#involuntary memory

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

one of my favorite high school english teachers pulled out the Hemingway "for sale: baby shoes, never worn" 'short story' on us once and having already been trained in the tumblr shitpost mines for years at that point i hit her with the "for sale: baby shoes, heavily worn, almost as if the baby had been hiking" post and got a laugh out of her

[st-just]

By far the funniest thing people on here ever convinced themselves of was that no woman was actually attracted to conventionally masculine and muscular men (and that saying otherwise was antifeminist, somehow?).

Especially when it was basically contemporaneous with the otherwise-totally-inexplicable fandom for that CW green arrow show that was like 40% the lead doing a salmon ladder shirtless.

[wuggen]

In elementary school we took a field trip somewhere where they taught us how to clean fish for some reason. And there was a girl in the class who was avowedly vegetarian. Like, not secret about it or anything, this was known to everyone including the teachers. And like, the teachers didn't just make her attend, they made her fully participate, knife in flesh pulling out guts butchering an animal. I found her scrubbing her hands and silently crying to herself afterwards. Why the fuck did they do that to her, that was so fucked up

[beardedmrbean]

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Among Us impostor is in my house. I hear them crawling through my vents. Help.

In the event of a major impostor event, or if anyone (including the impostor) is a follower of mine, or if the impostor somehow makes its way into my notes, I strongly suggest you immediately ask the impostor for its pronouns and tell it it can either go back to the imposter lair or follow me as a normal tumblr user. (Asking the impostor for a pronoun isn't in itself evidence, as I could have pronouns myself I just don't want to talk about it)

If the impostor continues to make its presence known after my followers and I have all been told it is not one of us, then it will have passed the test and become one of us.

[jossfontenot]

Involuntary

Since then I cannot even hear the accent of your homeland, I cannot see its triband flag rippling in wind, I cannot meet somebody attending your college, I cannot dine at that poignant chain of restaurants without remembrance of you -

something stirs and retrieves you from things past, involuntary

your ghost appears unveiled, involuntary

Is there a remedy for this Proustian phenomenon?

What is the purpose of remembering if it did not mean a thing to you or blossom?

[sleepydrummer]

He [Marcel] wanted to know all about me and my family and especially my childhood.       "That’s where everything starts,’ he’d say. ‘Both heaven and hell.”

—Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust

above image: Marcel Proust (left) with his mother and brother, Robert, circa 1895 Bibliothèque Nationale de France

[st-just]

When there's discourse about 'Americans have uniquely bad public schools/history classes in particular' I occasionally just get violently reminded of the one incredibly awkward time at a party a few years ago an Egyptian guy spent half an hour asking me to explain 19th century Egyptian history to him.