Sugberged

Renew, Ren, Numen, Ronkosis, Kosi, it/its

[drill-teeth-art]

Wow! Here’s something incredibly personal.

This is Good Bi Gender. A comic I made to express some feelings I have about my gender. I don’t really have that much else to say about it. Here it is.

[inkskinned]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[inkskinned]

when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can't write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no "winning" the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.

the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -

the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn't stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend's room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.

i couldn't read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.

i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn't read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can't even promise they won't ever have to experience that again. i feel like we're just waiting for trauma and instead i'm showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?

i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made a loud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn't been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn't assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.

how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.

i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother's soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.

i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!

my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.

and they said: it brings me joy, which means it's time well spent.

something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you're not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it's gonna be okay.

[inkskinned]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[inkskinned]

when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can't write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no "winning" the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.

the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -

the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn't stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend's room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.

i couldn't read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.

i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn't read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can't even promise they won't ever have to experience that again. i feel like we're just waiting for trauma and instead i'm showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?

i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made a loud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn't been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn't assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.

how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.

i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother's soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.

i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!

my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.

and they said: it brings me joy, which means it's time well spent.

something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you're not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it's gonna be okay.

[inkskinned]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[inkskinned]

when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can't write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no "winning" the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.

the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -

the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn't stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend's room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.

i couldn't read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.

i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn't read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can't even promise they won't ever have to experience that again. i feel like we're just waiting for trauma and instead i'm showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?

i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made a loud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn't been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn't assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.

how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.

i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother's soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.

i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!

my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.

and they said: it brings me joy, which means it's time well spent.

something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you're not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it's gonna be okay.

[hyenafu]

Here’s a comic I made about identifying as asexual and aromantic! I made it for an anthology which ended up falling through, so I thought it would be a good idea to post it on Valentine’s Day.

Take care of yourselves out there! http://raizap.com/

[drill-teeth-art]

Wow! Here’s something incredibly personal.

This is Good Bi Gender. A comic I made to express some feelings I have about my gender. I don’t really have that much else to say about it. Here it is.

[inkskinned]

i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

[inkskinned]

when i wrote this 2 years ago, i put in the tags the other thing that was happening: right before covid, i had changed my tune. instead of telling my students here is what you can't write, i asked them to please choose something that brought them joy. choose something beautiful. in college, i am not looking for a specific topic, there is no "winning" the essay, i am just making sure that you know how to format an essay and accurately cite your sources.

the world is pretty bleak right now, and many of my 19 year old kids are full of anger. my brother and i are teachers at the same time, but he is a professor in engineering. our colleges are owned by the same person. he calls me, frustrated, because he just got a student out of crisis, and now the financial aid office has sent the student right back into hell again. we talk about the administration being useless. we talk about feeling useless. we both say: i wish there was more i could do, but -

the world is pretty bleak right now, and i asked my kids to write about joy, because i couldn't stomach what is unsaid in the above post: kids were writing too much about gun violence. they were writing about blood smeared across the hallways of their middle schools. i would get essays about how they huddled under a desk while the bell rang around them, this strange and eerie tune. one of the only times i told my siblings out loud i love you was while we had an active shooter. i was locked in a friend's room up in a dorm while we all huddled around unwashed pastel dollar-store bowls. we called our families and loved ones. what else was there to do.

i couldn't read any more of those accounts. how cowardly.

i wish i could say i was braver, that i heard the weight of what they were handling and was able to bear it, but it adds up. i had 50 to 100 students. every semester, at least 3 of them would have visceral memories of a school shooting. their friends and neighbors and loved ones. their hands shaking around their phone as they type out this message might be my last one. i couldn't read that and stay calm. i had to call my mom. sob to my therapist - how the fuck do i resolve that. how do i help them? we both still have to go to school in the morning - me and my students. how am i supposed to just read that and then go on and teach them about prepositions? i can't even promise they won't ever have to experience that again. i feel like we're just waiting for trauma and instead i'm showing them how to keep their commas in the right place. how the fuck do either of us navigate that space?

i forget it can be different. a few years ago, a series of roof tiles fell off our building and made a loud scattered popping noise when they met the ground. i remember the strange accidental culture shock: most of my students went quiet and flattened to the floor; i leapt up and & turned off the lights & shoved my desk against the door. there were three kids who hadn't been raised in america. i remember the look on their faces; shocked and confused, nervously laughing because they hadn't assumed a threat. the gentle hands of their american friends helping them get down; shushing in a way i can only describe as kind, sympathetic. one of my students whispered you get used to it.

how can i see how they are suffering and then still ask them such an incredibly selfish request: please just write something about love, about joy, about something that reminds you of passion.

