thing in real life, where he seemed to anchor the world. I often have this sort of waking-dreaming feeling, and it always went away around him. Like the dream either ended, or at least became his dream. And it felt like that there. All the fuzzy logic of running to Utah and going to a floor that was entirely just one man's hospital room just went out the window.
I asked him something along the lines of Where is everyone else? and he answered something along the lines of Already gone. It's just you and me now, and I am tired of sitting in this bed.
So I picked him up, which I could never have managed in real life, and I carried him into the elevator, and we left the hospital to go walk along a canal. I've had a lot of important talks along canals. They're part of my internal iconography at this point.
And we just talked. I talked with him about how proud I was of him for powering through those last months, and how much his goodbye had meant to me, and how much I was gonna miss him, and how much I wanted to never feel like I had missed my chance to be where I was supposed to be, ever again, and he listened, because he was always good at that, and at some point I stopped and I said that I didn't know what else to say but that I didn't want it to stop.
And he said, very kindly, that he was glad he'd had a chance to put all of those last trailing emotions to rest, but that he was also ready for me to put him down. And he gestured at the canal for that too. There's some deep symbolism in the brain, tying the flow of rivers to the everafter.
So I walked down some stairs carved into the concrete walls of the canal, and I lowered him in, and I watched him drift down the canal until he went out of sight. And when I woke up my pillow was wet with tears. I actually don't think I've cried that hard at any other point in my adult life. It was like all of my guilt and shame and grief was moved through in one night. In my head, I know that it was the cheese. But in my heart, somehow, I got my chance to say goodbye for real. I got my second, second chance. I don't know if I even deserved the first one.
But I have tried very, very hard to pay it back. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it. Trying to be like Hank.
And while it has not gone perfect, I do have a lot of time left to learn.
Thanks for reading! This was made a response to this post which I made while I was very sleep deprived.
Another story about Grandpa Hank for those interested.
A fictional piece I wrote shortly after his death.
Legolas: I’ve never heard someone speak like that before…it was strange, and stilted, and you used full words the whole time.
Aragorn: Elves may sound fancy to us, Frodo, but they speak slang, and almost exclusively in metaphors.
Frodo: Oh.
Legolas: Aragorn has described it as ‘a monstrosity of a language’.
Gimli: Dwarves have a better language.
Legolas: You do.
Gimli: Ha! You admit- wait, you admit it?
Legolas: Elves curse by using the names of trees. Tree names! You have actually cusses. Do you know what I would give to cuss, just once in my life, Gimli? Do you know what I would give to tell someone to f- f- f- I can’t even say it.
Gimli: You can’t say fuck?
Legolas: …I have an idea.
-
Legolas: The-
Gimli: Fuck.
Legolas: -are you talking about?
Boromir: Why did we let the dwarf start swearing for the elf?
Aragorn: Because I can’t wait to see Thranduil’s face when he finds out.
a couple months ago someone sent me an ask asking if I’d ever heard of Boquila trifoliolata and I was like ‘no way. this can’t be real’ and i looked it up and it was and I forgot about it until just now when my supervisor and I got sidetracked and I looked it up again to prove to her that it’s real and found out that not only does this plant vaguely mimic the leaves of whatever plant it’s vining on, it does it when it climbs on fake plants too so any theories about how it does it that include gene transfer or chemicals or touching it in any way are just out the window and those were like, the only theories the original researchers had about how it might be doing it. so anyway I am screaming and crying and whatnot
The more you read the better this gets – from Krulwich, Nat Geo 2016:
Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus; it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near. And that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. It only has to be nearby. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. But this plant can hang—literally hang—alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.”
(Artifical plant modeling & c. discussed in White & Yamashita, Plant Signaling & Behavior,
https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530)
One theory from that above White & Yamashita paper is that Boquila does this using plant ocelli—a very basic type of eye! If you’re interested in a brief infodump about ocelli: Many animals have ocelli, like jellyfish and insects. Here’s a picture of a wasp head—you can see its two main eyes to the side, and those three dots in the middle are ocelli.
