Epitome of Chaos

I have thoughts about stuff and I'm going to share them sorry...

[skullsnpineapples]

When I was 19 and traveling I was very open with my friends at the time that I didn’t really do emotional openness that well. I could support other peoples emotions but my own made me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable. Expressing them with anyone horrified me. But I would, albeit sometimes reluctantly, share pieces of writing I was working on. We did a workshop to do a 48 hour film challenge and I made something so stupidly recklessly emotionally true to me. I went on my own to London and took a course to write and record my own music and when we joined back up again I showed it. And then entire time I was prickly about being open with people and pushed back against it. I remember one of the leaders of that group saying to me in our last week something to the effect of “You try really hard to keep your distance and make people thing you don’t care but then you share these pieces of art that you make and I think it’s your way of letting yourself be known”

It’s been almost 5 years since that. But I think about it a lot. I think maybe the reason that I want to create so badly is because with everything I make I am on some level begging for someone to know me.

[skullsnpineapples]

Sometimes I think about that anecdote of Hans Christian Andersen getting a bad review and lying down to weep on Charles Dickens lawn, and I try and wrap my head around how the scale of critique and rejection that one faces as a creative today is so inconceivably massive compared to what it used to be like. Like yeah people have always criticized art and people who make it sometimes for good reasons sometimes for stupid ones, but for most of human history that critique and hatred and rejection didn’t live in a hand held device where an algorithm is force feeding stuff to people to provoke a reaction. Now trying to succeed as a creative means putting yourself into the public sphere to be torn apart in the hopes that you will find enough of your people amidst the eagles feasting on your liver to make it worth exposing yourself to that.

All this to say I think that given the circumstances we’re all coping quite adequately and or we deserve a nice cry on Charles Dickens lawn.

[skullsnpineapples]

Its not that I think I’m a particularly good person so much as I’m just someone who isn’t morally bankrupt enough to scam people or manipulate them out of money or do those really well paying but soul crushing jobs that are horribly unethical and sometimes I’m kind of resentful of my own internal morality that holds me to not doing those things because I’m unequivocally making my life more difficult

[jeniferprince]

Xena & Gabrielle

they were so important to me as a baby lesbian :')

patreon // buy prints here

[skullsnpineapples]

I’m not a classicist and it’s not really my department at all, but I can’t help but roll my eyes every time I see some alarmist take about how as a modern society we’re hell bent on bastardizing the classic. There’s just been a bunch of pearl clutching about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie and how it’s historically inaccurate and how stupid it is that he’s retelling this story when there’s obviously modern influences. And like I don’t know how to tell y’all but we as a species have been telling and retelling this exact story for thousands of years and that in doing so we have both been telling a story about The Past and Right Now at the same time. The ways that classics are reshared in any given time indicates a lot about that time and it doesn’t make it a bastardization to exist in dialogue with that.

Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey has an introduction that points out that every translation in some way carries the influence of its translator and the cultural influences and values that they brought into the translation and that there can be no *true* pure translation it’s an impossibility

I think if we view adaptations, of classics particularly, as translations that exist in context of the moment they were made and in dialogue with the previous interpretations, instead of trying to assign them as uniformly correct or incorrect we’ll be able to have more meaningful discussions around how effective they are

[skullsnpineapples]

Not to be all “old man yells at cloud” but the corporatization of meme pages now bums me out. Like instead of people sharing stuff they like in their own weird niche you’ve got pages that just repost memes in mass to advertise sports betting and generate AI captions to get around instagrams attempts to prioritize original content

I don’t know it just bums me out when it’s soulless posts from memes.189123482 with no character to the page

[skullsnpineapples]

It’s always funny working with kids because I always ask if anyone has any allergies before I bring in snacks for their final class and there are always kids going “I’m allergic to cats, grass, and penicillin” as if the party snacks are going to be a grass and cat salad with a penicillin dressing

[skullsnpineapples]

There are some foods that have excellent vibes but I tragically cannot stand eating. Like mushrooms. Vibes are immaculate. But the texture…

[skullsnpineapples]

If you’re gender nonconforming there is not an answer to the question what gender are you that will make the conversation stop. Like you’ve already deemed my gender presentation suspect you aren’t going to trust the answer I give you.

[skullsnpineapples]

In my opinion, the best way to make a piece of art that feels like a universal human experience isn’t actually going broad with your character and depiction in the hope that as many people as possible will project onto it, but instead to be really specific. To me, specificity in your characters and the interactions they have with each other and the world feels a lot more universal. Telling an Every Man story feels like an Every Man story and strips out all the nuance and idiosyncrasies of the human experience to try and homogenize it. Grounding the story in the world of a character with the subtleties and depth of individual experience makes me feel connected to that character because it reminds me of the nuance and differences of those small aspects of my own life even if the character and I are entirely different in every way.

[skullsnpineapples]

If I, as a woman exists publicly on the internet, could impart one sentiment to the public, it would be: I’m Not Trying To Seduce You.

All of these people seem desperate to tell me how little they want to have sex with me. And I’m just here to let y’all know, it’s actually not one of the top 100 goals I have when considering putting my work up online. You don’t like my face or body? Ok. I’m not asking you to.

[skullsnpineapples]

One of the reasons dating apps suck is because in order to use them without eviscerating your soul you have to basically go into every interaction with a level of detachment and with no expectation of anything. The only way to do it is to have no investment in the specific interaction so when they don’t respond or ghost you you’re not disappointed. Which is like probably not healthy and is definitely not conducive to creating any kind of connection whatsoever. But how are you meant to care about any of these interactions when part of you is bracing for it to fizzle out anyway?

[wanghedi]

One of the effect of elementary watson being a woman on sherlock is that hes always making caveats about murder suspects like a man caved his skull in. Or a woman. women can also cave skulls in 👍 he set the building on fire. Or she. I would never imply women cant set building on fire

[bbcwhereareyou]

[skullsnpineapples]

Intellectually I understand that my perception of what the “normal” experience and timeline of getting your life together is skewed by the socioeconomic conditions and cultural norms when I was growing up and that in the scheme of human history that being the baseline is on the whole entirely abnormal and that the world and circumstances are greatly different now.

However emotionally I find myself unable to get over this internalized image of What I Should Be and How Life Should Look and the substantial and numerous ways in which I’ve failed to live up to those standards.

[skullsnpineapples]

I’m thinking about the crushes I had on guys in high school and how like in hindsight it is obvious that I didn’t really like or want them in a romantic way but I did want them to want me because that felt like the only way for me to have confirmation that I could be desirable

[skullsnpineapples]

I remember when I was in high school where I was with this female friend at a dance and I wanted to kiss her and I had a sudden realization in the aftermath that I had had this crush on one of the guys we knew for like a year but I had never wanted to kiss him.

[skullsnpineapples]

I’m thinking about the crushes I had on guys in high school and how like in hindsight it is obvious that I didn’t really like or want them in a romantic way but I did want them to want me because that felt like the only way for me to have confirmation that I could be desirable

[skullsnpineapples]

Me about 2 years ago: I should play a cleric with a bard dedication who writes songs about her adventures in worship to her goddess who’s domain is storytelling. I could even write some of the music and share it that could be really fun.

Me currently as the campaign is ending remembering I have to record this music which means I have to sing it: what was I thinking? Who let me do this? Someone put me out of my misery.