[bibliophelia]

I firmly believe that there’s a “right” time to read a certain book. It’s okay if you’re interested in a book and it sits on your shelf for years. Maybe it didn’t call out to you when you wanted something to read because it was waiting for the right time to mean the most to you. Not saying this is always the case, but this has happened enough to recognize the magic.

[dankmemesreasonforliving]

[roachpatrol]

ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.  

i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy. 

[roachpatrol]

i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet. 

it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more. 

have a cookie.

i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine. 

[naamahdarling]

i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.

[feminesque]

1. The universe is indifferent. We ought not be.

2. A good quote: There are two kinds of people. Those who think, “I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did.” And those who think, “I suffered; why shouldn’t they?”

3. Two good quotes by Kurt Vonnegut: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

And: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”

[grison-in-space]

Another good quote:

“I. THIS IS NOT A GAME.

II. HERE AND NOW, WE ARE ALIVE.”

You can be kind and fuel it with rage. You can be kind and fuel it with a bitter twist, or you can be kind and fuel your kindness with righteous anger, or you can be kind and fuel it with love or spite or ecstatic joy. And no matter what your fuel is, you still can make kindness happen in the world so that people can warm themselves by it.

Kindness isn’t an emotion, kids. That’s the thing. Kindness is action. Kindness is choosing to take your emotions and channel them towards doing the most good where you can; to choose the targets of your actions carefully; to spread a little joy behind you, when you have a little to spare.

Kindness can mean a gentle word or a shouted imperative. It can be a warm meal or a gentle hug or a clean death. Kindness can manifest in many ways, and not all of them are one hundred percent nice. The kind thing to do may be doing nothing at all. 

But kindness is, above all else, an action. We are imperfect humans, and we cannot control our emotions–but we can control what we do as a result. We can control the actions that our emotions and experiences propel us to perform. 

The darkness is nothing but the absence of light, you know. It is endless and nihilistic and all enveloping. A lit candle has no hope against it.

But if enough of us light small candles and little matches behind us as we walk through this wide, uncaring universe, we can light up that sky. We can take an empty world and we can fill it with each other. 

That’s how we can take the bones of an empty universe and forge a warm hearth fire humanity can use to keep back the night. 

[glorious-spoon]

But kindness is, above all else, an action. We are imperfect humans, and we cannot control our emotions–but we can control what we do as a result. We can control the actions that our emotions and experiences propel us to perform.

[nyxetoile]

I’m also a fan of Camus:

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

[elljayvee]

“There are three ways to ultimate success. The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.” — Fred Rogers

[beatrice-otter]

“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I’d always thought kindness a trivial virtue therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.’ ‘Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how they may endure.’        ―    Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion    

[mckitterick]

[snowdayinthearchives]

Since I already brought up my university’s chaplain once today, I thought I’d share with you the best advice he ever gave me.

If someone is suffering and you want to help, instead of saying “let me know if there’s anything I can do,” offer a few options of things you know you can do.

“Can I do your dishes while you study for your exam?”

“Would it help if I came to the waiting room with you?”

“I can distract you if you like.”

When someone’s suffering, making them choose how to be helped can sometimes be an extra burden, especially if they don’t know how serious your offer is. By giving examples, they only need to say yes/no, and they know you wouldn’t offer anything too big for you to handle.

[fatpinocchio]

It should be socially unacceptable to come to work with a cold or similarly contagious disease.

[infraredarmy]

It should be socially unacceptable to make your workers come to work with a cold or similarly contagious disease.

[shoggoth-the-bitch]

It should be socially unacceptable to pay your employees so little that they have no choice but to come in with a cold or similarly contagious disease.

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

[curseworm]

DIVORCE HIM

[lierdumoa]

Our society has a number of loveable buffoons who fool around and are excused from acting like prats because they’re funny. They might be rubbish at most things but as long as their banter is flowing, we put up with it.

These types are almost exclusively men. You don’t get hilarious, idiotic women being lorded as icons of our culture. Diane Abbott is dismissed as a cretin while Boris Johnson is a joker.

Which begs the question: is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny?

If you labour the point that you can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else to take over.

Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, they’ll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when you’ve got an incompetent clown on your hands.

I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.

It’s about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that she’s spent the past eight years being a slave to her kids and nice-but-emotionally-dim husband.

Part of this awakening is the realisation that she does all the housework because her husband is crap at it. Left alone, he makes inedible food. He lets the kids stay up well beyond their bedtime. He leaves the house a tip. 

He doesn’t even try to do a good job because he fears that if he’s too good at these jobs, his wife will make him do more of them.

https://metro.co.uk/2017/11/01/male-incompetence-is-a-subtle-form-of-misogyny-7046248/

Put these garbage men in the garbage where they belong.

[dlasta]

I went and checked the original source and it’s worse. While most of the comments get the problem (the lying, not the eggs) some of them just cannot see that this shit is actually a big honking warning sign for bigger shit. A loving person is not capable of doing this. 

He literally puts his mere convenience over her actual well being. This guy thought up and executed a plan where she has to do *all* the work (because of course it wasn’t just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. …now imagine this with kids. You think this guy cares if she gets off during sex? Would he take care of her if she were to get sick? Would he ever lift a finger if he could get away not doing it? 

