You can also have my cloak if you get cold.

This is somehow the most wholesome, hilarious, and relatable request ever and also WOW her armor is on POINT

A) this is *adorable*

B) I am very bisexual

“One man’s cringe is another man’s epic” and “a flawed story is still a thousand times better than a story never told” are two pieces of advice that a lot of people aspiring to be writers really need to take to heart. Stop tearing yourself up over getting every little insignificant thing right.

Also A flawed but genuine story is leagues above one that tries to aim for perfection so hard that it removes it’s own personality.

what city slickers don’t understand is that weird noises always come from the forest and we just ignore it

if you go out to investigate and get got then that is on you, ignore it and go back to sleep like a rational person

Me, on the porch: chillin

Woods: WoooooooooEEEEEEEEEEEG

Me:

Best case scenario, it’s a fox. Worst case scenario, you’re next.

Don’t forget about the blue herons (if you’re near water).

Replace forest with acres upon acres of corn fields and the advice will holds, I’ve learned.

When you start hearing the Coyotes ten ft from your house the fear of God runs deep

I’m actually still, as the kids say, Big Mad™ about that really awful New York Times article about marriage, and I’d been meaning to make a post on this anyway for a while, so, based solely on my own experiences in my own relationships, here’s my pithy bit of relationship wisdom:

Relationships take work, but they should not feel like work.

When I say “work,” I’m thinking of a bunch of things that we do for each other that technically require effort, but the effort is minimal compared to wanting to make the other person’s life easier and for them to be happy.

I like heist films and shows. My partner doesn’t - he gets bad secondhand embarrassment. I spoil the plot for him to let him know what will happen, and I’m not offended if he pulls out headphones and plays Dark Souls on his laptop so his attention isn’t solely on the movie. Both sitting through something you don’t love and explaining what’s going to happen are technically work – like, they’re something you have to do instead of doing nothing – but it’s not a big deal.

When one of us is working or watching something or on our computers, we can always interrupt the other (knowing that, if it can’t be interrupted, we’ll tell each other and it’s no big deal). It takes effort for me to disengage from a movie to help him season chicken without getting his chicken-y hands all over the pepper shaker, and it takes effort for him to put away his video game to help me get stuff off a high shelf, but we do it, because it’s not a big deal.

Most of the time, for long car trips, he drives, because I get nervous driving. But recently I drove the six-hour round trip to a family thing because he had driven to a different family thing the week before and was sick of driving and wanted to be able to nap in the car. We’re both putting in the effort of driving each other, but it’s not a big deal.

I hate physical chores and avoid them whenever possible, but I am good at planning and making lists and identifying problems. He prefers doing the actual physical stuff but gets nervous about messing something up if he’s not following specific directions.

Writing out a long description of how to do the laundry (like, “all of the dark clothes need to be washed in cold water, gentle cycle, with enough liquid laundry soap that it comes up to the 1 line on the cap, and then hung on the drying rack instead of being put in the dryer”) is work. Actually doing the laundry is also work. Planning meals for the week and then working out what groceries we need for those meals and making a list and then sorting that list out by store and specific aisle is work. Carrying the groceries up two flights of stairs to our apartment and putting them away is also work. This is literally how we divide up almost all of our chores. We do these things for each other because they make each other’s lives easier.

Like… at no point does it feel like a grand sacrifice. There’s no “oh god, there he goes, asking me to emulsify a sauce for him again. Oh well, I must Suffer™ because that’s what love is.” I cannot describe how absolutely mundane it feels. It just doesn’t even register as effort.

I think that those things feeling like a grand sacrifice is what breeds resentment. It’s not sustainable to feel like you’re martyring yourself every day just to tolerate someone else’s presence. Love doesn’t mean heroically ignoring your own suffering forever.

And writing off a potential problem with “well, your partner is just an unfathomable mystery and inherently flawed, so nothing will change” or “that’s how marriage works! love is a choice!” is really not helpful at all.

okay I realize I am longwinded so the tl;dr:

“relationships take work!” means “both people in the relationship need to consider the other person’s feelings in addition to their own and act accordingly.”

it also means “things are not going to be magically perfect: you need to be able to discuss problems openly and then solve them together.”

