when you see your little kitty walking toward you at a leisurely pace and say "hi baby!" bc you're excited to see her and she starts trotting a little bit faster 'cause she's excited to see you too. that's what life is all about i think
this ask polly comment..
i cant stop laughing
house md is wild cause it feels like in creating a show based on "irreverent doctor who is garbage, unlike the saint docs on all the boring medical soap operas rn" they completely accidentally created one of the most compelling and important concepts of all time, in "disabled chronic pain doctor distrusts medical institutions because of his experiences with addiction and disability, therefore he is constantly breaking the law and hospital administrative policy rules to get marginalized patients care that they would otherwise be denied, and the show uses this as a way to spotlight various forms of institutional patient inequity"
but BECAUSE the writers lucked into this concept by accident and have no idea WHY it's important, half of the show is Also "doctor commits constant heinous malpractice on vulnerable patients and treats them like shit and traumatizes them and this is considered a normal good protag thing to do because it will always be shown to be retroactively justified, because actually the patient always Was lying or being unreasonable, and this doctor is so so so smart and special that no rules ever apply to him, and no consequences will ever be shown" which is obviously. eaugh
so when it's good it's SO SO SO SO SO FUCKING GOOOOOD but it's also like. not something i can in good conscience recommend to Any other chronic illness people. u feel me.
Also if I never see another abled fan going on about how patients should put up with being treated like shit because Doctor Knows Best and we’re all annoying burdens, it will be too soon.
sometimes it’s annoying when your character can’t jump in a video game but how often do you jump in real life?
“Do you even remember the last time you jumped?” is a question I never anticipated leaving me feeling so hollow and terrified.
crazy how at my age my parents already had children (that they were in no way equipped to raise)
nutty how i'm not even in a relationship but at my age my parents had been married for years (and established a dynamic so dysfunctional that i would spend my adolescence wishing they'd get divorced)
it's almost like it's not a bad thing that millennials are getting married and having kids later in life (or choosing not to do those things at all if they don't feel well equipped)
it's 4:14 which means it's about to be 9 pm if i'm not careful
the number of times i think about the full body viking skeleton i saw in the museum is ridiculous like when i say it haunts me i mean it actually haunts me
every time i remember the questions are endless — what was his name? what did his mother call him? what sounds did he wake up to? what sounds did he die to? how old was he when he died? how old when he fell in love? how old when he first fell out? who cried with him and laughed with him? who cried for him? how many miles of separation can i draw between my ancestors and him? was he kind, serious, jokey? was he sombre or impulsive? was he chatty and good-humoured or a cantankerous asshole? like…i have never stopped thinking about this.
the fact that at one point in time this was a living breathing person. with memories and petty hates and the dumbest jokes. and friends he loved. and the fact that he probably at some point burst out into drunken song or punched someone in an argument or GOT punched in an argument or tripped into the mud while his friends pissed themselves laughing or or or or…countless or‘s into infinity
and the fact that before all of that this massive skeleton was tiny toddler (was he scared of the dark? did he squabble with his siblings? did he have siblings?) who may or may not have hid behind his mother or probably got hoisted onto an adult’s shoulders and in his little mind thought this person was the strongest human in the world and that he could hold the whole sky up just by standing there like that and as long as he was up there he was king of the world or could be.
like…what am i supposed to do with this? what does ANYONE do with this? how are you supposed to cope with the enormity of this while at the same time realising just how tiny and fleeting our lives are? there is literally more than a THOUSAND years between us & ALL of it has been pinched down to a glass case not even 2 inches thick like…i’m losing my mind.
I got this feeling when I saw some petroglyphs on the side of a cliff like.. a human made those. That human felt all of the emotions I feel they went through the same universal human experience and they each had vivid internal lives and memories. Wild.
ok this is next level and i honestly…i honestly can’t
during my prehistory module we got given Roman pottery and roofing slabs that had thumb prints in the handles and I put my thumb over those thumb marks and cried in the middle of the tutorial
I do pottery, and it’s one of my favorite things about the medium: that you can often see the shape of someone’s fingers in the surface. I love it when someone just shoves a finger somewhere while throwing, and leaves it there as a place for YOU to put your finger. Little thumbrests on top of mug handles is a fave. “How did you make those ridges like that on the outside? How did you make that spiral on the bottom?” “With my fingers.”