(Photo cred: Assafn, Wikipedia)
These ocelli don’t form sharp images, but instead probably detect light and shadow for sleep patterns, directionality, flight stability, etc.
Some reptiles and amphibians also have a light-sensitive third eye called a parietal or pineal eye! It’s similarly right on top of their heads. Again, they’re not forming complex images, but instead use general light information to regulate other things. It’s also why even tame reptiles may bolt if you reach at them from directly overhead, out of range of their normal eyes—that third eye sees an incoming shadow and goes HAWK, RUN.
So with that in mind, plant ocelli…Basically they think the upper epidermal cells have evolved to have a particular convex dome shape that focuses light. I don’t know what proportion of cells are ocelli, if it’s just some or all, but basically the leaf itself IS the “eye”.
Plant ocelli were first proposed over a century ago but they haven’t been well studied since then. Cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic bacteria) focus light. Arabidopsis thaliana has been documented to recognize other Arabidopsis plants…basically when competing for resources, if the Arabidopsis recognizes it’s competing with other Arabidopsis plants, they’ll cooperate and move leaves so that they don’t shade each other, ensuring each plant has access to nutrients. But if the competing plant isn’t Arabidopsis, screw ‘em, they’ll shade it. Crepy & Casal narrowed this down to a light-based response, not just chemical identification, so it’s possible Arabidopsis is visually identifying friend from foe. At any rate, that’s about the extent of plant ocelli research that I was able to find. So this Boquila thing is cool and weird.
What we don’t yet know is how precisely Boquila is seeing the world. Boquila is clearly getting some level of resolution in order to be able to copy shape, size, AND color. Unlike an insect’s 2-3 ocelli, it has tons, so even crude data over a lot of inputs might lead to a pretty good picture. The paper also says the mimicry gets more accurate over time, so there appears to be some learning involved. I would also love to know if it has some equivalent of depth perception! If the target plant is near vs. far, does Boquila produce the same appropriately sized mimic leaf? Does it adjust? They’re going to keep studying it so hopefully we have some answers in a few years!
Anyway here’s a picture of the variation of Boquila mimic leaves.
"She was very beautiful. And I loved her. Oh, yes, I loved her. I won’t deny it or belittle it now. It was a lonely, romantic boy’s first passionate love, and it was very real. And I thought she loved me. I was fool enough to think that. I was wildly happy when she promised to marry me. For a few months. Then—I found out she didn’t."
- The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery
“It was a foolish, idle inclination on my side,” said he, “the consequence of ignorance of the world, and want of employment. Had my mother given me some active profession [...] it would never have happened; for though I left Longstaple with what I thought, at the time, a most unconquerable preference for his niece, yet had I then had any pursuit [...] I should very soon have outgrown the fancied attachment [...] I had therefore nothing in the world to do, but to fancy myself in love; and as my mother did not make my home in every respect comfortable, as I had no friend, no companion in my brother, and disliked new acquaintance, it was not unnatural for me to be very often at Longstaple, where I always felt myself at home [...]: Lucy appeared everything that was amiable and obliging. She was pretty too—at least I thought so then; and I had seen so little of other women, that I could make no comparisons, and see no defects. Considering everything, therefore, I hope, foolish as our engagement was, foolish as it has since in every way been proved, it was not at the time an unnatural or an inexcusable piece of folly.”
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
For anyone thanking me for "sticking to my principles" about Israel and Palestine...
Those motherfuckers are sticky as fuck. They're worse than the tar-sap-stuff you get when you climb pine trees. Even the special soap doesn't get rid of 'em. You don't even notice when it gets on you. Even people just standing near me a lot have been known to stick to my principles. (There are those on Tumblr who can attest.)
Excellent article that really encompasses why I have been saying that the far left/ the antizionist left has revealed that they do not actually believe in anything. It's also why I, and so many other Jews, feel so politically homeless.
