MY BLACK-EYED FLOWER

you’re the breeze in my austin nights

[dogmotifs]

i love the phrase soft in the middle! like yes i am! thank god i can be!

[disorientation]

Having a "stupider people have done this" attitude about the things you want to do can open so many doors

[technofinch]

I have GOT to stop spending $30

[offshoreoilrig]

What jobs even exist

[boppinbobby-moved-deactivated20]

"art garfunkel contributed nothing to the songwriting in simon & garfunkel" girl he was the muse!😂

[junglejim4322]

Why did 4 months of this year go by in like a week

[junglejim4322]

Where am I

[wholeheartedsuggestions]

no one is coming to save yo- wrong!! everyone who has ever shown you love and/or care is saving you a little bit.

[rosieandthemoon]

By Melanie Miller

[weltenwellen]

An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

[bgm05]

tenderqueer is when you reblog more gifsets of anime than scans of 90s gay zines

[exitwound]

I have a disease called I can’t reply to your text. I love you

[letterful]

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

[letterful]

What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.

[australiansanta]

u know when someone really annoying is talking and you can almost hear the XDDDDD in their voice

[quirkybrittany-blog]

what’s wrong with “xD”?

[australiansanta]

not now quirkybrittany

[cheaphalloweencostume]

god give me a sign but not that one i just saw

[ismenes]

When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural dread of toddlers, who get described more like animals than people. Kids in their "terrible twos," I was warned, are illogical, unregulated, and feral. "Good luck," people would say. "He'll grow out of it."

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett

[priezpourlui]

Luna Mahoux

[mrsterlingeverything]

Baby shoes for sale theylook gay