All of this.
At Wells Cathedral in England the stairs down from the chapter house have had dips worn into their stone by centuries of human feet taking the most direct route up and down.
Thinking about the immense distances between the stars makes me panic, but looking back into human history gives me peace.
Reminds me of when we got to see this exposition on ancient egypt.
I was like, “Wow a real life papyrus!”
but then my mom said, clearly moved, “Wow, that’s someone’s handwriting.”
Part of why I love medieval calligraphy so much is that my sources are these centuries old manuscripts that have… doodles in the margins, and scribbles where they tested their pens and ink, notes at the end and in the margins complaining about the temperature or their work materials or thanking god that they’ve finished. There are surviving artifacts with cat paw prints across the page where some pet got into the ink, and there’s even one with a pee stain on it followed by a long note explaining why nothing of importance is written on that page and a reminder not to leave your books out at night.
They were made by people, and I love feeling connected to those people by what I do.
The one that gets me every time is this bowl:
I want to know what the person who was making it was thinking, so badly. Maybe it was all done very seriously. But maybe they were giggling, as they said to themselves, “But what if I put feet? FEET ON THE BOWL!” Were they giggling at the idea? Did it make them happy, every time they shaped those little toes? If they were having a bad day, did they make a foot bowl, to cheer themselves up?
Did they ever consider that, some 6000 years later, someone would look at their foot bowls, and smile every time, and wonder about the person who made them?
As someone who has worked in clay? Yes, we think about that. We wonder about it. We wonder who will see our work, if it somehow survives even a hundred years, let alone a thousand, two, or – amazing! – six thousand years. When you work in a durable medium, you wonder whose thumb will fit the prints you leave. Who they will be. If your work will bring them the same joy that it brought you in its making.
I transcribe documents. Mostly ship logs. But also personal diaries and journals. They were just like you and me. They write don’t forget eggs, and wondered if their neighbors secretly hated them or if they are reading into it too much. They loved and were loved and they wondered. They wondered about you. Who were you going to be? Would you live in a hose like them? Would you travel the stars? Would you care about them? The things they wrote the things they made? Did they leave an impression. Everything I transcribe from ship notes, research papers, census, to diaries. Are just people saying I was here, what I did mattered, please remember me. And every word I type out is me whispering back. You were, you did, we will.
I have this feeling about stairs. (Not all stairs, but most.) They are used for the same purpose generation after generation, to take a person up or down. Room changes. We refurnish them, repurposed them… stairs remains.
Far more often than I should, I find myself thinking about the people who have worn the steps before me. What waited for them at the top or the bottom of the stairs. What errand they were on. Why they took just these stairs.
The older the building, the more worn the steps, the harder it is to not think about all the feet going up and down before me. The more significant the building, the harder it is to not think about how I use the same stairs, for the same things, as kings and queens or whathaveyou.
The first time this thought struck me, however, was at my university. In a building that only dates back to the 1970’s. But there are so many generations of students who have rushed up and down those stairs. So many dreams and expectations. So much stress. So much prospect for the future.
I don’t know. Stairs just fuck me up.
This reminds me of the two Viking Age skeletons that are on display in the National Museum in Denmark.
Through DNA research, they found out they are family members of the second degree - a grandfather and son, or an uncle and nephew, or… But they definitely came from the same area. They probably knew each other. Laughed at jokes and ate the same food, telling the same family tales.
The only thing is?
One died in central Denmark, the other was killed in England in Oxford, each about 1,000 years ago. In 2005, archeologists found a skeleton in Otterup of a 50 ish year old man, with signs of arthritis and tuberculosis.
The other one died in Oxford, in a mass grave along with 35 other people. He was only in his 20s, and he had weapon scars and more showing a harsh death, probably killed on the orders of King Ethelred. He was found in 2008.
Now both uncle and nephew lie next to each other in the exhibition in the National Museum. Separated by 1000 years of history, put into the ground by different circumstances, far away from each other. And now they lie together again as family.
