Know that in later chapters you will complain about how things were better back in your day. Give yourself lots to complain about.
-Phil Kaye, "Beginning, Middle & End"
Xuebing Du
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Sade Olutola
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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occasionally subtle
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Love Begins
🪼

oozey mess
Show & Tell
YOU ARE THE REASON
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

Kaledo Art

Janaina Medeiros
Mike Driver
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

ellievsbear
art blog(derogatory)
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@heartspeech
Know that in later chapters you will complain about how things were better back in your day. Give yourself lots to complain about.
-Phil Kaye, "Beginning, Middle & End"
Well, being youthful is an inside job. Think about what youth is. It's kids, kids are enthusiastic, energetic, interested, optimistic, engaged, and curious. If you're not all of those things, you can have no lines on your face and a 32 inch waist, and no one is going to call you youthful.
Rob Lowe, reddit AMA (10 April 2014)
Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16
"As you go back through the creaky secret rooms of your memory, you find places damaged by time and neglect. You can dust them off, but often you want to present them in a form that is understandable to people, and I can imagine polishing a corroded memory and making it prettier or more compelling than it deserves to be." "Getting your ass kicked teaches you that your body isn't a glass menagerie figurine that could shatter at any trauma. You gotta get lumped up sometimes. Then heal and know you are all right." "Of course, if you are wounded, and you find a medicine that makes you numb, you don't correct for the wound." "If nothing changes, nothing changes." "That day, I knew. Why that day was any different, I don't know. There comes a time. The pain of existence transcends the fear of change. There comes a time." -Moshe Kasher
Every Day
"The sound of words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside." "Falling in love with someone doesn't mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel." "Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving." "Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn't entirely grounded in your own mind..." "...I can't bend over backward and walk around at the same time." "I wanted love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on its own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf." "The clock always ticks. There are times you don't hear it, and there are times that you do." "When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways." -David Levithan
This is how I imagine it goes.
"You're doing better, yeah? You seem to be better now," he says encouragingly. I consider being honest. I almost let the words "I've just gotten better at putting on the face" fall carelessly from my mouth. Instead, I say, "Yeah." I use a warm, reassuring tone that's so convincing it surprises me to hear it, and he seems satisfied with this simple answer. Simple answers are nice. Simplicity is nice. We have this desire for things to be simple, to fit neatly in boxes, to fall wholly into categories. We want everything to have definition. Definite beginnings and endings. A linear trail of cause and effect and reason we can follow. Simple helps us understand. It helps us cope. But simple isn't always right. It almost never is, really.
I can't bring myself to let on how deep this runs. It's complex, but we've just established that we like simple. And I've delved into it before, with past friends. I've talked about my feelings and complications at length. I find that people grow weary much faster than they imagine. I can see it in their sad eyes and hear it in their tired voices. I recognise the slumped body language of defeat, even while listening to them talk with empty hope, their words hanging awkwardly in a purgatory in the room for what they imagine is my benefit, and it's as if the words themselves are confused as to why they were spoken and what their purpose is. Eventually, I notice when my friends approach the limits of their attention spans. I can almost see their brains hurt as they struggle not to fidget, try not to check the time or play with their phones or talk about something else. It never seems to matter how much the person cares for me, how deeply the person loves me. It always ends the same, in a quiet space filled with the not knowing what to do and being sad and sorry about it. We are only human, after all.
It's easy to see why saying "yeah" is preferable to a futile and ultimately pointless attempt at explaining myself. We're always trying to fix things and we can't bear it when a solution doesn't exist. It's cruel to put people through that kind of frustration, like leading someone down a long and arduous path just to have them find an anticlimactic dead end when you knew all along that's all it was ever going to be.
"I'm sorry," I want to say. "It's not fair to anyone who's ever known me." There's no way for them to make it better, for themselves or for me. It's only a burden for them to know how I carry one. It's best to keep it to myself.
I put on The Face. I hold onto it for dear life as I join a sea of smiles belonging to people who must never know I can't swim.
Are you sure you want more discipline? Because maybe instead, you should quit. Wait — I’m telling you to give up? Yeah. It’s okay to
things about dating that are bothering me
It's a lot of the same stuff over and over, but I just wanted to vent: If you pay for a date and I'm not interested in going out with you again, don't feel cheated, especially when I offered to pay and you refused to let me. I did not take advantage of you. You paid for dinner, not for my attraction, or a right to be with me, or anything else of that nature. If I had a good time on a date with you, it does not mean I want to date you regularly, be your girlfriend, or have sex with you. It means I enjoyed the date. I don't owe you anything afterwards. I can have fun on the first date and still not want a second. There's no guaranteed formula for these things. You could do everything right and I may still have no feelings for you. That's not my fault so don't punish me for it. It's not your fault, either; don't punish yourself. You do not get to make assumptions about how I feel about you and then blame me for not embodying those assumptions. Maybe you think you're good at "reading" people but you're probably not always right. Don't be upset with me if I don't live up to the expectations or fantasies you created in your head. If you want to know, ask, and don't get mad at me if my answers are not what you want to hear. If I express to you that I would like to be friends, you don't have to be bitter about it, pretend you're a victim, or try to guilt-trip me for not having feelings for you. My lack of romantic and/or sexual interest in you does not make me a bad person.
“No” is a complete sentence. You don’t need to follow it with justifications and apologies.
Christine Hassler (What I Would Tell My 20-Something Self)
"Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn't speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife." "We Have Always Fought": Challenging the "Women, Cattle and Slaves" Narrative by Kameron Hurley
"Isn't the assertion that straight white men are narratively neutral itself a political statement, one which seeks to marginalise as exceptional or abnormal the experiences of every other possible type of person on the planet despite the fact that straight white men are themselves a global minority?" PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical by Foz Meadows
"History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth. History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN." Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let's Unpack That. by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Sometimes it’s not so easy. Not all demons have horns. Not every damsel wants to be rescued.
Allen Francis Doyle, Angel (unaired pilot, Season 1, Episode 0)
Si tu savais comment je m’ennuie de toi.
Andrea Lindsay, Printemps Noir
I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.
Andy Bernard, The Office finale
I made a series of Calming Bunnies (based off of the Calming Manatee meme) for my friend Gab, who isn’t a huge fan of manatees!
We can always use more bunnies, I think.
I have feelings for someone I don't even have feelings for.
Like my feelings have feelings, and I have feelings about those feelings. And I don't know how to feel about that.
"...forget the money, because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living-- that is, to go on doing things you don't like doing-- which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way."
Alan Watts
I don't know if it's the caffeine or too much sugar or the thought of someone I love but my heart is electric and I feel like flying.