We Care Lest Our Lives Mean Nothing

Meaghan or May, American, Asexual, She/Her, Slytherin, Artist, & writer. I love quotes, poetry and good art. My ask box is always open

[crossroadsghoul]

"they're not gay" I don't know man, I read a masterfully written fanfic on A03 that says otherwise.

[stopiwanttotalkaboutcheese]

funniest thing about the halftime show is that the audience seems to be generally divided into "what the FUCK is this/OMG IT'S THE MUPPETS/what in the world was that bieber song?" and somehow all of those opinions are 100% correct

[creekfiend]

many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think

[phantomrose96]

After 13 years of this, it's still funny to me that detailing a full mental breakdown on tumblr is standard fare, but posting a nice selfie is a fraught decision.

[loki-zen]

this is the correct way around and every other social media site is wrong

[queerspacepunk]

not to be all "these two words will change your life" or whatever, but I promise you, programming in "good catch!" as your response to people correcting you/pointing out errors or whatever removes so much friction from interactions, and comes with a delightful happy meal toy of "not hating yourself so much for making mistakes"

[madgastronomer]

I use "I stand corrected" a lot. The mild silliness of the outdated language makes it work for me.

[knitmeapony]

I had a high school science teacher who would say "if you admit you're wrong and change your mind..." and the whole class would respond back "... you aren't wrong anymore!"

And when a kid would assert something incorrect In class, he wouldn't tell them they were wrong, he would help lead them to the right answer and then when they admitted/ accepted the new information, he'd say "now we're both right! Nice work!"

For a bunch of gifted kids whose identity and reputation often was staked on knowing more than most people, it was a great safety valve. No shame in making a mistake, because if you accept it you have learned! Now you are smarter! It always made me feel better.

[homunculus-argument]

Feeling physical exhaustion as a psychosomatic reaction to things that feel daunting or intimidating is such a ridiculously counterproductive thing to do. Like there's a situation that requires you to be alert and mentally present and paying attention, and your brain just goes "hey I don't wanna. I don't wanna be here. How about going unconscious instead. No fuck you we're warping out. Night night."

[xenogears]

Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that

[the-lincyclopedia]

Me, reading the first 80% of the post: What do you mean, "experience it firsthand"? How am I supposed to join the Hunger Games or go on the Odyssey?

Me, reading the final clause of the post: Oh, you literally meant that people have to read the book/listen to the audiobook in order to fully understand it. And people got mad. Oh dear.

[marisatomay]

To quote what a friend of mine said after she watched Jerry Maguire (1996) for the first time, having thought she knew what it was about because of its cultural ubiquity: “you miss a lot of a movie when you don’t watch it”

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

When we were children, my sister had private music lessons at her violin teacher’s house. I only visited there once, but I still remember that afternoon. The teacher had an artificial pond in her yard, a large beautiful thing with lily pads and plant life. And in the pond, there were goldfish. I had never seen such enormous goldfish. 

I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond. 

Funny what lessons children remember. My sister doesn’t play the violin anymore, but that was the first time I caught a glimpse of the overwhelming extent to which it matters, the way the world treats us.

[yellow-hatco]

Reblogged again for this drawing I made for it

[221b-hound]

Give us room to grow and see how we flourish.

[maemaybe]

I don't know who my intended audience is here, so whoever needs to hear this, I am begging you to learn to participate in conversations that are about things you aren't interested in.

Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.

Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.

It can not always be about your preferred topic.

You are being rude. Yes, even if you are neurodivergent. You can be both autistic and rude.

[helpimsotired]

Justin McElroy talking about accessibility in live theatre (June 9, 2019)

[formichi]

[quasi-normalcy]

“Art is happening everywhere all of the time” but an awful lot of it seems to only ever happen in New York and London, doesn’t it?

[lavabunart]

Back massage

[wakingfromthewater]

This was shared as a "bad" joke but I was so charmed by it I've been thinking about it for days.

[artistic-octopus]

[wordswithkittywitch]

Moose at the next table: No they don't. I've been waiting here for an hour.