I cry every time I see their skeletons. It’s such a beautiful and poetic truth.
self affirmations i am an inhospitable environment. i cannot be settled i cannot be terraformed i cannot be irrigated. weary travelers are always telling their companions we cannot rest here for the night it’s too dangerous. no one has ever lived here. no one has ever wanted to. all the maps of me are covered in dragons
My take on fic writing is that I don’t care what actually happened in canon.
- but I do need to get the price of tulips in 1850’s Paris right because that’s how I’m letting you guys know that my ignorance of the source material is a hard-earned and intentional kind of bliss.
Chescaleigh on twitter
the key to not having a terribly destabilizing moral freak out when you detect abusive traits and behaviors in yourself is to not put abusive people in the category of evil subhuman who can never be absolved or forgiven.
possible framing questions for examining your own abusive traits and behaviors:
what roles and dynamics and patterns accompany the times when I am abusive? what did I feel when I exhibited power over someone? what was I protecting or avoiding at the time? if I projected something onto someone, what did I need from the fiction I projected? what do I feel when I think about the level of vulnerability required of appropriate and timely repair work?how much support do I need before I can become capable and resilient enough for repair? how do I ensure that those I have harmed are supported by my adherence to whatever boundaries they set?
not “is this forgivable” or “am I forgivable” or “how can I get (x) to forgive me”
Life is a learning process. We're all imperfect beings, and it's often easy to fall into toxic behavioral patterns, especially when we were exposed to those behavioral patterns from a young age. No one is beyond improving themselves, and everyone deserves the chance to become better, they just have to put in the effort to make a change.
Never be afraid to look at yourself and your behaviors and ask questions such as those the OP gave. Introspection and critical thinking are important to do, because they help us figure out how to solve our problems, especially internal ones.
The people you hurt may never forgive you, and that's their right. But you will meet other people, make new friends and loved ones, and so long as you've put in the effort to be better, they won't know you as someone who hurts others, they'll know you as someone who's genuinely trying to be their best self in spite of the problems holding them back.
not to be a misogynist doctor from the 1800s but i’m pretty sure my uterus is moving around my body, biting my other organs, and also is possessed by the devil
Too real.
This tweet is the distilled sentiment I’m trying to get across every time I vent about the pandemic on social media.
[Alt text: Tweet by twitter user @/LaurenRKayes from October 2nd, 2022. The tweet reads: “If you're nondisabled, whenever you say "you can't expect people to not [indoor activity] forever," I'd like you to check in on whether disabled people can safely do that thing. Because if not, you're excluding us as "people." And you might not notice, but we feel it every time.” End alt text.]
always so touching and vibrant when you remember people a hundred years ago had profound lives full of fun and love
my great grandparents met because they were both telephonist-telegraphists and they used to communicate in spoken morse code so that their kids wouldn’t understand the dirty jokes they were saying. And my great-aunt was telling me the other day about how her father would sit with his kids during stormy nights and hug them as they looked out the window and he pointed out how beautiful the lightning was. Because he didn’t want them to be afraid. It isn’t far away but it’s easy to forget that people are people are people
isn’t it cool that we still take silly pictures where we pretend to put our baby niece up for sale or where we pretend to officiate a funeral on the beach? I think that’s neat
legit the best advice i can give you: feed your friends
any time someone is in any kind of crisis or upheaval, offer to feed them. tell them they don’t have to choose what it is if they can’t make decisions, just ask about allergies and preferences and tell them you’re just gonna make food happen at their house.
friend having a baby? delivery gift certificate to order food to the hospital after the kid shows up.
someone’s relative passes away? offer to make them dinner.
buddy gets laid off? ask if you can order them lunch.
pal stuck in a depressive episode? offer to drive them to fucking mcdonalds, if that’s what they want.
people in crisis are tired and sad and angry and the last thing most of them are doing is thinking about feeding themselves. so if you have the ability or time or money, providing that is always, always a good move.
legit i do this all the time, and it is 100% always appreciated. i have taught all my friends that when something happens, we feed each other. it makes people feel extremely cared for, and I cannot recommend it enough.
