and tonight I'll ache with undefined longing for no reason at all

Origami Around
Show & Tell
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
i don't do bad sauce passes
Monterey Bay Aquarium

ellievsbear
we're not kids anymore.
h
Mike Driver
hello vonnie
AnasAbdin
Xuebing Du

Kaledo Art
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
occasionally subtle
Claire Keane

⁂
RMH
Sade Olutola

pixel skylines

seen from Türkiye

seen from Türkiye
seen from China

seen from Singapore

seen from Germany
seen from China

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from Saudi Arabia

seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany
seen from Hungary
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
@missunadventurous
and tonight I'll ache with undefined longing for no reason at all
“The mark of a true friendship is being able to disagree…and yet hold hands.”
— - My Priest, During His Rather Top-Notch And Eloquent Sermon Today Which We All Enjoyed (via merinathropp)
“God’s presence is not the same as the feeling of God’s presence, and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing the least.”
— C.S. Lewis (via ihearyourmelody)
Catholics be like "I know a place" then take you to a church to adore Our Lord Jesus Christ present in the tabernacle.
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others;
If he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)
If this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. This is especially true of those who follow the corrupt desire of the flesh and despise authority.
But these people blaspheme in matters they do not understand. They are like unreasoning animals, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like animals they too will perish. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity.
If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and are overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. — 2 Peter 2
him: what are you thinking about?
her: oh.. it’s nothing…..
her brain, longingly:
i was most violently yanked back to my 7yro self by my belt
Lander Elementary School-Mayfield Heights, Ohio
I’m just so happy for him.
This is so cute!
These r Hs real Fans
Bruce Wayne watched both of his parents die.
Tony Stark has heart problems and anxiety.
Peter Parker saw his uncle being murdered.
Steve Rogers lost his best friend.
Bruce Banner attempted suicide.
If they can save the world, you can get through this day.
Never stop fighting.
none of these people are real
god forbid kids be allowed to draw comfort and inspiration from fiction i mean what do you kick puppies for fun
Robert Downey Jr. was incarcerated on two separate drug charges. He broke and in and out of prison because of his self-destructive addiction to booze and never-ending quantities of weapons-grade drugs. He was reduced at one point to earning eight cents an hour scrubbing pizza pans in the kitchen of the LA County Jail. There were several nights where, claiming to be targeted by other inmates, he woke up in a puddle of his own blood.
He was already on parole after being arrested for racing his car drunk along Sunset Boulevard while in possession of a stash of drugs and an unloaded .357 magnum revolver. On another occasion, he was arrested whilst naked and hallucinating at the wheel of his Porsche.
At his darkest hour, he was found in the fetal position in a rat-infested alley behind a dingy LA hotel. During one of a litany of court appearances on drugs charges, he told a judge: ‘Taking drugs to me is like having a shotgun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.’
Now the former laughing stock of Hollywood is one of the biggest stars of our generation, a star you pay huge bucks to get in and elevate a film.
If a person can come back from that, if a person can get out of an addiction to drugs of that outrageous caliber, and do as well as he did in spite of everything that had happened during that –– as he called it –– twenty year coma, then chances are you can pull through what you’re having to struggle to get through right now and come out the other end.
that real enough for you, bitch?
yeah just leave it on the table for me I’ll get some in a minute
i’m so in love with domestic sweetness.
cooking dinner with the one you love while they wrap their arms around you. taking quick kiss breaks in between folding fresh laundry. washing each other’s hair in the shower. giggling and rolling around in the fresh sheets you both just finished putting on. dusting while showing off your latest dance moves and having your sweetheart show off their vocals.
it’s so comforting to have someone that you just enjoy making a home with. because chores done with someone you love isn’t such a chore after all.
Happy month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus!
All the Ways Your Rich Friends Will Not “Get It”
I’m a kid from a blue-collar, working-class background, doing my master’s degree at an Ivy League school. I’m incredibly grateful to be here, and I fully understand that this is an opportunity most people of my upbringing never get to have. Not everyone here is from a rich background - there are other working-class kids, getting by on loans, scholarships and part-time jobs. But for the most part, the people around me grew up very differently than I did, and although I love my friends, there are things about my life and my college experience that they’re just never going to get. Things like:
Money can buy good grades. My wealthier friends aren’t slipping the TAs a wink and a $100 bill on their way out of the midterm, but being wealthier does make it easier to earn better grades. I have to work a part-time job in order to afford my rent, while my rich friends are abstaining from work so they can focus on school. That’s 20 hours per week that they can spend on school, while I’m at my job. Our school is in a neighborhood in Manhattan that I can’t afford to live in - I’m spending at least ten hours per week commuting, while they live steps from campus. That’s all extra time that they can spend studying, or just relaxing and getting the sleep they need to be mentally alert. Many of my friends pay to have a laundry service pick up their dirty laundry and bring it back clean and folded (which is common in NYC). I can’t afford this, so instead I spend hours lugging laundry up and down five flights of stairs, because I can’t afford to live in a building with an elevator. I cook and prepare my own meals, they eat mostly takeout. And so on, and so forth. My life is filled with hours of work, chores and annoyances that they don’t have to deal with, and all of it cuts into my time. We may be taking the same classes and doing assignments that are the same difficulty, but I’m going in with a 40-hour per week handicap that they can afford not to have.
“Follow your dreams” is a risk some of us can’t afford to take. My old roommate spent long hours agonizing over whether she wanted to major in art history or creative writing. For me, that would be like asking if I preferred a pet dragon or a unicorn. My biggest passion in life is fiction writing, but I can’t justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to study it - I’m paying for my education by myself, and I had to choose a field that would let me make enough money to pay back my student loans and afford my own rent after graduating. My friends can focus on the things that really interest them, without worrying about future career prospects. A lot of them are using their college years to “find themselves” and plan to take some time off to travel the world or work on their art after graduating. Many of them have parents with connections in hard-to-access industries like fashion, publishing, television, or the art world. They can take unpaid internships and go for their shot at a one-in-a-million dream job - if it doesn’t work out, they can move on to something else, no harm done. If I put tens of thousands of dollars into being an author and it doesn’t pan out for me right away, I’m in deep shit. I’m happy for people who are able to follow their true passions, and I wish more people were able to do so without fear, but I’m tired of the pitying looks and condescending lectures I get when I tell my friends why I’m not in school for my greatest passion. I didn’t make that decision because I’m boring, or because I don’t believe in myself hard enough - I made that decision because my parents co-signed on all my student loans, and they could lose their house if I can’t find a job.
Your “funny mishap” is my “life-changing disaster”. My friends talk about the time that they accidentally got drunk and spent all their rent money at a strip club, or the time that they slept through their final and had to re-take a class. For them, these are funny stories. For me, this would be a life-defining catastrophe that could change the course of my 20s and beyond. If I blow all my rent money, I can’t call my parents to beg for more - I could get evicted, or ruin my credit score. Best-case scenario, I’d probably have to take on so many extra hours at work that I could barely finish my schoolwork. If I sleep through a final and fail a class, I will lose my scholarship and be unable to complete my degree. To my friends, I come across as uptight and overcautious, but I don’t have a choice. The same mistake carries much greater consequences for me than it does for them, and they have a hard time understanding that. I wish that I could be carefree about money, and laugh about accidentally getting drunk and spending $500 on Amazon, but I can’t. It can be hard to tell the difference between “oh shit, this really sucks” and “oh shit, I’m going to be dealing with the consequences of this for years” when you’ve never been on the latter end of the spectrum. Again, I love my friends, and I’m happy that they don’t have to have these stresses in their lives, but it’s hard when they attribute my cautiousness to a personality flaw, and not to the financial reality of my life.
