Aishwarya Rai in Silsila Ye Chahat Ka from Bhansali’s Devdas (2002). The level of glamour and ethereal aesthetics of a girl keeping a lamp continuously lit for her love since being separated in childhood—
HONESTLY thank u all for appreciating my culture, i feel like we don’t get a lot of recognition at all. as a child, i used to feel like the odd one out for loving and admiring people like her. but seriously, indian songs/movies can be so beautiful and have so much elegance..and i think it’s really cool that you guys have noticed that
1. How do you lose a Giraffe? She apparently scaled a cliff that served as part of the enclosure (which the other giraffes in the herd had shown no interest in climbing.)
2. Well it should be easier to find her, she's a whole ass giraffe? Yeah, you'd think, but Texas ranches are fuckin huge. The man has apparently hired a helicopter and several drones to aide the search, but no luck yet. She's been seen on some game cameras on the nearby ranches though. But she's sneaky.
3. Why does a random guy in Texas have a herd of giraffes? Because it's Texas and we have basically no exotic animal regulations. No really. If you have enough land out in the hill country, you can just own stuff. It's fuckin nuts.
if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*
I really recommend the Táin Bó Cúailnge to anyone looking to get into medieval literature because it's a great story, brilliant poetry (I read the Carson translation, and the way he translates the roscada sections are beautiful) and the backbone of the Ulster Cycle, but it's also just really fucking funny. It has a very slapstick yet dry sense of humor that provides just enough comic relief to make the dramatic moments of the story even more impactful. Genuinely I laugh out loud every few pages. Go read it.
I’m spending a lot of time at memorials these days.
Partly it’s to do with living in a small town with a median age well above the national average. Partly it’s to do with loving people, being close to them, and wanting to stay present when they go.
I had the chance to speak about my 7th grade teacher, Peter Thielke, this past Saturday. I think more people should know about this lovely man, so I’m republishing my speech online. Writing—and especially writing that expects to be read aloud—has been feeling so alive to me lately. Good thing, too: I have to write another one of these (for my dad, no pressure) in the next five weeks.
Anyway, here are some words:
Hello, everyone. My name is Lucy Bellwood. I had the great joy of being Peter’s student almost 25 years ago.
I was twelve when we met. The teachers I’d had at Oak Grove School up till then had taught me many things, but a fluent understanding of mathematics was not among them. I entered 7th grade carrying a level of insecurity around the subject that often left me near tears.
Peter was into math the way other people are into sports teams. His patient encouragement, carrying over into many after-school study sessions, taught me to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing. I didn’t learn to love math that year, but I learned that it rewarded persistence; that I was capable of arriving at an answer. I know now that this is a much higher predictor of success than intelligence or expertise.
He taught me many truths, but there was one lie I carried for years after leaving his class.
We’d built our own desks that year. The classroom was littered with them—some low and curved, others precise and upright, some with drawers and some without, all in shades ranging from deep mahogany to pale birch. Each one felt like an extension of the student who’d built it. (Mine, a low walnut crescent moon, is now a desk for a twelve-year-old I love in Ojai. I’ve visited another in Flagstaff, Arizona. A third sits in a classmate’s parents’ living room on Shady Lane. They stay with us.)
I’d spent years telling people that yes indeed, my 7th grade teacher taught us to design and build our own desks. It felt like the perfect encapsulation of my time at Oak Grove.
So when I had the chance to see Peter in the months before his death, I made sure to tell him about my desk, and about the people I’d shared it with, and how grateful I was he’d given us that freedom to experiment and learn under his guidance.
He raised his eyebrows. “But that was your idea.”
I was speechless. He was insistent.
He said that yes, he’d had students build desks every year, but before our class came along they’d all been built to the same specifications. “It was you, Lucy Bellwood, who asked why you couldn’t each come up with your own designs.”
How could I have forgotten?
“I had a bit of an educator’s crisis about it,” he admitted. “I went home and wrestled with the idea for days before I said yes—and then it turned out to be so fun.”
My appreciation for his teaching deepened so much that morning, because it was clear that none of this happened by accident. Peter weighed the options, and then he made a choice. Guiding sixteen kids through their own design process was undoubtedly more work than having them build from a single plan, but it was the richer option by far.
Granted: there were limits. He said I’d wanted a four-poster frame with a canopy as part of my design, which was a firm no-go. This, too, is good teaching. Sometimes we need guardrails. But he said “yes” to us in so many other ways—when we wanted to build a ladder to the loft in our classroom or paint a mural on the wall. He gave us ownership of our quest for knowledge.
In the months since that conversation, I’ve realized how much Peter’s skill as a woodworker infused his teaching practice. Wood, like people, has its own opinions about where it wants to go. Education is often conceptualized as a top-down process—the expert imparting wisdom to the inept. Peter understood that it is far more rich and strange: the teacher reveals to the student what they are capable of. He honors their curiosities, their instincts, their passions. He collaborates. He brings out the luster of the grain.
My father died almost a year ago. His decline was long, and marked by a lack of lucidity that meant I never got to have the kinds of conversations with him that I had with Peter. Caring for my dad over the last five years of his life left me out of touch with myself, but it also brought home the truth that it is vital to spend time with the people we love while they are alive. This is true whether or not they can carry on a conversation. We must tolerate the discomfort of not knowing how long we have.
As I cycled home from my last meeting with Peter, still crying through the scent of orange blossom, I remembered more about the 12-year-old I’d been. I’d spent so much time focusing on her inexperience, her insecurity, her bad-at-math-ness, that I’d forgotten her creativity and boldness. I’d forgotten about her willingness to try.
This was the gift he gave me. Even after so many years and so many students, he saw me at a time when I was, once again, struggling to see myself. And he gave that gift the same way he always had: with ease and humor and encouragement—even in the face of his own mortality.
This is what the very best teachers do: they give us back to ourselves.
Thank you for being here to celebrate him. May we each carry on his work in our own way.
"hey toast you stayed up past midnight because you were working on the fic and not because you were procrastinating by making a hideous pattern for a joke cross stitch" have you never met a writer before
This is leaving out the most crucial piece of why that was a normal reality: UNIONS.
Union participation percentage is a measly 10% across all industries for the latest statistics in 2025.
Unions are the ones who could fight against the requirement for everyone and their mother to need a minimum of a bachelor's degree. they could fight for working hours to be properly compensated so that the work week was actually 40 hours or less and everything over was actually paid for.
The reality of the work place and why we work so much more for so much less is because we are not unionized. the reason europeans seem to have it so much better is because of their strong union culture.
there are solutions to these problems and we need to stop obscuring the why.
titsay
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
areudirty
