It'll never be the same

Brazilian. 30+ yo. Lesbian. Non-monogamous. I'm just trying to keep myself positive about life.

[stillhere-erehllits]

This a a reminder to not fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. Just because you invested time and energy into something, does not mean you should indefinitely waste more time and energy on it, if you decide it’s not what you want anymore. This goes for anything, from books, to relationships, to jobs, to hobbies, etc.

If it’s not serving you anymore, move on.

[finnglas]

This is honestly one of the places I find Marie Kondo's advice most helpful. I stop, look at the thing I've spent time and money on only to realize I dislike, and I say, "Thank you for teaching me something about myself and my preferences. I think I've learned this particular lesson and we can part ways now."

And then I don't feel like I "wasted" things or made a mistake. I just tried one path of learning about myself, learned something, and now it's time for a different path. Works a lot better for my brain.

[ekjohnston]

The time Marie Kondo said "you can thank a a shirt you've never worn for teaching you about your taste", thereby making it NOT A WASTE literally rewired my whole brain. Acknowledge the thing and move forward, even if that means leaving the thing behind.

[genderkoolaid]

part of the reason i love how bell hooks talks about masculinity is that she shows real compassion towards men suffering from the effects of toxic masculinity. she was conscious of how we need to unlearn the ways we talk about men + masculinity just as much as we need to unlearn the same for women + femininity. so many times ill see someone talking about toxic masculinity like (hyperbolizing here but only slightly) "these FUCKING STUPID BABY BITCHES won't MAN UP and go to a therapist!!!" and like. i get the anger. but you see feminists recreating patriarchal manhood by only promoting good behaviors through patriarchal frameworks. any use of the term "real men" is bad because it reifies the idea that manhood is a special title you must earn, and it is something possible to fail and fake. & as important as it is to promote sexual equality + the pleasure of non-cis-men, lots of people are essentially still working with the idea that men need sexual prowess to have worth but just shifting it slightly so there is more emphasis on women's pleasure. but I want cis men to think about their partners' pleasure because they care about their partners, not because they need to check a box in order to keep their man card. and don't get me started on small dick jokes– and the absolutely pitiful excuse people will use that "well, I don't believe it, but misogynistic men get upset when I say it, so it's okay!"

basically bell hooks is so fucking right. in order to create loving men we need to love men, simply for being alive, whether or not they are performing. as much as we need to actively unlearn misogyny (and we do), it's equally vital we unlearn patriarchal ways of seeing manhood. we can't just assume that taking a feminist perspective automatically means there is no work to be done there.

[pro-anomalocaris]

My mom is a psychologist and she has gotten dudes to go to therapy just by telling them softly, one hand gently resting on their arm, "You deserve to go to therapy. You deserve to have someone help you and you deserve to feel better than this. You shouldn't have to go through so much alone."

When I tell you she's made men cry with this, I mean it. I have never seen anyone get a man to go to therapy by making it another task they have to do in order to be a Real Man (TM). I have seen full grown badass, shredded truckers and professional businessman and toughened good ole boys get teary eyed or freeze or cry silently when shown an ounce of compassion because men are starving for it. Men are so used to everything being yet another burden to carry and thing to do in order to earn manliness points in the eyes of the world that being told sincerely, "you deserve to be happy" just about short-circuits most of us. One time one of my bullies' dads went from yelling at my mom to trying not to cry because she just listened to him rant about how stretched thin he was being a single dad, put a hand on his and said, "That sounds like a lot to carry alone. I can't imagine how hard that's been." It was like she'd flipped a switch and suddenly he had permission to feel what the anger was disguising. (She then told my bully to try to think about his dad a bit more, because family needs family. And when I tell you this boy looked like he'd been called out by God Himself, I mean it; he had several revelations and stopped a lot of toxic behavior after that.)

I really hope this isn't derailing with personal anecdotes but I just. I really think it's baffling how tumblr will post all these quotes about kindness, compassion and love and then not extend them towards men. I just don't get it. Because men react to any of it extended towards them like someone in the desert presented suddenly with water.

One of my neighbors is known as the grumpy old guy who hates everyone. He is not grumpy or hateful towards me because I did the very Southern thing of making food for everyone and introducing myself when I moved in. I listened to him rant about how no one does that these days and how no one knows their neighbors and agreed that that's awful and we all need people and it sucks that we're all so isolated from each other. I told him it's cool that he still does stuff like foster cats and didn't let the world drain the kindness from him and y'all, that one tiny piece of acknowledgment that life is hard and his kindness in spite of it took work has made the "grumpy old guy who hates everyone" my bestie. He and I chat whenever we see each other in the hall. He is starving for positivity and gentleness.

One time on the bus, coming home from shopping, I got to talking to a guy in his 50's riding across from me. He wanted to know why I had a bunch of flowers. Snidely, he asked if I was giving them to my boyfriend. (I had on a vest with Pride pins at the time.) I explained actually, they were for my French professor, whose mother had died. He was confused that I said my professor was male. Nobody gave him flowers when his mom died a year ago, he said. I took a flower out of the arrangement and handed it to him as my stop approached. He looked at it as if I'd given him an entire flower store.

A chunk of the internet seems convinced that the way to stop hateful men is to meet hate with hate. I have yet to see that work. I have yet to even hear anecdotes that state that it works, only that it satisfies some internal desire to lash out in response to someone lashing out at you.

But I have seen a construction worker on a bus hold a single white hyacinth with the utmost care and be unable to meet my eyes as he said "thank you".

[nateconnolly]

40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back. 

[nateconnolly]

A Timeline of Humanity:

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

saw a sinisterly pretty cat on the sidewalk

[fandomrecycling]

Fuckyea did you get to pspsps the kitty

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

the kitty glanced at me with dripping disdain and returned to plotting its nefarious schemes

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

disney villain femme fatale motherfricker

[mikeahlstrom]

Napoli, Italia 🇮🇹

[beemovieerotica]

right in front of their salad

[guillotinevogue]

[albatross-the-pen-chewer]

While taking a nap today I dreamt there was a hazard sign called "never found" which was used to indicate a location where people disappeared never to be seen again

[albatross-the-pen-chewer]

it looked like this

[lethesbeastie]

The imagery and vibes of this were so visceral I had to do art about it

(Grayscale version under cut)

[thecooler]

They should invent a falling asleep that is easy

[tooies]

basically one's mind can be considered to be a large cavern inhabited by two main groups of animals: land creatures (primarily insects and arachnids) and aquatic creatures (fish and crustaceans). these two groups both feed off of the same source of energy, bat guano, which represents the experiences life provides you that enrich your mind with nutrients allowing the cave-dwelling animals to feed. apart from this common food source, however, these two groups remain relatively separate due to the barrier between them, which represents your mental barriers that prevent you from reaching higher levels of thought. still, there is a way to overcome these barriers: the cave salamander. the salamander is important because it has the power to venture both the land and sea, enabling it to prey on the animals fro. both environments and dominate as a species, uniting them into a single tree of life. one must introduce the salamander and allow it to evolve into a specialized form very much like the olm. by doing so, one will unite both ecosystems of their mind and achieve enlightenment

[thecheatinghomunculus]

new reaction image

[rural-panoptes]

[saintjosie]

[damnpharos]

[captain-price-unofficially]

[oldguardleatherdog]

[admitier]

[ID: A poem by Maegen McAuliffe O'Leary, titled What I Would Tell Eve. It reads, "Eat the fucking apple. / They are going to blame you / regardless. / You might as well go to the gallows / with a full belly / knowing more than God." End ID.]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I wrote another short story and this one is very short so it is definitely normal. It has no space to be weird.

How to escape the well

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Lot of strong reactions to this one, for a story that's less than 750 words

[tongue-twists]

btw dating sucks as a concept.

[tongue-twists]

meeting up with someone with the explicit goal of figuring out whether or not you want a relationship with them spoils the dynamic. it sucks. it's terrible. fall in love with your friends like normal people.