“relationships take work!” does not mean “relationships are an unpleasant chore and constant struggle, and anyone who doesn’t feel that way is deluding themselves.”

a couple of people have reblogged this with some variation of “it’s rotten work / not to me. not if it’s you.” and like. YEAH. EXACTLY THAT.

And if I may tack on to that, it is work that pays out in happiness.

You notice each other’s efforts to help you and your specific quirks, and feel appreciated. You go through the motions of chores in this larger system that you structured for both of your comforts, and feel seen. When one of you predicts what the other needs and does it without asking, one of you feels understood and cared for and the other feels observant and appreciated.

The work should result in feeling mutual care and understood.

I guess many of us can give a negative example. Here I want to describe when it really is “work” in the worst sense of the word.

I hated making tea for my ex. I absolutely despised the whole process, down to adding three spoons of sugar and getting the temperature just right. He would ask for that damn tea whenever he wanted, and I was supposed to provide. “Your table is closer to the kitchen,” or, my favourite, “I like it when you take care of me.” If I refused, he would try to make me yield. He would cajole me and try to make me feel guilty, make silly faces at me and joke. There could be a whole scandal, and he wouldn’t let me to return to what I was doing.

I hate to be interrupted - it ruins my concentration (especially when I’m writing and have inspiration). I rarely feel the urge to be a caretaker. I don’t have that many spoons to randomly offer cups of tea to family members. The word resentment was mentioned. Oh, how I hated my ex’s pleased face when he received the damn cup of tea that I made with disgust. Oh, how angry it made me feel, how helpless, how trapped.

One of my friend was like, “Oh, what’s a big deal, I can ask my partner for tea, and if he asks, I am happy to make it. I like taking care of my loved ones!” She didn’t understand because her raltionship wasn’t like mine. But it hurt, you know. My needs were overlooked, my pleas fell on deaf ears, I was constantly guilt-tripped into doing something a grown-ass man was totally able to do. It was only one little thing, but it reflected his casual laziness and my anger about being forced into doing everything at home on my own if I didn’t want to live in a pigsty.

When your partner thinks it’s more important to make you take care of him they way they like than heed your complaints, it’s a red flag. I wanted to put salt in his tea so much, many times.

I could be trying to write some stuff or be very tired after work, it didn’t matter much. He’d ask for tea and expect me to do it in the next fifteen minutes. He liked being taken care of. Since he liked it, it was bad of me to say to him that I don’t want to do it, offer him to do it himself, or, goddess forbid, say that I hate making tea for him.

For me to make him tea four times an evening - it wasn’t easy, no. I felt like I was in his service. I felt as if I had no control over my life.

And just one more little thing for the dessert. After we broke up, his new partner told me that she started hating when he asked for tea…

I actually really appreciate this addition, because it is a great example of when and why something feels like work, and also how something feeling like work is a sign that your relationship is unhealthy and not just How Relationships Are So Suck It Up. It’s not about the amount of work required, or the physical effort, or the technical skill. It’s about whose needs and desires are respected and whose are ignored. The whole point of martyrdom is sacrificing yourself for some cause, because that cause is more important than you, but in a relationship, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice yourself, because you’re both important.

Also I’ll be honest: part of my inspiration for writing this was observing my parents’ relationship. There are things my parents do for each other where I can definitely tell that it’s not effort for them and something they enjoy doing to make each other’s lives easier, and when it’s something they resent and despise. And it’s not the actual thing that they’re doing, it’s how the other person makes them feel about it.

#i think this post needs to cover the issue of communication more #cuz no relationship is perfect or without conflict even the best ones #and a really good sign of wether or not ur relationship is healthy #is when conflicts arise how does it get dealt with #cuz if the answer isnt talking and trying to understand each other then its not gonna work out #that is actual hard effort in relationships and it can either break or strengthen the relationship depending how the communication goes (via @soupy-gremlin)

That is 100% true: while I touched on it in my tl;dr, I didn’t cover it extensively as part of the post’s thesis. I agree that communication is a major reason why something may feel like work, but I actually want to go a step further and explain the “good work” v. “bad work” in communication.

Like, okay, say you have a relationship where Person A always leaves their socks on the floor, and Person B hates having socks on the floor. Obviously the thing to do is to have a conversation about it in a respectful manner (as opposed to B suffering in silence or A getting angry the second B brings it up). Like, “talk about it” is step one in dealing with the problem.