Having no safety net is more stressful than you can imagine. Many of my friends insist that they aren’t really rich - rich people own private jets and private islands and party with celebrities, while their parents just own a modest condo in Manhattan and a sensible vacation home in Connecticut. They’ve grown up around people who are much richer than they are, and they’ve come to think of themselves as middle-class, even though many of their parents easily make double or triple the federal upper boundary for the middle class. But they don’t have unlimited money. They don’t have their own 6-figure bank accounts or unrestricted use of Daddy’s black credit cards. If they run out of money, they will have to call home and ask for more, which will be awful for them - their parents will probably yell at them, and make them feel shitty, and give them a huge unwanted lecture about responsibility. It could have a huge toll on their mental health, and that really sucks. But if I run out of money, I’m just kind of screwed. My parents cannot help me, even if they desperately want to. The best they can do is let me move into the guestroom of their home, in a desperately poor rural area where the best job available is cashier at the grocery store in town, because it pays $2 above minimum wage. I wouldn’t be homeless, but I would almost definitely default on my student loans, launch my credit score straight into the sun, and waste months or years trying to get back on my feet in an area with no opportunities. If my friends screw up, they have to face their parents’ scorn and disappointment. If I screw up, I have to face my entire life coming apart at the seams. Living with that constantly hanging over your head can affect your entire life, and it really does feel like you’re trying to walk across a tightrope dozens of feet up, with no net to catch you if you fall. Once again, I love my friends dearly, and I am grateful to have every single one of them in my life. They have made my life and my time at graduate school infinitely better with their humour, their wit, their friendship and their sympathetic ears. I am in no way blaming them for the way they grew up - they didn’t choose their lives any more than I did, and many of them appreciate how lucky they are. But there’s still a gulf between me and them, and it’s one that can be surprisingly difficult to cross. My rich friends love me, but they don’t understand me. They don’t understand that money isn’t just an aspect of my life - it shapes my entire life, for better or for worse, and I don’t have the luxury of forgetting that it exists for even a moment. My rich friends love me, and they try. But they just don’t get it.
Our vocation among the elites in First World societies
I was at my 25th college reunion this past weekend, and my collar got a lot of attention. You’re a priest! That’s a surprise. How’d that happen? As you do when you have to talk about yourself over and over, you package your story so that your life sounds like it has a clean narrative. I decided to become a priest in Boston, even though I’m not from Boston, because I had wanted to be a university chaplain, that actually I felt being one a was a part of my vocation to the priesthood, and that the Boston area has a lot of universities, so it seemed a fit. I said that a lot. But with a few classmates who had grown up to be more interesting people (at least to me) than they were when we were all in college, some conversations went deeper.
One evangelical Christian who’s a professor at a med school in California wondered, Isn’t it hard to spread the Gospel not just at a place like MIT, but in Boston after the scandals and all that? And I said, yes, but that’s why it’s worth it. Just like it’s worth it to spread the Gospel in a place like LA. From there the conversation broadened to discuss how to do Christian apostolate today.
The Church already knows how to evangelize pagan cultures which have not yet heard the Gospel, and primitive cultures, where the missionaries and clergy are among the most educated people in society (and therefore are impressive in worldly terms). In the U.S., the Church knows how to take in immigrants and help them make progress here, both spiritually and as productive citizens. We’ve done these things before, there’s an existing playbook, and so that sort of apostolate just involves making a few tweaks to adjust to the new immigrant groups, and from there it’s just a matter of organization and will.
What we’ve not figured out how to do is evangelize a post-Christian or post-Catholic culture, a culture that believes it has heard the Gospel already, that is bored by Christianity and has moved beyond it, a modern and intellectual place like France or Boston. And unless we crack that nut, unless we can re-evangelize the First World, all our successes in the Third World will be rolled back as over time people from those cultures progress and they too come to think that they’re too educated and sophisticated to believe in Christianity.
So that’s one way to look at our vocation today. God has given us the opportunity to be in a post-Christian society, to be at elite places like modern universities, so that we can run experiments on our friends and colleagues, testing different approaches to discover the best ways to help them encounter the Gospel with fresh eyes. We have to have as a part of our prayers, that all the people around us, including those who seem farthest away or most hardened, may come to know what Christianity really is; and that at least some of them may come to share our faith. That’s the task of Christians who find themselves with access to modernity’s elites.