thoughtmusic

[kohisev]

I have found myself on the path of classic old-timey bands again lately. And this is one of the chillest and feel-best songs out there.

[kohisev]

I discovered that Robbie Williams is one of the most diverse singers out there. His songs range from rock to hip-hop to roadsongs like the one above. This, however, is one of the catchiest and message-wise funniest I have heard from him.

[kohisev]

Light Night

I believed in loving daylight

But in darkness I dwelled best

Daystar gave me sweet delight

Nights calm tidings were a test

  As the hours ran toward calm

I lay my head on the meadow of life

Held all I was in the stripes of my palm

Seen by the sun but hidden from strife

  An unexpected night came by me

Whence I saw that I’d taken a fall

Finally, light swore and let mine be

Darkness had won, once and for all

[kohisev]

Great song, good cover, rock classic. Do I really need to say more?

[kohisev]

As for vaccines and their side-effects - every major medication has side effects. But the main effect they have is that you get to live. So do the side-effects really matter all that much?

[kohisev]

So this is a song that randomly came up on a “Bass guitar” playlist that I’m currently listening to. I had completely forgotten about the existence of it. I’m glad I was reminded though. It is a great piece with even better lyrics.

[kohisev]

This song came on the radio in the morning again. It’s so good. To be absolutely honest I think this is my favourite song from their repertoire. I mean, they have other brilliant ballads (”One” is just gutwrenching) but this one’s the closest to my heart.

[kohisev]

Tartu

The city that feels my soul.

The one where I escaped from because my mental healt couldn’t take it.

The one I left so many unfinished things to.

I visited it again this weekend. Leaving there this time broke me a little again.

Because even though I know I am setting up a nice life for me in my current hometown. I know I will be happy here as well. 

But there will always be unfinished business between me and Tartu.

I don’t know if I can ever forgive my brain for ruining that and myself for giving up and leaving that place in a hurry.

[kohisev]

Growing pains

Being in your mid-twenties is a weird state of constant inbetweenness

You are absolutely confident in yourself and your abilities. Yet, if anyone asks, you falter easily.

You know exactly where you're going and how to get there. Regardless, you doubt every turn made on the way.

You know what is right and strive to do the right thing all the time. And in the evenings you find yourself being stupid because "when else am I gonna be young".

You have an education and a job that you wanted and enjoy. Still you find yourself thinking: "Is this it? Is this what I'm gonna be doing for the next twenty years?"

You see and know what you'd want in a partner. You undesrtand that the perfect partner doesn't exist. Your heart keeps on searching anyways and your brain doesn't let you fall in love with the "next best thing".

Being of that age means being happy, satisfied, confused and torn. Some people are also depressed and anxious. All of that in a space of a week or a month. Or maybe just four days.

Life keeps on giving, we keep on living. All in the space of the inbetween.

[kohisev]

What you don’t think about

What people don’t realize is how much more expensive it is to live with a mental problem. Even if it’s a small one. For instance, my phone company sent me a notification a month ago about how they are going to discontinue the pack that I have on my contract and substitute it with a much more expensive one. But unfotunately for me it has been a month of anxiety and therefore tiredness. So I haven’t done anything about it because I haven’t had the energy to do so. Hence, my next months phone bill will be a lot bigger than it has been before. And this is just a minor bump in the road. I don’t even wanna think about what would have happened if I had another run-in with depression. 

[kohisev]

This song is weird. I have no idea how I came by it in the first place. I only know that it was about 10 years ago, it’s by far the most emo-rock song that I know  and it comes to mind ans starts earworming me every two years or so.

[horrorgay]

The only realistic gay/straight interaction

[kohisev]

This made me giggle like a madman. 

Unfotunately I don’t really have any gay friends or even people who would know enough about gay/lesbian culture/language to get it. So, I will reblog this and hope someone cool is gonna be my friend :D

[queercheersquad]

[lesbophobes-deactivated20220907]

everyone is deleting the caption to this but this work is called “perfect lovers” by the gay artist felix gonzalez-torres. the piece is about the illness and death of his HIV-positive partner ross laycock:

For Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), he synchronized two industrial clocks placed side by side. Inevitably, because batteries fail and things tend toward entropy, the clocks would slowly begin to advance at differing rates, out of sync, having moved, however briefly, perfectly together. (x)

[kohisev]

Love is inspiring. Not matter in what form. No matter how lenghty. It is beautiful none the less. Love is love is love.

[batmanisagatewaydrug-deactivate]

lately for several varied reasons I’ve been doing some reading on the rules of the Publishing World, and two things have one to my attention.

thing #1: in YA publishing, 17 seems to be the rough cutoff age for protagonists; anything older is considered too old for YA.

thing #2: thing #1 is bullshit.

