@listlessnss - Tumblr Blog

i would like less things to stress about

#i need to be unemployed #whispers

loveridden1999

my two moods these days

lesbiangiratina

Youre always so kind and gentle with me olive garden

health-goth-inc

Ooh girl you rhythmic and vigorous with it, you like a washing machine

iamaine

repeating this to myself as a list of daily affirmations

dykely

yellow-cat

(voice of a person spiralling) its embarrassing but i still havent figured out if its ok for me to be alive

persianmom-deactivated20260602

tockthewatchdog

it seems like not only do a lot of people no longer believe there's anything to be gained from persevering at something difficult, but also that almost any difficult activity is inherently unpleasant

that's completely fucked up, it's actually in direct violation of the human spirit. we were built to struggle. i say this as an adhd-haver, yes often things i don't care about are boring to me, which is unpleasant, but difficult and boring aren't the same thing. plenty of things i'm interested in doing are extremely difficult but not boring, just hard. this is unpleasant to deal with initially, but i know pleasure is on the other side of the difficulty. it's also on the other side of failure, from which i learn, and through this learning the difficulty diminishes

and nothing else gives me the same level of pleasure. easy pleasure is great, but it's not sustaining and is actually boring in and of itself. it's level 1 every time, like a rat hitting a lever. progressing steadily over time is a much more intense kind of pleasure that makes you like yourself more and makes your life feel more meaningful. you can't get that from easy pleasure because there's no sense of progression. there's nothing to turn and look back on with satisfaction or pride. the human spirit is iterative

the--framed--maelstrom

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

dubiousdisco

fanfican

An Important Lesson from the Authors Who Came Before Us

We all know the story of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Childhood friends, high school sweethearts, and university rivals.

They showed up at Cambridge with trunks full of typewritten stories featuring talking lions, magical rings, a demon named Screwtape, and a dragon named Smog.

Their Creative Writing professor, James Joyce, famously suffered a fit of apoplexy when he first read their writing. He was so furious over their whimsical stories that he banished them from his classroom and forced them to work as unpaid innkeepers at his pub. He told them they could only come back once they proved they'd learned enough about the "real world" to write stories about "real things, like eagles and children."

Professor Joyce was forced to admit them back into his classroom when Tolkien wrote his eagles into Middle Earth and Lewis created the Pevensie children to visit Narnia. Their contemporary, Bede Griffiths, alleges that Joyce could be heard raging and screeching about how the clever young authors had willfully misinterpreted his assignment as far away as Gertrude Stein's Edinburgh apartment!

I remember this moment in history every time my professors tell me that I need to change my writing--when they try to get me to conform to a dying format. When they tell me that my Land Before Time fanfiction isn't appropriate for a class on Immigration Stories and Travel Narratives. When they tell me that my Babe fics "can't" be considered an essay on Orwell's Animal Farm.

Won't they feel silly in a few decades, when there will be sold-out university courses focused on studying work like mine.

There's a reason James Joyce's work has never been turned into movies. There's a reason his fandom is practically nonexistent.