beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like g·d

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[senatortedcruz]

Risencrantz and Grindenstern

[tomato-greens]

[lingering gaze out the window] When Will I Be Done

[tomato-greens]

in positive news I have invested in a desktop swamp cooler and it was totally worth paying $40 for this thang

[tomato-greens]

[lingering gaze out the window] When Will I Be Done

[tomato-greens]

reading Dani Shapiro’s Devotion and just keep finding myself thinking the exact sentence “this coulda been baller if she’d gone off’er rocker.”

[tomato-greens]

I am about ~3/4ths done with the book and like, it’s nice, the curation of other texts quoted in the book is very good, but I’m really just left with the impression that this person is very #normal and her religious experience is like, rather shallow. there are very compelling passages in the book - descriptions of her father’s Shacharit and tefillin were particularly beautiful, her anxieties about her son’s rare seizure disorder and her gratitude about his recovery, these are quite beautiful, but - maybe because it’s a newer experience? maybe because my aunt (who grew up Buddhist and is not white) has been gently making fun of white Buddhists my entire life? - I find the Buddhist exploration in the book thin and wanting. Shapiro doesn’t claim to be Buddhist at all - she has a yoga practice, she goes on a retreat, she uses these tools to experience prayer and transcendence, blah blah blah. but I guess probably in part because I exist in the category of person she explicitly discusses with jealousy and a little derision (people who understand and can position where they are within their own belief, though part of the point of the book is to trouble the rigid categories she begins the text with) I’m just like, well, it’s wild you’re using these tools with essentially no cultural context while also giving us zero cultural context, but sure, man

also she keeps saying things like “we had no money and no financial security” literally a page after saying she and her husband sold their brownstone to buy ten acres in Connecticut. she and her husband are both writers and property is very different than cash, so I want to #honor their #livedexperience but it is so different than my own that I’m like GUYS take a BREATH

[tomato-greens]

more and more I’m glad I read All the Way to the River just so I could understand what the fuck is going on with Mo (who isn’t bothering me as a roommate anymore, thank g·d, but is acting absolutely crazy)

[wanderlustjelly]

Meadows of central Bulgaria

[tomato-greens]

reading Dani Shapiro’s Devotion and just keep finding myself thinking the exact sentence “this coulda been baller if she’d gone off’er rocker.”

[tomato-greens]

wow this asynchronous class with Esmé Weijun Wang is v. good so far & I am v. grateful to have gotten access to it. thank you Esmé Weijun Wang

[tomato-greens]

but this is the problem! how do I reconcile being told “but you’re not a thug ;)” by my old boss re: my ethnicity with also demonstrably being a white person in America? I just don’t know and I’ve never been able to figure it out

[tomato-greens]

my roommate convinced me to break my long but casual boycott of Marvel movies (this was not principled, it was, like, emotional) to go see the new Spider-Man movie and it was entertaining but

the racial and [trans]gender politics of this movie are ALSO crazy. I mean on its surface it was very “we all have to embrace the Other which is within us 🙏” but 1) I haven’t seen a Marvel movie in a decade or read comics in longer but I used to be deep into all that before I was Betrayed and I thought we, like, were pushing back at the idea that DNA and hormonal differences were inherently connected to dangerous behavior that needed to be controlled by our “normal”/hegemonic selves. guess not!; 2) for real, what the fuck is going on with orientalism - I mean, it’s not like orientalism ever disappeared, but as I recall Marvel movies specifically were like, oops, we were really orientalist, yikes! but this movie had as a protagonists almost entirely white people and as antagonists a Black man and among others a group of nonspeaking samurai who are figured explicitly as amoral and in need of strong leadership (being unable to lead themselves?). the person who says this is unreliable but given that they don’t talk or have any textual interiority whatsoever - I can imagine interiority based on two shots where I got a good look at one woman’s eyes but that is not, um, actually very much emotional work on the film’s part because it was during combat - it’s hard to necessarily say that this is an incorrect assessment. I presume this is setting up the Silver Samurai or something but it felt essentially unforgivable to me.

[pmamtraveller]

Ancient Greek Coins With Octopuses

[smsomah]

Priceless jewelry modeled by Ruth Bitsui and Gloria Davis in their own land; Monument Valley. Scanned from the magazine Arizona Highways; April 1979

[tomato-greens]

OK! thanks to my friends on tumblr for also being crazy. I think a thing I can do when I feel the precipice approaching is 1) what I tried last time, mitigating through half-measures; 2) next time, redirect by seeking other threshold experiences that will be less destructive to me/that I have more control over

[chthonic-cassandra]

Precisely because it's riddled with problems and nowhere close to utopia, yet still part of the most looked-to city on the planet, Queens could in someways be a bizarro model for diversifying cities, towns, and suburbs everywhere, not to mention the thousands of sending communities from which people migrate. There is a remarkable record of tolerance precisely here, where the city (and the world) is at its most diverse. While diversification in the short term can bring challenges, the example of Queens strongly suggests that more difference over time means less conflict, and that it matters how contact happens, is managed, and is mediated. Deep difference can come to seem utterly natural. The idea that people who speak differently can't get along is just as wrong as the idea that people who speak the same will always get along. We won't all learn to speak each other's languages, but a few words can go a long way, and at minimum we need to grow familiar and comfortable with hearing them all the time. We need ways to communicate, which is why the city has not one but a dozen lingua francas. We need people who speak four, five, or six languages, the constant connectors who are on every block in certain parts of Queens. We need language keepers, who keep up endangered ways of speaking, knowing, and being, despite the loneliness and pressure, reflecting everything we are.

Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

What did the author mean by the curtains being blue? Hi, literary expert here to help! Navy blue means anal sex but light blue means oral sex. Curtains on the left side of the window mean top but curtains on the right side mean bottom.

[pinene]

What do you guys think of my new yellow curtains that I’ve pushed to the right side of my windows?

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

Hi, literary expert who drinks lots of water here. Come over.

[amateur-climber-pro-shitposter]

Every year The Internet Archive hosts a competion to make art using newly public domain materials, and I've been losing my mind at this submission:

https://archive.org/details/555-milf-tar/

[tomato-greens]

1) it’s fucked up that #MyWound hurts even though, like, yeah. a wound will

2) I finished the worst part of my work. I have more to do tomorrow but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel

[tomato-greens]

3) over and over again, novelty is really what makes the difference. I need to give up my childhood and childish wish of becoming a naturally obedient and useful person and prioritize novelty during my high stress periods; the sooner I accept and build in novelty the easier this will get