[batmanisagatewaydrug-deactivate]

why’s it bullshit? glad you asked.

first off, the logic seems to be that young readers aren’t interested in people too much older than them, which is fair in some cases. 11 year olds don’t care about 20 year old problems, probably. but high school YA readers? extrapolating from my own experience, most hardcore readers in high school are anxiety-riddled nerds who would kill for some kind of clue about how college was supposed to work. I didnt know shit, because as far as the YA section at my library was concerned, the young adult experience was complete by the time I graduated high school and afterward I’d just plummet off a cliff or something

[batmanisagatewaydrug-deactivate]

also, like, I understand that it’s not every individual writer’s job to account for every individual experience. I get that. if someone wants to write about the teenage experience, by all means go for it. I also write about teenagers. there’s a lot of appeal.

but. it also kind of hecks you up if you’re a quiet book loving nerdchild who hasn’t done anything in her life and it seems like all the fictional teens have sorted out their life and found their purpose and true love before they even leave high school. I’m not blaming YA for the generation of depressed 20 something’s feeling like failures, not at all, but it contributes to the culture.

[batmanisagatewaydrug-deactivate]

and it’s such a baffling omission? I think a lot of people like to write about the teens™ because that’s a huge period of self discovery and growth and learning shit and new experiences but do you know??? what happens immediately after high school ends? EVEN MORE OF THAT, except probably with less parental supervision and cooler opportunities and a greater opportunity to get into trouble and make choices with consequences. that’s Interesting.

[kohisev]

YES. To all of this. I, too, am stuck with reading high school fiction although I am supposedly too old for it. It would be so awesome if someone wrote about the problems of your average socially awkward college-age kid.

[kohisev]

This is a surprisingly chill song. It is also surprisingly the song Captain America: Civil War ends on, which was weird, but cool. I figure they thought we needed something a little more upbeat after the downbeat. 

[kohisev]

How on Earth

Today I made a very important discovery. The dude that plays Daredevil in the TV-show and the dude that plays Tristan in “Stardust” are the same actor. Named Charlie Cox. Mind=blown. 

I scolded myself on why I haven’t quite put two and two together sooner. But in my defence, I did watch Stardust a long time ago and he has aged like a fine wine, not really looking the same.

PS! If you think men have it easy looks-wise in the showbiz, then do look at the pictures of his interview-giving, comic con-going self. Now look at the pictures of half-naked Daredevil. Now look at the chest-area. And then dare to come back and try to convince me men don’t have to shave half their body hair to get a role in anything.

[inkskinned]

how terrifying, to be aging and girl. at 18 i was told by men that i was “the perfect age,” and i still thought it was a compliment. is it because at 20 i figured out how sharp those words were. i felt old at 21, felt like if grey hairs came and my spine cracked i was done for. how scary. i am reminded constantly by “realistic” ideas in fantasy novels that i should have five kids.

my life feels short. like it is squeezed into my twenties. like at 30 i become ghost, just another mother or hard worker or both, just another background character. like if i am not settled and making a difference by 27 i should just give up already. is this something men feel? like a clock is painted on their back, one hand warning: your beauty is something you are valued for and it is something you cannot get back.

and why was i only beautiful, i wonder, at 18 on a riverbank. i’m told often my childish face is a blessing. that i shouldn’t want to look older. one told me i was a trap falling: “you look young but you’re not” he said to me, “it kind of led me on”. am i not young? 

maybe i am wrong. maybe it’s just how we all feel, getting old, like time is slipping from us. maybe men do worry that they will be alone forever if they don’t settle by thirty, maybe it’s even because they think they’ll turn ugly. maybe we all squish our lives into that incredibly young decade. what do i know. i’m still learning.

[shad0wspinner]

I’m almost 25 and I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.

[plaidadder]

As a 48 year old lesbian, I offer my perspective on aging, and you all can take it or leave it.

Our understanding of our own aging is very much conditioned by the priorities of straight men, who in the aggregate understand beauty and femininity, indeed women in general, in literally superficial terms. Most of the ads you see for anti-aging products, for instance, focus on its *visible* symptoms: graying hair, wrinkling skin or discolored skin, sagging breasts, changes in body shape, etc. These are the symptoms of female aging that men perceive, and they are the ones that the cosmetics and the larger anti-aging industry therefore target. (Men do have their own anxieties about visibly aging, mostly related to hair loss and body shape; but they are not, for instance, generally terrified by the appearance of wrinkles, unless they work in the entertainment industry.)

