here for now

[nayyirahwaheed-deactivated20180]

poem. from salt. by nayyirah waheed.

[martina-07]

[ruffboi-mags]

;; thank you, this is exactly what i needed today.

[fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment]

Make Shit

This is your Saturday pep talk.

Today’s topic is: Creating garbage. 

Producing bad work is always going to be better than producing nothing. The idea of making trash can twist something dark and nasty in the gut, but making garbage does not mean that you are garbage. You don’t have to get it right on the first try– and if you don’t try at all, you’re never going to get it right. 

Make your bad work. Burn it, smash it, bury it in the garden, abandon it when you hit a dead end, pack it away in a box labeled ‘practice’. Don’t worry about making it good yet, just make it. 

[the-golden-ghost]

I guess the trouble here is what if you don’t improve, what then? Then you just have poor work and a lot of wasted energy, don’t you?

[fuckyeahcharacterdevelopment]

I really (have to) believe that no effort is wasted, but you reminded me of an important point:

Make garbage that you enjoy. Have yourself a fantastic time making it. The idea of allowing yourself to make bad work is really to stop stressing and start playing. If it’s something that you love doing, then either a) you’ll improve just by doing and end up taking risks and doing more interesting things because ‘failure’ has been removed from the equation b) your work will always be garbage but you’ll be happy doing it. I wish more people did things that they loved but don’t have an immediate aptitude for. I wish I did more things that I suck at, unapologetically, because they make me happy. 

I think that we’ve been lead to believe that if we do not immediately show talent in a given area that we should quit. This shit kills me. I’ve lost count of the number of times that someone who is about to draw something in front of me apologizes for their lack of skill. If you ask a child if they can draw, usually they unselfconsciously bust out their crayons and draw you a sick giraffe. 

At what point were we taught that if we’re not good at something right away, we’ll always be bad at it? When were we taught so much shame for trying to do things that we enjoy but aren’t naturals at? 

 Improvement may be slow. Sometimes it goes in leaps and then horrible, soul-sucking plateaus. But people who dedicate themselves to trying, as far as I have seen, always get better. Even if it’s not by much, so what? I say make your garbage. Enjoy your garbage. If something makes you happy, it’s not a waste of time.

[oofpoetry]

No one warns you about the amount of mourning in growth.

Té V. Smith (via oofpoetry)

[evoketheforms]

Rebecca Lindenberg | Interview in The Believer | March 27 2012 

[larmoyante]

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

Audre Lorde (via unpochoclodemas)

[wordsnquotes]

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Nin, Anaïs. The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4. (via unpochoclodemas)

[fables-of-the-reconstruction-de]

you have had love, and that means your sternum is a divining rod for both passion and grief. because the tongue is the body’s strongest muscle, make it say joy. make it say I am a factory of splendid things. make it say the octopus is the smartest animal in the animal kingdom, and I am an octopus. I am an octopus. I am happy. my survival was not an accident, or purposeless.

Marty McConnell, Zoo

[herefornow]

[rhizombie]

Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of “Who am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?” Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are. The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.

Michel Foucault, Friendship as a Way of Life

[officialbluebeetle-deactivated2]

saw-whet owls are very cute

[pinkpurplebluexxx-deactivated20]

I once told a joke about a straight person. They came after me in droves. Each one singing the same: Don’t fight fire with fire. * What they mean is: Don’t fight fire with anything. Do not fight fire with water. Do not fight fire with foam. Do not evacuate the people. Do not sound the alarms. Do not crawl coughing and choking and spluttering to safety. Do not barricade the door with damp towels. Do not wave a white flag out of the window. Do not take the plunge from several storeys up. Do not shed a tear for your lover trapped behind a wall of flame. Do not curse the combination of fuel, heat, and oxygen. Do not ask why the fire fighters are not coming. * When they say: Don’t fight fire with fire. What they mean is: Stand and burn.

Stand and Burn by Claudia Boleyn.

[herefornow]

Donde no encuentres amor, pasa de largo. Eleonora Duse

[apihtawikosisan-deactivated2014]

On a very common request, some thoughts

If you have any sort of public presence as an Indigenous person, it is very likely that you will be approached for your opinion and help on all manner of issues and projects. At first it might be a little heartening, that people are making an effort to look beyond stereotypes, but from my experience it can start to wear thin, when the time and effort you put into these requests is never reciprocated in any way.

I have had many students contact me to help them with projects, to point them in the right direction in terms of research on specific topics, or even to be interviewed as part of their work. At first I thought that it was obvious and did not need to be stated that I would want to see the final product, but after enough times of never hearing from the person again I made a point of stating this. If I help you with your work, I want to see what you do with what I gave you. Still, in the vast majority of cases, I am not contacted again.

So I address this to the students and professionals who have an interest in Indigenous issues.

Before you contact someone to help you with your work, please consider a few things. You are asking someone to help you with your project, which is of great benefit to you, but requires the time, energy and expertise of someone who will not necessarily benefit and who undoubtedly has a full-schedule as it is. Consider what it is that you are bringing to the table in such a situation, aside from the desire to not perpetuate stereotypes, or to ‘get better information out there’. Also please consider why it is you wish to incorporate information so far outside your own base of knowledge, and whether you have the time and resources to do this accurately and respectfully, without requiring an outside expert to do the bulk of the work for you. To do your project justice, you may need to do more than search for a few quotes or pieces of information, and you need to evaluate whether you have the time and interest to do what is required. PARTICULARLY if you are straying into areas of traditional knowledge and culture, even if your interests is purely ‘artistic’. Indigenous cultures are very much based on the concept of reciprocal obligation. Generosity is highly valued, and is expected in return.

Many post-secondary institutions have implemented fairly rigorous ethical standards when conducting research involving Indigenous peoples. You should approach your institution to see what threshold your project/interest meets, and what standard you should adhere to.Do not assume that your work does not trigger these obligations just because no one has made it clear to you that it does.

At the very minimum, in my opinion, is this standard, from the CIHR Guidelines for Health Research Involving Aboriginal People: Research should be of benefit to the community as well as to the researcher.

If you do not know how your work will have a benefit beyond what you are personally getting out of it, then please consider choosing another topic.

We are not textbooks that can be checked out, skimmed for information and hastily acknowledged in a bibliography, if at all. Not even when you ‘just have a few questions’.

ekosi pitama.

[herefornow]

To my interpretation, what transpired was a mix of the absurd and the real. It reminded me of the first Boondocks episode where Huey dreams of being the Black kid telling a white and wealthy crowd “Jesus Christ was Black, Ronald Reagan was the Devil, and the government is lying about 9/11.” The party-goers rush into a panic, unable to bare the shattering of their deeply held world-views. He wakes up to his grandfather saying, in essence, “Are you dreaming again about telling white folks the truth?” Later on in the show, Huey actually goes to such a party and, with amazement, his words are met with paternalistic applause and comments like “you’re so articulate!” The message? People of color talking about systems of oppression is a joke. A joke.

Junot Díaz and the White Gaze | La Respuesta

[herefornow]

Vamos a tomar prestada una idea de Nietzsche y definiremos a las personas vitalistas como aquellas que aman la vida no porque están acostumbradas a vivir, sino porque están acostumbradas a amar. Estar acostumbrada a vivir significa que la vida es algo conocido, que sus presencias, sus gestos, sus sucesiones se repiten y ya no sorprenden. Amar la vida porque estamos acostumbradas a vivir es amar lo que ya hemos vivido. En cambio, amar la vida porque estamos acostumbradas a amar no nos remite a una vida repetitiva. Lo que se repite es el impulso por el cual nos unimos a las ideas, a las cosas y a las personas; no podemos vivir sin amar, sin desear, sin dejarnos llevar por el movimiento mismo de la vida. Amar la vida es aquí amar el cambio, la corriente, el movimiento perpetuo. La persona vitalista no ha domesticado la vida con sus costumbres, porque sabe que la vida es mucho más fuerte que una misma.

Maite Larrauri, El deseo según Deleuze

[herefornow]

"Hurricane" by Mary Oliver

It didn't behave like anything you had ever imagined. The wind tore at the trees, the rain fell for days slant and hard. The back of the hand to everything. I watched  the trees bow and their leaves fall and crawl back into the earth. As though, that was that. This was one hurricane I lived through, the other one was of a different sort, and lasted longer. Then  I felt my own leaves giving up and  falling. The back of the hand to  everything. But listen now to what happened to the actual trees; toward the end of that summer they pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. It was the wrong season, yes, but they couldn't stop. They  looked like telephone poles and didn't care. And after the leaves came blossoms. For some things there are no wrong seasons. which is what I dream of for me.