Gaya K

[inkskinned]

when i was 12 i babysat this girl for a few years and she would come to me and show me her art, drag me by my wrists and point at the pieces she’d made during the week. and she’d be like “do the voice” and i’d put on a sports-announcer olympics-style voice and be like “such form! this level of coloring! why i haven’t seen such perfection in crayola in a long time. and what is this? why jeff, now this is a true risk… it seems she’s made … a monochrome pink canvas…. i haven’t seen this attempted since winter 1932… and i gotta say, jeff, it’s absolutely splendid”  and she’d fall back giggling. at the end of every night she’d check with me: “did you really like it?” and i’d say yes and talk about something i noticed and tucked her in.

she was just accepted into 3 major art schools. she wrote me a letter. inside was a picture from when she was younger. monochrome pink. 

“thank you,” it said, “to somebody who saw the best in me.”

[liannakristine]

[liberalcrocodiletears]

[showerthoughtsofficial]

I thought the Bermuda Triangle was going to be a bigger problem in my life when I was younger

[odaro]

N.B.K. Residence (2) / Bernard Khoury

[onlytwitterpics]

[automatissun]

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

José Saramago, The Double (via mesogeios)

[intotheastral-blog]

I hate that post going round that’s like “haha you wouldn’t tell a disabled guy he’s using his crutch as a crutch” ecause that very thing literally happens to people that use mobility aids.

I can’t count how many time people (including physiotherapists who’re supposed to be understanding and help me) have said “you need to stop relying on your crutches” and the like.

I literally had a physiotherapist remove my crutches from under me without my consent and tell me to walk.

And it’s not even a rare thing.

Wheelchair users get told they need to stop relying on their wheelchairs, cane users get told they shouldn’t rely on their canes etc.

I’m just so bored with the depression-centric ableism rhetoric, erasing the ableism people with physical and visable disabilities experience

[iwriteaboutfeminism]

It’s an argument against the cynical shrug that says, ‘That’s just the way things are,’ and the world-weary sigh that implies that nothing can be done. This is a manifesto against passivity and defeat, and in favor of action as an antidote to despair. This is an invitation to gather together in an expanding public square, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, in order to fight for something radically different and dramatically better

Bill Ayers, in the preface to “Demand the Impossible”

I just started reading this book and it’s a great morale booster! 

(via iwriteaboutfeminism)

[eccentricastrology]

don’t bend. don’t water it down. don’t try to make it logical. don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly

the writer/novelist, franz kafka; cancer (via eccentricastrology)

[spaceisart]

[public-rhetoric]

Let them know

[whats-out-there]

Don’t discount the remarkable human adventure that is modern science because it doesn’t console you.

Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing (via whats-out-there)

[ucresearch]

You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up, draw on it when you need it. In that process you will figure out who you really are.

Sheryl Sandberg speaking at UC Berkeley’s Commencement (via ucresearch)

[toriffic]

[surpanakhai]

long legged spider: hey

scientist: daddy

long legged spider: what the fuck

[aestivalism]

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men - friends, coworkers, strangers - giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that htis kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much - no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version  - maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (via aestivalism)