But aging is not just something that happens to everyone else’s perception of you; it is something that happens in your own body, at levels deeper than anyone else (especially anyone male) is ever likely to perceive. From my POV the really important thing about aging is how you feel. Your body is where you live; it is for you. Aging is inevitable, but it can to some extent be intentional, in that you can (to some extent; all this is limited by the amount of time and money available to you and the healthfulness of the environments you have lived in and how you did in the DNA lottery) choose to do things that will help preserve the things about your body that make YOU happy to be living there–things like flexibility, strength, and the smooth functioning of your major organs. Generally, if you’re healthy, you don’t think about any of this stuff at 18 or 25; but when you are 40, you will start to take more of an interest as you come to understand how important all of this is to your own ability to enjoy life.

So that sucks, as does menopause, which is the unacknowledged referent of a lot of cultural anxieties about female aging. But the point I want to make is: one of the worst things that the phenomenon described so evocatively by the OP does to girls and young women is to make them so anxious about their own bodies that they are unable to enjoy and appreciate their youth while they have it. And that is theft. It really is. I miss youth, but even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then. I did not appreciate its many excellent qualities, and it was a long time before I allowed myself to accept and act on its desires. At a time when I was beautiful, I thought I was fat and ugly, and that because no man would ever find me attractive, I was doomed to loneliness and isolation. After I met Mrs. Plaidder, her conviction of my beauty eventually passed into me. As a result, I enjoyed my life in general a lot more in my 30s than I did in my teens. I’ve enjoyed my 40s more too, apart from the cancer and the current catastrophe. Age does actually bring experience and knowledge and, to those able to profit from it, wisdom. You do gain, even as you lose.

Catullus, yelling in Latin verse at his lover Lesbia, asks her venomously, “cui videberis bella?” By whom will you be seen to be beautiful? It’s a question that still poisons our sense of self and our understanding of our own possibilities. By myself, asshole, she should have replied; and so may we all, at any age. 

[cricketcat9]

Long post, but - my three cents. At 67 I don’t feel old and/or ugly. In fact, I really enjoy myself. I’m happy with how I look - because I got over the brainwashed way we see ourselves. As plaidadder said: “even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then.” BTW, plaidadder - you are STILL beautiful, trust me.  The American cult of youth and they way of evaluating women’s beauty as inevitably liked to age is fucking TOXIC. I now live in South America; was complemented ( in a non-creepy way) by two guys less than half my age last week, grey hair & all. Love it here. 

[justgot1]

You will never feel as old as you do in your late 20s to late 30s. Seriously. Western culture makes the passing of youth into a tragic death and that’s – so fucking sad. Once it has passed and you can no longer reasonably think of yourself as young, no matter how desperately you try to hang on to it – you find yourself in a whole other country, you realize that you’ve lived on one side of a mountain all your life and told there’s nothing beyond it only to discover that there is, in fact, an entire world on the other side. Don’t believe the lie. 

[unreconstructedfangirl]

I enjoyed this post. I also lacked the clarity on culturally imposed bullshit to enjoy my youth and beauty, and at 47, I have good days and bad days. I’m looking forward to one day not giving a flying fuck what anyone thinks about my body. I’m embarrassed and a little ashamed to report that I’m not there yet.

[mizjesbelle]

What I like about getting older (I’m 46.) is that the less “attractive” I become, the more I get to fill that space with things I choose.  The more invisible I become as a person with whom someone may wish to have sex, the more I can just wear clothes that I like and think are pretty, the more I feel free to let my hair have no real “style.”  I wear flat shoes that I think are cute.  I wear the same earrings I’ve worn for twenty years.  I get to choose to present myself as eccentric or artsy or sloppy or outdated without much commentary from the peanut gallery, because nobody is concerned any more with my fuckablity.  And without the constant input, I have more room for my own opinion.

Not that I’m there all the time, but I’m sure there a hell of a lot more often than when I was in my twenties.

[doctornerdington]

One of the things I love best about tumblr (and there are many, many things) is that here I have found a circle of middle-aged and older women who are kind and wise and brave, and are willing to share their experiences and to mentor younger women through aspects of aging. I’m 40, and I feel like I am beginning a journey into a new phase of life with a tribe of women beside me. It is so hugely valuable. ❤️

[recentlyfolded-deactivated20181]

Well, at 67, I can tell you that finally no one is looking at me like a tarted-up slab of meat with a vagina. Of course, I’m easy to mistake for a little old lady now, my hair having come in a disorderly charcoal grey after my chemo. But that’s a fun stereotype to work (some years ago the teens I was working with described my personal style as “granny goth”), and it also lets you comment and converse with other people with impunity: no one really worries if their kid shares a word in the store with “that granny” and when someone is unspeakably rude, you can just fire right back at them and they actually, sometimes, demonstrate at least momentary guilt. I dress for my own comfort—although I believe one can demonstrate respect by dressing nicely for things like meetings or travel, I tend to mean beyond what simply amuses me that I am clean, relatively ordered, and have all body parts covered that would cause arrest in my local jurisdiction. 