My beliefs have not changed. I still believe everything I did years ago. But apparently, a large swathe of the people who said that they ALSO believed that stuff just... Flat out don't.
I mean… okay, antisemitism is not my main deal. Like, a big fan of it? Hard no. But antisemitism is, as currently manifested, not something that puts people in the path of the carceral system, which is my main deal.
By which I mean, stick around long enough and you’ll be thinking a lot of thoughts about justice as a process of restoration and healing rather than punishment. You’ll be applying that to a lot of new contexts and new knowledge about the American criminal justice system!
God, this used to be a normal tumblr. What happened.
Besides, if I violate my oaths, Athena (just seems the most likely suspect, given my overall energy) will take my paladin powers away.
I’m not serious but I’m also kind of serious: I can do the closest thing real life gets to my aura making you immune to the “fear” condition, and that puts me at least at level 10. Gotta stick to those Oathes
It's Spiders Georg! I've translated it into Angkorian Khmer, the language of Cambodia from 802-1351 AD. Because I like doing stuff like that ;)
You read the black consonants first, then the blue consonants, than the purple vowels. If there's no written vowel, use an 'a'. Magenta is punctuation - a dingbat marking the start, periods, and then a stronger period that tells you the paragraph/section is finished.
Here's what it says!
The original:
reallyreallytrying
Jan 8, 2013
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Transliterated into Latin characters:
1935¹ śaka, ekādaśi roc mārggaśira, 'aṅgāravāra, nu rilirilitroyiṅ kathā: Neḥh ’ālakṣaṇa kathā: ’nak cya pīṅ pi pratisaṃvatsara, toy vyat vakra saṃkhyā.
’Nak cya pīṅ śūnya pratisaṃvatsara.
Nau ru Jaṃrau Pīṅ, ’nau guhā cya daśasahasra pratidina, ga te krau daṃnuk ta caṅvāt ti mān ban dāṃ ta kāñ.
More detail under the cut!
How it’s spelled:
1-9-20-10-5 ś-k e-kā-d-śi ro-c|mā-ʳgg-śi-r
ʔ-ṅgā-r-vā-r nu ri-li-ri-li-tro-yi-ṅ|k-tʰā neḥ-
h|ʔā-l-kṣ-ṇ k-tʰā ʔn-kˣ cy pi-ṅ|pi pr-ti-sṃ-
v-ts-r to-yˣ vy-t|v-kr sṃ-kʰyā . ʔn-kˣ cy
pi-ṅ|śū-ny pr-ti-sṃ-v-ts-r . nau ru jṃ-rau pi-
ṅˣ ʔnau gu-hā cy d-ś-s-h-sr pr-ti-di-
n g te krau dṃ-nu-k|t c-ṅvā-t|ti mā-n|b-n|dāṃ
t kā-ñ .
1935th Śaka year, 11 day of the waning moon of the month Mārggaśira, Tuesday. On this day, Reallyreallytrying said:
This, the instruction which says “People eat 3 spiders yearly” is really because of a calculation mistake.
People eat zero spiders every year.
Of Spiders Georg - who lives in a cave and eats 10,000 daily - he is outside the boundaries of the set and should not have been counted.
¹ The Angkorian Khmer used a different calendar than we do, called the Śaka Saṃvat, or Shaka Era. It starts in year 78 of the Christian Era, so 2013 AD lines up with 1935 Śaka.
² The Khmer has a large number of Sanskrit/Pali words, similar to how English has a lot of Latin/French. These loans are marked with a degree symbol ( ° ). I decided to use very formal language here, so there's a lot of loans.
³ ‘pīṅ’ is a Modern Khmer word (or at least a component of several modern names) for spiders. My Angkorian dictionaries didn’t have a term, and this one has cognates in several related languages, so I decided it was my best bet.