i get novels in return. technically, i have a page limit, but i never enforce it. every semester, students are delighted by the prospect. i get essays about being a dog show judge and about the history of the throw rug and about how prismacolor chooses certain paints. about glitter controversies and about their favorite albums and their role models who helped them come out as gay. students came in with visuals and little movies they made. they would go above and beyond just to ask their heroes i have this assignment. will you tell me about what joy means to you? i have records of interviews from writers and tv producers and youtube stars. i hear stories about tracking down the recipe for their grandmother's soup and making bread with their uncle and learning about dance from other cultures. they put their whole heart into it.

i said: this is just for your freshman english class! you do not have to try this hard! i am just one teacher in a million!

my students looked up to me, coated in the viscera and insincerity of their lives; this harrowing space so slick with their own mortality, their childhoods never awarded to them. they do not have the same promise of future. they have never assumed they would live forever. love is not in an arrow-speared heart for them; it has always been too fleeting to tattoo. if they catch it, they release it back into the wild, horrified by how little territory it has left. they wish it well but do not keep it for long. they have always been aware of the cost of their own body.

and they said: it brings me joy, which means it's time well spent.

something about that. something about the fact they can find it anyway: i wish i could write each of them my own essay, and it will be full of all the words you're not supposed to use. ribs and teeth and middle fingers. i wish they related to that, that in their heart were only poems about falling asleep and soft blankets and galaxies. every rainbow peony cliche. i wish i could hold their hand and push the desk in front of the door and say: i got you now. it's gonna be okay.

[needsmoreexplosions]

I love the phrase "they get along like a house on fire". It's perfect. You and me have perfect chemistry and it's setting off the carbon monoxide detectors. People are calling emergency services to get us to stop being so chummy. Someone died

[techscore]

[bitegore]

#this is like the computer equivalent of one of those tortured saint portraits#our lady of the flayed motherboard

[runcibility]

(pinhead voice) WE HAVE SUCH (web)SITES TO SHOW YOU

[tilthat]

TIL in 1915, San Diego hired a “rain maker” who used a secret mix of chemicals to “attract rain” for $10,000, payable if he filled their reservoir. It rained for most of January, destroying bridges, dams, and causing 20 deaths.

via reddit.com

[armedandgayngerous]

that was the Devil

[general-thinks]

I mean they wanted rain

[northerlygale-deactivated202307]

His name was Charles Hatfield and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t make a deal with him, but I am saying that you should be very clear about the terms and conditions

[prokopetz]

I think we need to fully appreciate the fact that the reason he “looks like the Devil” is that many depictions of the Devil in American popular media are specifically caricatures of this guy. Like, imagine being a con man and fucking up your hustle so badly that for more than a century afterwards people start drawing the Devil to look like you.

[i-say-ok]

ok.

[valtsv]

doing social media training at my job like i don't run a blog that would make me unemployable

[valtsv]

"thank you for maintaining a professional and responsible online presence"

me, drafting a post about how i want to be harpooned and gutted like a fish sexual style: sure thuing boss 👍

[lokiloo-blog]

I hate hate HATE all those 2edgy 4me theories about kids shows. Like Angelica dreaming up the rugrats, or the ed, edd, and eddy children being ghosts, or literally anything that takes a lighthearted and fun kids show and has to turn it into some tragic take of rape or murder or misinformed mental illness. So you know what? From now on I’m gonna do the exact opposite. Every cool grim-dark show is now because of a bunch of children. To get us started: Game of Thrones: A middle-school DnD campaign with the most angry, vindictive DM who has promised to kill everyone’s player characters (and their family) by the end.

[werewolfxo-moved-deactivated202]

The Walking Dead is actually a bunch of kids playing zombie apocalypse in their neighborhood and every time someone “dies,” it’s because their parents called them home for supper.

[transselkie]

Breaking Bad is actually just a fanfic the students in Mr. White’s class write about him because no one has any idea what he does with his free time and the running jokes about it got wildly out of hand.

[pyrlspite]

Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg (1996) // Team Fortress 2 wiki

[koth-harvest-final]

op’s tags

[animentality]

[intersexfairy]

orientations can be gender if you try hard enough. gay? gender. lesbian? also gender. sapphic? wow. another gender. mspec? again. gender! aspec? wow... what a beautiful gender. the list goes on.

there are no rules. get weird with it. genderqueer and genderfuck it all.

[the-haiku-bot]

there are no rules. get

weird with it. genderqueer and

genderfuck it all.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[i-say-ok]

ok!!

[anxietyproblem]

[blankpointdankmemes]

[matt-ruins-your-shit]

[spaceshipoftheseus]

Look, this is my litmus test: I pretend I am the original Earl of Sandwich. I have asked for non-bread foods to be brought to me inside bread, that I might more easily consume them one-handed while gambling.

This does not enable my wretched regency habits. This is not what I asked for. I do not deign to grace it with the name of my house.

[dirkbolero]

This is the most important addition to the sandwich discourse I have ever read.