[totally-not-an-al1en]

[thefreakmeister]

me: isn’t it funny how captain kirk was supposed to be the sex appeal of star trek but it ended up being spock

my dad: i thought it was bones

me:

my dad: i thought bones was supposed to be the sex appeal

[thefreakmeister]

prev you’re the only person here that gets it

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[json-derulo]

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

[creatureprofessor]

i love when museums have near exact replicas of their displayed objects for you to buy. haha 15th century ceramic cup you are in my possession

[slytherverse]

friend is trying to sell her car bc shes moving to a state with vehicle inspections and her prius lives in defiance of god. anyway so shes cleaning it out at my apartment complex bc we have dumpsters and her roommate forgot to pay the trash bill. i will be liveblogging my experience watching her do this and you will understand why i refuse to help her

[slytherverse]

-threw out the floor mats entirely bc theres magic the gathering cards molded into them

-found an axe formely belonging to a friend who is now in jail

-four trash bags worth of clothes and an untold amount of fast food trash

[slytherverse]

guys theres a pile of chicken bones down there from wingstop im so scared

AND i hear "hey dude can i use ur washing machine real quick" and she pulls out a pair of pants from, i shit you not, 1940 and theyre moldified into a SOLID. those pants survived a war and couldnt last a year in her fucking shitbox istfg

[slytherverse]

shes cleaning out the Broken Glass Area of the backseat (normal thing to have. been there FOUR FUCKING YEARS)

fuckin blindly sticks her hand under the seat and pulls out a fully intact URANIUM GLASS PLATE. "for you :D" ... GIRL

[slytherverse]

"oh no i disturbed the nursery section of The Colony!!! D: D: " awesomesauce. i hope an asteroid comes and kills us both

[slytherverse]

i swear to god im not exaggerating here. anyway heres an incomplete list of everything we found inside:

-axe (stolen)

-earrings made out of dentures

-flavored condoms

-a quilt

-hello kitty sweater (stolen from a DIFFERENT ex-friend with a felony charge)

-deer spine

-baseball sized wad of human hair

-""sex apron""

-uranium glass plate

-pile of non-uranium non-car glass

-rollerblades

-complete phantom of the opera cd set

-magic the gathering cards mold-ified into a brick

-lego millennium falcon

-a CUTLASS??? (for "self defense")

-the back bumper of the car

-an entire fucking ant colony

and finally, perhaps the most disturbing,

-a pack of vanilla wax melts, inexplicably unmelted and intact despite sitting inside this terrarium-with-a-prius-wrapped-around-it in 100 degree heat for god knows how long

[slytherverse]

i must stress: before today she DID NOT KNOW about the ant colony in there . she thought ants just really liked to climb inside anytime the car was parked.

[slytherverse]

guys i cant take it anymore

[slytherverse]

bringing this post back bc i found a video of her offering me the phantom cd set and i said no because the box was coated in a syrupy mat of human hair and she was confused because "we know whos hair it is" ???? as if the origin of the hair was the only fucking holdup

[unfortunatelyshortpeasent]

@entities-of-posts

[entities-of-posts]

The Corruption

[fadecrow]

Reblogging this again actually because I just checked the notes and this only confirms the diagnosis

[entities-of-posts]

Valuable supplemental research.

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

"boys have dirty rooms but clean cars, girls have clean rooms but dirty cars" is a statistical error. Most car owners keep it neat regardless of gender. Ants Georgette, who drives around in a Prius-shaped ant colony (their little ant feet do the Fred Flintstone thing), is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[teaboot]

Alright kids say it with me

My thoughts don’t make me a bad person

My feelings don’t make me a bad person

My thoughts, feelings, and impulses only exist inside my head, and none of it matters unless I act on it

Nobody can see my thoughts or emotions

The only things anyone can see and judge me on are my actions

There’s no such thing as a thought crime

thank u

[teaboot]

You can have harmful beliefs and harmful impulses and harmful urges and not be evil. You can make yourself aware that these things are harmful and take steps to correct yourself and not be evil. You can walk around with the urge to kick puppies all goddamn day and as long as you are capable of redirecting that impulse to something benign then it doesn’t matter. I don’t know how else to say this

[sillyness-incarnate]

Yes, but you are missing the part, where this is okay for everybody, except for me.

[teaboot]

As someone who has struggled with that exact thought, I personally try to kick it back with “if it’s weird to think I’m specially and uniquely better than everyone else, it’s equally weird to think I’m specially and uniquely worse”