⁴ I'm not certain that zero could be used in this way at the time. They were definitely using 0 in large numbers, but actually treating it LIKE a number is usually a later development.
⁵ Translations in brackets mean that the word has no direct translation. The best I can do is say the function they serve in the sentence.
⁶ I think I'm funny.
⁷ Angkorian Khmer doesn't have a word for 'and' - you can just put things side by side. I've chosen to move the 'e' in 'ge ta' so that it reads 'ga te' to replicated the original misspelling.
And here are some (undescribed) old guides to reading Angkorian Khmer. They're written in a slightly different style - especially visible in the 'ñ' - but might still help if you're interested!
kastrakomnenes
this may be one of the most interesting posts I've ever seen. What got you into Angkorian Khmer specifically?
Thank you!
I'm interested in cultural history and I love the First Millenium AD/Early Medieval period. I got really into Heian Japanese fashion, and then was looking at other cultures that existed around the world during the same period. Sometimes it was the fashion that grabbed me. Sometimes the architecture. And sometimes it was the script or language. Angkor has all three!
I find the script (characters used to write) to be gorgeous, and the grammar is similar enough to English that I can wrap my head around it. (Very little inflection!) I am endlessly fascinated by how people take scripts that do NOT work for their language, and smash them with hammers until they do - the way the Irish use Latin to communicate consonantal sounds, how English uses it to communicate vowel sounds, how Angkorian Khmer uses Braḥmi to communicate consonant clusters, etc.
There's a large enough surviving corpus (enough things with writing on them), and enough of it's online (even if the scan quality can be unbelievably bad) that I can really sink my teeth into it. There are enough grammars from India during the same period that we've got a good understanding of how Sanskrit/Pali works, and studying the differences between Indian and Khmer Sanskrit/Pali is really, really neat! Plus, Angkorian Khmer works COMPLETELY differently, so seeing how they incorporated all the Sanskrit loanwords into non-Sanskrit texts is even MORE interesting!
But mostly, I love the curves. I love how the characters stack. I love how the 'e' diacritic comes before the main letter and I always forget to leave space for it and then want to have a tantrum. I love that the last black character on that text I wrote becomes a spiral later on in history. Becomes half as wide, loses all those weird bits that look like diacritics but aren't, and just becomes a spiral.
some of y'all: science has more evidencial support than religion, and it is the more reliable and believable truth. in the ancient contest between empiricial science and religion, modern achievements have declared science as more accurate and the better source of truth.
the truth: Scientific empiricism and religion aim to understand different kinds of truths, and they have never truly been at odds. Science gives the mechanical explanation of the world. Religion gives a philosophical explanation. Both are inexorably intertwined, but each have their own realm of study. In the last 3000 years, men of science have typically also been men of religion. Much of modern science today relies upon the accomplishments and theories of men who were religious. Further, if you devote serious time to the study of either the sciences OR religions and philosophy, you will discover that there are very few discrepancies and they actually correspond to one another. The real problem comes when science attempts to make a philosophical observation, or when religion attempts to make a mechanical observation. Religion’s role is not to explain how clouds form, how cells function, or how light travels. Science’s role is not to explain the meaning of life, whether or not God exists, and what morality is. All in all, each are good and legitimate areas of study.
Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero. She:
was admitted to Julliard at 8.
was performing in top venues by 16.
pioneered “swinging the classics” and made the equivalent of a million dollars a year doing it.
was the first person of color to have their own national TV show.
went to Hollywood but refused to be cast as a “singing maid.” Demanded and got control over her casting, her wardrobe, and how footage featuring her was cut.
refused to perform in segregated venues and led charges for integration in several northern cities, notably Spokane.
She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten. But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.
"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
something i actually just realized on call w some friends recently is how crazey it is that your online friends are as many as thousands of feet above or below u right now. like if you teleported to their location without changing your height above sea level, well your fucked in some way basically
turnnoffyourmind
jacobvanloon
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
izzy806
2087
prguitarman