The rest of it? Fuck that noise; I’m old and I haven’t got time for that shit.

[antilla-dean]

Just to chirp in (45). One of the many gifts of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was the intergenerational community of dykes. So first, as a dyke, I wasn’t around men a lot who were telling me how unfuckable I was. So aside from the general socialization, inside stepped a ton of bullshit. But also, at 21 I was hanging with wyms who were 40, 50, 60. I was seeing all of these older women in their fullness and glory and sexiness and intelligence and BEAUTY and like everything that happened there, I realized the head trips about aging were a lie.

These women, who embraced being crones, were EVERYTHING. I wanted to be them. And as I age, I remember their power, their gorgeousness. I aim for it with all my might.

Unlearning lies is such hard work, but patriarchy spends a lot of energy reviling things that are powerful.

[vulgarweed]

I can’t believe all the wisdom in these posts above. you GO. I am so in love with all y’all.

There is so much women are not only not taught, but flat-out LIED TO about aging. Even within fandom, a space that is very much women-driven, occasionally you come across someone trying to pressure older women to bow out because our mere presence makes some people uncomfy (and sometimes by “older” they mean over 30, never mind the 40+, 50+, 60+ women speaking up here).

Because we are not taught to respect older women as sexual beings, as beings with our own interests, our own passions, our own weaknesses, and our own right to take up space and be fully present even though we are no longer sexually desirable (to SOME) and might not be willing or interested in taking up a “mom/grandmom” role.

When I was in my 20s I was doing a lot of music writing and one of my biggest role models who I sort of knew personally was Deena Weinstein, who was doing exceptional work on metal culture - very little studied in academia at that time - and she was doing it as a (at the time) very rare visibly middle-aged woman at metal shows banging her head off to Cannibal Corpse. (She is not “detached.” She’s in the mosh pit. She loves the fuck out of it, and it shows.) Lots of people were lining up to tell her in one way or another she ought to be “acting her age,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. I looked up to her as the giant badass she is.

A few things they don’t tell you about aging, that I know at 48 (and I know to some people here, I’m still a baby, and that’s OK)

1. Menopause is real and for some people perimenopause takes years. Holy shit. It’s as big an upheaval as puberty - but, like puberty, it’s not a disaster it’s just a shift. Respect it but don’t fear it. Most of all, don’t fear talking about it honestly.

2. Being sexually invisible to strange men is a fucking blessing, especially if you take public transit every day. What a gift to actually be able to read in peace most of the time. Don’t dread this!

3. Judgmental opinions of trivial people become a lot more obvious for what they are, over time. 

4. Your interest in sex might decrease. OR IT MIGHT NOT. IT MIGHT EVEN INCREASE. In a culture that is horrified by the sexuality of older women, consider who is served by the assumption that loss of libido is a thing that always happens. (Or that it should.)

5. You ARE still the same person you were at 17, at 24, at 39, etc. You’re just a little bit MORE that same person. 

6. You have the right to discuss and write about any age you’ve passed through. You own your experiences and you can do with them as you will, creatively. You have been a child, a teenager, a young adult, a middle-aged person - you have memories that you are always entitled to draw upon, for any reason at any time.

[aprillikesthings]

I’m so, so fucking glad I’ve had women friends older than me (and in some cases, older than my own parents) since my early 20′s. Seeing women older than me enjoying their lives and being interesting and doing fun things and even (gasp!) having active sex lives, meant I haven’t been nearly as freaked out about getting older. 

[jaybird-with-a-hat]

Things I have enjoyed about getting older to this point (37):

Increased self confidence

Learned patience

Managing my anxiety and depression

Enjoying the body I have, right now as it is

Things I am not enjoying:

why is it so hard to get off the floor??

I get tired from physical activity faster

I can fuck up my back/neck in 0.5 seconds

Things I give zero fucks about:

grey hair

wrinkles

[recentlyfolded-deactivated20181]

For all of you up thread fretting about menopause, feel free to ask (my inbox is open). I’ve actually been through it twice, one naturally and then because that didn’t work out as well as hoped, surgically. And I’ve done a lot of research on the topic. So fuck the conspiracy of silence and know that I’m available for questions or just blowing off steam.