She can’t trust a word he says and he doesn’t give a shit about her needs. It’s not about the *eggs*.

[manthedog]

Sorry to reblog from you, stranger, but this commentary is all very good. I especially appreciate the emphasized statement that “a loving person is not capable of doing this.” That line is going to rattle around my brain for ages — the words feel good in my mouth. How you’ve said it is just so right.

I want to add some of OP’s further comments on the thread she made:

“To be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, that’s okay! But now I’m starting to seriously wonder if he sabotaged cleaning, too, just to get me to do it. Dishes, for instance. He will wash half and leave a nasty sink full of the rest, claiming he’ll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, I’ll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, I’m seeing it as malicious.”

→ The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesn’t even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.

“Yes, he sucks at dishes and laundry to the point he is banned from doing them. He will leave clothes in the washer overnight and doesnt separate anything to the point I’ve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.”

→ The husband is inconsiderate of his wife’s property, even that which is well-loved. Could his repeated failure to learn how to do this task have been a ruse? Did he anticipate his banishment from laundry duty? OP now has to genuinely wonder about this.

“I’m starting to think he does things wrong on purpose now just to get me to do it. Another example! My car. For a while my driver side door wouldn’t open from the outside, so I had to crawl through the passenger side. He ordered a handle and kept putting it off for WEEKS. Finally, he says his hands are too big to do it, so I had to do it.”

→ The husband makes excuses for himself that cast him as an unwitting victim to fate, with the implication that he would totally do [action], if only he could. He distances himself from any possibility of blame.

Obviously, anonymous forum posts are taken with a grain of salt — we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. That’s not a concern for me, though. Like I don’t care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the poster’s husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. He’s manipulative and lazy to the point of cruelty, expecting his wife to work while he fails to lift a single functioning finger. The statement that “he likes her eggs better” isn’t cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; it’s just another excuse that walls him off from criticism, a bullshit reason he pulled out of his ass to make her feel guilty and unreasonable for being upset.

The absurdity of the situation when taken at face value — lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someone’s favorite food — extends an air of the absurd to the wife’s concerns, and to others’ warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, “These people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. That’s just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.”

It’s fucked up, is what it is.

…deviled egg lady, if you’re truly out there somewhere, I hope you told your husband to make his own goddamn eggs from now on. It’s literally the least he can do.

[lola1b]

oh yeah my brother used to do this. his only chores were to take out the dishes and vacuum. He always did such a shitty and slow job, that my mom had to redo it and waste more time and delay washing the floors. So eventually she made me do it instead and he got off scott free. And her reasoning was just this “he’s a man, I shouldn’t have even asked, men can’t do housework, he’s incompetent, he can’t do this!” And I resisted and even attempted to mimic (unsuccessfully) his strategy as a 14 year old because I KNEW he was just doing it to be an ass. Because what’s so fucking hard about vacuuming? Just put the thing that sucks shit in all the corners and ur good. But he somehow couldnt do that? Bullshit.

[averagefairy]

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

[runawaymarbles]

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

[feynites]

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

[adora-korra]

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

[mosstronomy]

y’all ever have those lines in songs where, when they finally sing it, ur heart just goes !!!!! and you become very happy because that one line in particular is just so wonderfully and artfully crafted?? like sometimes it’s the tune, sometimes it’s the lyrics, sometimes it’s a key change, sometimes it’s a long note, sometimes it’s something hard to explain!! i live for these lines tbh, sometimes i’ll listen to particular songs just to hear a specific line lmao

[citizenshipandsocialjustice]

[calystarose]

Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.

[aloneindarknes7]

This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.

I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.

After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.” 

If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity. 

[idrils]

john mulaney and pancakes

ok SO john mulaney has a new live show on the netflicks (the comeback kid) and i was lucky enough to see him do this act live in milwaukee this summer!!! but the recorded show is missing something special

so summer in milwaukee is known for being like. comically humid. disgustingly, oppressively humid. ‘can’t tell the difference between being downtown and being literally submerged in lake michigan’ humid

and poor john mulaney was wearing a nice-looking but also very warm suit. so once about every 10-20 minutes he would pause whatever spiel he was on, wipe his forehead, flutter his jacket about, regret his fashion choices and ask what was wrong with us that we don’t properly air condition our venues

about halfway through the show, a woman in one of the front rows stood up and started to walk out so in classic mulaney fashion he razzed her that she couldn’t take the heat either and asked her to bring him a pepsi - she didn’t break stride (i would try to play it cool too if over a thousand people were suddenly watching me get razzed by mulaney)

as soon as she was out of the theatre, he turned his mic off and started yelling to those of us who were still in there

“okay guys, we’re going to play a little prank on her! can everyone hear me? WE’RE GOING TO PLAY A PRANK! at some point later in the show i’m going to say ‘you know what they say in milwaukee!!’ and you’re all going to wave your arm around like this’ - he jauntily waved his arm with his first finger outstretched, like an 80 year old man doing the charleston - ‘and you will all shout ‘gimme some PANcakes!!!’’