[tongue-twists]

as expected this one is a hit with the autism website

[elodieunderglass]

Hold on let me find you the research paper post though

[elodieunderglass]

Ok here you go @tongue-twists it could be worse

ELODIEUNDERGLASS

Jokes aside, this quote is how the researchers kick off an exploration of the under-researched concept of “friends to partners” with a call

[chocoholicbec]

#to be fair I did get married fairly young which is why the dating history is so sparse lmao#but until you get lightly roasted in a published paper#have you really lived?#one of the funniest tags to that post was#“assigned no bitches by sagepub#which id rather like on a tombstone#OHH#and dr glass could get one next to me and his tombstone could say like#IM NO BITCHES.

@elodieunderglass’ tags are a delight, as usual.

[elodieunderglass]

Thank you guys so much for witnessing my funniest ideas that NOBODY ELSE IN MY LIFE APPRECIATES

[qrowscant]

its been about 6 months

[qrowscant]

prev tags put it into words, thank you

[effemimaniac]

you know those mobile game ads where they play okay-ish but fuck up just enough to fail the objective in an attempt to rile you up so you want to try because you think you could do better? yeah

[aq2003]

sam and brennan’s greatest weaknesses (respectively)

(transcript under the cut)

Keep reading

[cleromanticon]

*mumbles to self* Pterodactyls weren’t dinosaurs…

[muffinlance]

My baby daughter got her adorable puffin-print dress absolutely CAKED in mud crawling around the yard and my first thought was "oh no her beautiful dress"

And my second thought was "oh huh it really WOULD be easy to unconsciously steer her away from playing in the dirt. Unlike my son, whose outfits are usually some kind of solid dark easily washed pants plus a shirt that doesn't trail in the dirt like a dress does."

Anyway something something gender roles start getting shoved on kids from literal birth, but with a little time to think about things, YOU TOO can let your children of any gender absolutely destroy their clothes in the dirt pit they're digging in your garden

[fozmeadows]

Years ago now, when my son was three or so, we were on a bus together, and there was a woman sitting near us with two kids around his age, a boy and a girl. We were in the front of the bus - the bit where some seats face the aisle instead of forwards - and as there weren't many passengers, both her kids were playing around on the seats; not disruptively so, but just in the way of wiggly kids trying to entertain themselves. The mother didn't say much to her son, but was constantly trying to get the daughter to settle - not because she was doing anything different to her brother, but because her dress kept riding up and flashing her underpants, which was a problem her pants-wearing brother didn't have.

And even though I'd already known about the ways in which girls are socialised differently to boys, seeing that scene play out really brought home to me how invisible a lot of those gendered lessons are. Because the mother wasn't trying to enforce a behavioural double standard, or expressing archaic views on ladylike behaviour, or anything like that: she was just teaching her child not to show her underpants in public, which is a necessary thing for kids to learn! But because she hadn't put her son in clothing where active play could lead to accidentally flashing, only her daughter was being coached to be conscious of how she played, how she moved, the relationship between her clothes and the gazes of the people around her, why it was important to sit still. And meanwhile her brother was carrying on uinterrupted, completely unaware of the lesson his sister was getting.

And the thing is, the problem is hardly inevitable. When I've told this story before, I've gotten responses from parents saying, "Oh, that's why we always gave our daughter bike shorts to wear under her skirts!" - and that might seem obvious, but that won't occur to everyone, especially if the option was never available in their own childhood. And so something as simple as a choice of child's clothing and historical ideas about Who Those Clothes Are For ends up dictating socialization in ways we might not consciously intend - and yet the consequences of it remain very, very real.

[bo-an-aro]

“sex/romance/empathy makes us human,” they say. awful. pathetic. what makes us human is the urge to set things on fire

[sullina]

you’re actually correct!

Cooking is the one thing that only humans do and can be directly linked to the increase in our brain size

[detrout]

Burning the mammoth flank just a lirtle instead of eating it raw gives grug more calorie to think. Grug thinking about color symbolism in silence of the lambs

[leveragehunters]

Behold, a (hu)man!

[kirkegarde]

The bird that torments Prometheus learned something

[shithowdy]