☾

— by Zahra

[orchidego]

tiny bio: muslim woman personal blogging est. 2011.

mostly posting about art, fashion, books, writing and such nowadays but if you scroll really really far back you’ll see all my teenage fandom posting, so that’s funny

[chandajaan]

Ocean trinkets

[kyrasaphira]

vintage stationary

envelope (1843)

Esther Howland lace lithograph Valentine (mid-1800s)

Studies on Twilight Phenomena after Krakatoa by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche (1888)

origami folk art card (1900)

Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science fabric sample

[cyberglittter]

heart-shaped potli purse

[guy60660]

Edward Gorey

[carouselfawn]

solid perfume necklace in the shape of a mussel from estée lauder, 1974

[war-photography]

New York, 1983 by Thomas Hoepker

[arsvitaest-deactivated20260111]

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1954, oil on unprimed canvas Yale University Art Gallery

[laughter-of-the-rose]

[sivavakkiyar]

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Nothingness Of Personality”

[orchidego]

I never expected to be loved by my in-laws (on the contrary, my own mother once told me that she wouldn’t want me as a daughter in law, which made me assume I’d be hated by default). I’ve seen them nearly every day for the past six months and I’ve been waiting for cracks in the facade. Once they’ve finally realized who I am, of course.

Lately our air conditioner hasn’t worked and it’s nearing the hot season in Los Angeles. My father in law has been tinkering with it for over a week. He looks at me today and goes “I haven’t been able to sleep knowing that this problem exists for you. I don’t know electrical work that well, but I will learn.”

[zegalba]

Yohji Yamamoto Pour Homme AW1995 Floral Turtleneck

[orchidego]

Hard balance to strike is when you’re forgiving yourself, with the power of hindsight, for not achieving in the way that you see your peers do because you realize their starting line and yours were miles apart—yet, when does this cross over into excusing yourself from participating in your life? giving yourself permission to roll over and die, because you made it as far as you could go and your progeny can take it from here? I hope I never stop learning. But achieving….well, that’s an interesting metric.

[orchidego]

Watching that Muslim matchmaker lady repackage dusty regressive classist south asian hierarchical auntie bullshit in her shortform content as “just telling it like it is” and people swallowing it brainlessly because she doesn’t have an accent.

With what authority do we accept Real Human Value as the domain of a clearly bored westchester county rich housewife sitting at the top of the pyramid scheme that is “being marriageable”. Congrats, you won at being valuable based on a metric that commodifies people in the exact way our religion tells us to actively minimize. Amazing you’re using your good fortune to reinforce the hierarchy that you won by sheer divine magnanimity! This is why blessings are also considered tests of character, by the way.

The only matchmaking related service that I would deem actually innovative and dire is one that could teach people how to see people as God sees them.

Credential matching is not a suitable heuristic for real, lived-in attraction, and it’s so unrelated to True Love that it’s laughable.

If you are looking at someone and the foundation of your lens is their credentials you are not serious about love. you do not have the capacity to unguardedly hold another person

[dsunearthed]

Chrysanthemum at Shinjuku Gyoen Park, Tokyo, 2005

[orchidego]

last time I took a bar exam was five years ago. Studying for one rn and……..it is not going well !

[leahberman]

field trip; antelope valley, california

available for purchase here