we did a few rehearsals of this until he was satisfied, and he turned his mic back on and continued with his act

a few minutes later the woman walked back through the theatre but passed her row, walked all the way up to the stage, and set a can of pepsi at mulaney’s feet. he stopped, mouth agape for a moment and touched his chest. ‘is this really for me?’ he asked. ‘did i ask you for pepsi? i have no idea why i would do that, i hate pepsi.’ he thanked her sincerely several times, and when she turned his back to him to return to her seat, he made frantic ‘kill’ motions across his throat to signal to us that the prank was off

he continued to lament the heat for the rest of his act, eventually lost the jacket and drank the gifted pepsi, grimacing cartoonishly every time. at the very end of the night he thanked us for being a great audience, thanked the woman in particular for her kindness, and triumphantly said ‘BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY IN MILWAUKEE!!!’ and 1 very generous women was hopelessly confused when 1299 people shouted ‘GIMME SOME PANCAKES!!!!!’

[idrils]

[meangirlnurse]

this is an extremely exploitable stock photo

[meangirlnurse]

[meangirlnurse]

i was going to make other unrelated jokes but it turns out i had some anger to work through

[marisatomay]

guess we all have some thoughts about driving

[alexander]

She got so mad she wrote song lyrics and edited a video and everything omg

[thesilverhammer]

Living.

[theblairwitchboy-deactivated201]

WHAT IS THIS AND WHY DO I LOVE IT SO MUCH

[unshaped]

this is the video description on youtube: “ I’ve been a server for 5 years. I made a song about the way white girls ask me for boxes. “

[moremarbles]

someone: what’s wrong? tell me how you feel

me, forgetting everything i’ve ever struggled with because i’m being put on the spot: uhhhhhh i’m actually pretty okay

[ilikeyoshi]

me: hey how long is this thing going to last

someone: haha you just want to know when you’re off the hook

me: hah

me: (actually i just need to allocate the right expectations and backlog of energy and make sure the rest of my day falls in good accordance with it so that i don’t feel time-crunched and propel myself into a hysteria because if i don’t know how long this thing lasts or when it ends i can’t possibly know when literally anything else starts and my entire life becomes an unraveled realm of anarchy with no rhyme or reason and how is that not terrifying to you)

[ilikeyoshi]

me: hey how long will this take

someone: oh like twenty minutes

me: ok

*an hour later*

me: *clinging to every learned social skill i can think of with the desperate hope my distress and exhaustion doesn’t show*

someone: hey we’re almost done don’t be so crabby

me: *smiling* *internally screaming at this SENSELESS CHAOS*

[ilikeyoshi]

someone: hey do you want to do [involving time-consuming thing]

me: hey that sounds fun! when were you thinking?

someone: oh we’re doing it right now

me: oh. like. now-now? like right now. like you want me to stop what i’m doing and get up and do this thing with you, suddenly, with thirty seconds of warning. now. like this second. immediately. now?

[verylostpenguin]

Me: i love books! I love them so much! I am such a bookworm!

Friend: cool! How many did you read this year?

Me: OK, so here’s the thing

[not-so-innocent-bi-sander]

I did not come here to be attacked in this manner

[shitmygaywifesays]

I want to tell y’all a story about supporting and loving your partner, starring my amazing wife.

I’ve mentioned before that I had an eating disorder for many years, and though I consider myself “recovered” there are aspects of my disorder that I still struggle with today — being quite a bit heavier than my wife is one of them.

When my wife and I moved in together back when we were still girlfriends, I was at my skinniest. She used to pick me up all the time and lift me off the ground, and I’d laugh and kick out my legs ‘cause I was just delighted to have her holding me.

But I started gaining weight as I went through recovery, and where once we were pretty close in size, I began to get bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And she remained her naturally petite self. I began to almost dread when she’d try to pick me up, sure that this time she wouldn’t be able to get me off the ground.

But every time, even if I protested, she’d lift me up and say something like: “See, you’re not so big that I can’t lift you!”

And one time I just blurted out: “But someday I’m going to be so fat you won’t be able to.”

She looked me dead in the eye and said: “No you won’t. Because if that ever happens, I’ll start working out.”

It was the best possible thing she could have said to me, because she wasn’t saying I wasn’t going to get fat — neither of us knew that for sure. She was just saying that I was never going to be “too fat” for her.

And every time I worry about getting bigger, I remember that I’ll never be so big that she can’t lift me, because baby knows how much I love being held, and she’ll change her own habits to ensure that I never feel “too big” or “too heavy” because in her eyes I’ll never be “too” anything.

Anyway, there’s a moral to this story: Find yourself a partner who will never consider you an excess. You should never be “too much” to someone who loves you — too big, too loud, too passionate, too awkward, whatever your “too” happens to be. And even as you change and grow (in my case, literally), the right person will be there through the changes, to tell you that you’re always just right for them.

[shitmygaywifesays]

My strongwoman, the wind beneath my wings, the arms under my ass.   😍😍 😍

[niyarest]

[xxxpersonanongrataxxx]