But the second step is actually implementing what you discuss. If B tells A, every day, all the time, “I am upset when you leave your socks on the floor,” and A always responds, “I hear your concerns and understand your needs and agree I should no longer leave my socks on the floor,” but then keeps leaving their socks on the floor, the communication occurred but it didn’t do anything. Now B knows that expending the time and effort to talk to A accomplishes nothing, so talking at all isn’t worth it.

And actually, I think we see that in the article itself:

This comes right after a long, long description of her suffering in silence throughout an entire vacation with her husband and the kids, gritting her teeth and ignoring every single problem until she explodes. And, according to her, he responds to this outburst by talking about how the vacation has been hard for him. Which is followed by this:

She has (either through experience with him personally or just in general) come to the conclusion that it’s better to just ignore problems rather than to try communication, since communication only makes things worse. And she has either tried to explain this exact thing to him, or tried to explain other things to him, and he hasn’t responded to the thing by changing his behavior.

So like, yes, communication and dealing with conflict in a healthy manner is important. And that also shouldn’t feel like work. If communication itself feels like work, that is also a problem.

when it takes you a while to process what someone is saying and you realize they asked you a question

I cannot fucking believe I am drunk, past midnight, and tumblr is throwing fucking saturated fatty-acids at me

Listen here friendo I didn’t sit through a year of organic chemistry for you to come into my house and call a carboxylic acid a saturated fatty acid you respect that hexadecanoic acid

And I didnt get a degree in biochemistry to hear you say that carboxylic acids with aliphatic chains arent fatty acids. That hexadecanoic acid IS a saturated fatty acid!

What a scary tiger!

eventually you realize you don’t want to die. you just don’t want to live the life you’re living. and slowly you try to create a life you want to live. just gotta start there.

no one needs to add “sounds fake but ok”, “no”, “well, not me”, “impossible”, etc. to this post. and i’d rather you not.

one day you think: I want to die.

and then you think, very quietly: actually. actually. I think I want a coffee. a nap. a sandwich. a book.

and I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friend, I want to sit in the sun

I want a cleaner kitchen

I want a better job

I want to live somewhere else

I want to live

DYLAN O’BRIEN 2022 | Jingyu Lin ph. for Bustle Magazine

Ignorant fools/racists:

More white people are killed by cops that black people.

This guy:

Nope.

Clip ‘n save.

“You can stop saying that dumb shit.”

You know what I want? A vampire comedy where at one point a vampire goes “Your father would be spinning in his grave” and then there’s a quick cutaway to a dimly lit gothic boudoir where a coffin is rattling at an incredible speed

Closer closer closer

This, but with the noise a printer makes lmao.

Costume appreciation series: Keira Knightley’s Period Drama Cinematic Universe

King Arthur (2004): costume design by Penny Rose and Louis Joon

Pride and Prejudice (2005): costume design by Jacqueline Durran

Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2007): costume design by Penny Rose

Atonement (2007): costume design by Jacqueline Durran

Silk (2007): costume design by Carlo Poggioli and Kazuko Kurosawa

The Edge of Love (2008): costume design by April Ferry

The Duchess (2008): costume design by Michael O’Connor

A Dangerous Method (2011): costume design by Denise Cronenberg

Anna Karenina (2012): costume design by Jacqueline Durran

The Imitation Game (2014): costume design by Sammy Sheldon

Colette (2018): costume design by Andrea Flesch

The Aftermath (2019): costume design by Bojana Nikitovic

Misbehaviour (2020): costume design by Charlotte Walter

OP you’re my personal fucking hero

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

And thus, the Mad Dad Hour was born.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

TEEN WOLF ⇢ 3x14 | MORE BAD THAN GOOD

he’s from lotus pier

— STAR TREK: PICARD — Q and Picard in 2x02 “Penance”

ID: Five black-and-white gifs from Picard, showing Jean-Luc and Q talking as they stand closely. Jean-Luc says, “I am too old for your bullshit!” which makes Q exclaim, “Old, yes!” He watches Jean-Luc in disbelieve and says, “How unfair time is… So many wrinkles (he reaches out to gesture towards Jean-Luc’s face) so many disappointments.” End ID.

OP tags: