vayreaux. @vayreaux - Tumblr Blog

my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who's my best friend in the world and recently he was like "you're too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!" and I was like "a niece might be more up my alley" and he just got more excited and said "ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful"

caustic-pixie

OP the tags!!

aster-is-confused

my favorite genre of bird picture

byjove

Cemeteries are not wastes of space. Historical cemeteries ESPECIALLY are not wastes of space. The fact developers are continuously foaming at the mouth to destroy them and put a strip mall up in their place should make you even more determined to help maintain them. In urban areas, they are a haven for wildlife. They are a green space. If you are too afraid of death to utilize them for that purpose, that is on you.

zooophagous

Thank you. Historically cemeteries were treated as parks, and it wasn't uncommon to see people not only enjoying the grounds but actually playing games and having picnics there. Somewhere along the line we decided that these activities were inappropriate and that cemeteries were off limits and now people see them as wasted space because they feel too awkward to enjoy them.

They're not only beautiful green spaces but excellent public displays of history and art history, and if you care to look closely you can find out a lot just by studying stones.

For example- notice how few modern headstones are dedicated to young children versus the ones erected before vaccines were widespread.

The cemetery near here has the state's largest silver maple crowning its grounds. Many of the trees in older cemeteries are some of the largest and oldest trees in an area.

Cemeteries are for the living, not the dead. Enjoy them. Go birdwatching in them. Don't be stupid in them sure but don't be too afraid to touch them either.

And for the love of God don't mindlessly support turning them into parking lots and ""luxury"" condos.

pomegranate-flower

aveloka-draws

Couldn't stop thinking about that tweet, I love the idea of a god promoting his faith.

gallusrostromegalus

Look if he's getting Wi-fi or Reception out there in the ass-end of nowhere, that's a straight-up miracle. I'm sold.

hamletthedane

I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.

Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.

I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.

And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.

rhube

I tried to let this go past without comment, but it's stayed with me throughout the day. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

Not for the positive sentiment that serving others can be a positive thing - precisely because no one was ever saying it couldn't be - but for how badly it mangles what it purports to be responding to.

No one ever said that the men who were only able to produce art because of other people labouring for them had had no pain or done nothing good. And no one ever said that those who supported them were always resentful and unwilling.

The point is that when people who weren't men had great tragedies and great powers of creativity, they were not supported to go off into the wilderness and explore their creative impulses and philosophies to their greatest depths.

And then we are compared to those works. And those works often PRESENT philosophies in which great works can be achieved on their own. This post is so... dishonest about what is being argued for.

Some of y'all haven't read A Room of One's Own, and it shows.

Shakespeare had great tragedies in his life, such as the death of his son Hamnet, and those obviously inform his work. But what, Virginia Woolf asks us, of Shakespeare's sister?

What would have become of the middle class woman with Shakespeare's upbringing and talent? She certainly would have been laughed out of the theatre.

We know that. Not just because of the remarks made by men of the time that a woman acting would be like a dog standing on its hind legs. But also because we can see the few, very few examples of women DID manage to write at the time, and how hard it was for them

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, with all the privileges that brings, was a philosopher and writer. She wrote the first science fiction novel. And she wrote plays. And she was ridiculed for it, and men tried to bury her existence. Despite a very supportive husband, she was widely regarded with derision as the Mad Duchess. While I wouldn't say her plays are remotely as good as Shakespeare, it's not as though she had the advantage of friendship with Kit Marlow. To be a playwright in Shakespeare's time was a collaborative effort, bouncing ideas and lines off your actors and other writers. We can see in the folios how much the plays changed from performance to performance. They weren' static. That was a novel concept just starting to be introduced by the printing press. But who collaborated with Margaret? Who batted frenzied ideas around with the Duchess?

Not Shakespeare's peers. And likely not many of her own class either.

Or try Aemelia Lanyer on for size. First woman poet to be published in the English language and her poems BLAZE with talent and pain and power.

But it was only possible because she had a female patron who supported her work, and they were both cut adrift in an inheritance dispute. You can hear it when you read The Description of Cookeham - the country house in which she and her patron briefly lived and for a while, she was free to write as men were. But it's a poem of loss.

Because they lost Cookeham. Because there is never the same financial security, and thus peace and room to work unburdened, as there is for men.

And no it's not the case that all men have it perfect and easy, but a fuck of a lot more of them have mothers or wives or sisters who will support them as they pour out their pain into the pages than there are fathers or husbands, or brothers who will do the same for a woman or non-binary person.

Woolf notes that you can see it in the cracks of the work women write. A moment in Jane Eyre where Jane thinks longingly of all she might do if she were free like a man that Woolf sees as flawed because it is not the character speaking, but the author, pouring out her pain.

Because women were always forced to write AROUND their duties, often in fear of getting caught. They could never polish freely to the same extent as men. Even Jane Austen had no study to retreat to, but would cover her pages with embroidery to hide them when she was interrupted by visitors.

It's not merely ignorant but insulting to be told that in critiquing the circumstances in which men wrote, partly supported by the labour of women, we are in some sense dismissing THOSE WOMEN. That in acknowledging that labour we are disparaging it.

This is some trad wife bullshit.*

NO.

Noting that the labour of women that supported the great works of men has gone unrecognised is NOT to dismiss that labour. Nor is it invalid to critique a man who wrote ruggedly individualistic works while quietly supported by a woman, just because he had also supported others and suffered grief. That argument DOES NOT scan.

A person - anyone - needs a room of their own and a place of safety in which to write to fully explore their creative ideas.

As I lay in bed too sick to either work or write I feel this more strongly than ever.

Privilege is multifaceted, and it has never denied that those with one privilege may suffer in other ways, nor that they can do good works and support others. The critique of privilege is DOUBLY important when this is so, because those people STILL benefit from the STRUCTURES that support them over and above those who suffer the same tragedies without that support.

When Shakespeare is thrown into depression by the loss of his son he is still held up in all the myriad ways that a comfortably well-off, educated, middle-class white man in Elizabethan England can be. When Aemelia and her patron are set adrift because she and her patron are of the wrong gender, they have no one to turn to. No salvation. And we have far fewer poems by Lanyer than we do by Shakespeare, for all that many speculate she is the dark lady of his sonnets (I know, there are other speculations, but she is one).

With all the wealth and prestige of a Duchess, Cavendish's plays were only performed at home. It's not that she wasn't known in the theatrical world - it's said that when Cavendish went to the theatre to watch a play, everyone else in the audience was there to watch Cavendish, because of her eccentric reputation, but she could never be one of the Lord's Men. She could never see her works performed at the Globe. Never drink Kit Marlow under the bench.

Massive structural machines were (and still are) in play to see that it is far easier for men to have what they need in order to think and create handed to them.

THAT is the critique. THAT is the point.

Not that no one should ever support their loved ones while they write. For the most part, that's the only way for creatives to get started in having a career as opposed to a hobby.

The point is that it is MASSIVELY more common for women to quietly support men without recognition while they go off and write books that ignore the existence of women than it is for women or non-binary people to be supported by their loved ones to go off and do something creative.

It's always worth checking, when you're hot and angry that someone is beating down on your fave, that YOU are in fact beating up a real opponent, and not a straw person.

*I have no reason to believe OP is a trad wife, I just mean that this is the pattern of argument they use to get you on board with their lifestyle while arguing that the left is devaluing the work of caring for others.

batshit-auspol

A news report from Australia's government broadcaster in the 70s, found in their archives simply labeled 'lesbians'

Captions added by for your reading pleasure

batshit-auspol

Remind us to make this into a bumper sticker in the morning

batshit-auspol

Here's to those

fansplaining

My personal experience of fandom has involved retreating to older platforms: revisiting Dreamwidth, joining more fandom Discords, and seeing many comic and fanartists revive their Tumblr accounts. The past 12 months have been the most active and more joyful on Tumblr since before the 2018 exodus. I never left, but for a while being on Tumblr felt like inhabiting a quiet, peaceful, abandoned house being slowly overtaken by vines and mosses. Now it feels flooded with new energy. I’ve loved watching Reddit users join Tumblr for the first time and be charmed by its odd holidays and other quirks. ... As I watch nearly every social media platform crumble into chaos, Tumblr and Discord, despite their flaws, feel like the best places to be right now.”

— for our anniversary episode, @redgoldsparks discussed the plaforms where e has been spending eir fannish time this past year. Click through to listen to eir full letter or read a transcript!

sandersstudies

I am OBSESSED with people telling me how they met the love of their life. Just found out my director met his wife through a misdirected email - that’s fate right there.

sandersstudies

“I saw her last name was Jewish - and I’m Jewish, so when I corrected the email I told her Shabbat Shalom with a smiley face — this was the very beginning of the emoticon era, you understand. She had a watermark of a dog rescue at the bottom of her email, and I love dogs, so I found her website and there she was — all these videos of her rehabilitating dogs and talking about the organization. I fell in love with her just from those videos.”

😭😭😭

sandersstudies

“I asked if we could meet for coffee, told her I was looking for volunteer opportunities — which was halfway a lie — and she said ‘okay, but just so you know I have a boyfriend, so this is strictly business,’ and I was so disappointed, but I did want to meet her. We sat in that coffeeshop until they turned the lights out on us, and she broke up with her boyfriend the next day.”

sandersstudies

MULTIPLE people in the notes have told me how important these tags are to them so here’s to keeping it in the main post.

soberscientistlife

nicetomeetmew

This collab was not on my 2023 bingo card

(source)

bbcwhereareyou

This fucking guy.

lostinhistory

The funniest response:

puppybeargf

gayspock-deactivated20250217

imagine dragons prematurely blew a fat load when they came up with such a righteous band name, with the price of being limp&dry ever since

dyst-blogs

took me sec to realize i wasnt supposed to be imagining a dragon doing this

gayspock-deactivated20250217

EVERYBODY. IMAGINE DRAGON BLOWING FAT LOAD. NOW. 🗣️👍

cryptotheism

I would kill for my own room man I think every California landlord should be drawn and quartered

cryptotheism

I like my roommates. We are good friends. The four of us are splitting a 2bed 1.5bath for 2.2k/mo. (So 500$ each). This is like, dirt cheap for LA.

cryptotheism

Oh yeah part of why it's so cheap is that the water randomly explodes a few times every month and floods the parking lot. (which is unsafe to use, so most people in the apartment have to park two blocks away in a residential area.)

cryptotheism

oddliestcatch

drfunkbeat

[ID: Fanart of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, drawn as if she were a defense laywer in an Ace Attorney courtroom. She points, doing the "Objection!" pose. Her dog Bruiser is in her purse on the stand in front of her, barking in the same direction. End ID]