Finally posting these in a set! From the last few weeks’ Floraverse updates.
I assure you there’s a reason behind the reference material, but it’s not quite done yet.
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#mmmmmmm #foodMore you might like
the fucked up thing is that i’ve been in this exact situation and actually felt some measure of beauty in the world. but only when the streets are empty and the area descends into a time of day when it clearly was not meant to functionally exist. there is a wretched beauty in walking around one of these suburban sprawl commerce zones at night or close to dawn, sitting down at a table like this and basking in the sensation that you own the place. maybe this is an inherited derangement from living most of my life in the midwest suburbs, working late night shifts at a grocery store on a corner exactly like this one. maybe it’s just the only time of day in a place like this when you can be truly alone outside
Shaun Tan (Chinese-Australian, b. 1974, Perth, Australia) - The Kingdom, 2015, Paintings: Acrylic, Oil, Paper Collage on Canvas
I graduated high school in 99.
There was a student at our school named Wayne.
Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.
Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.
The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.
Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help.
He went to guidance counselors for help.
He went to the principals for help.
He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.
Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.
So... no.
No one in my school talked about being trans.
Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.
Left: Susuwatari, Studio Ghibli. 1988.
Right: Baths of Musiciolus, Ostia Antica. ca. 200 CE
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
Tumblr really has ruined me. I was in a Rite-Aid and "out of touch" came on over the speakers, and I freaked out a bit because I thought I had missed my thursday morning meeting. It took me a minute before I remembered that Out of Touch playing does not always mean its thursday. sometimes people just play the song.
need the studios to cave to the guilds demands very immediately or tom cruise is going to have Free Time on his hands for the first time in 42 years we as a species cannot allow that to happen like this is what he’s like when he’s busy working every single day of his life can you imagine what would happen if he got BORED
ALToh so we’re just stealing amanda marisatomay bits now
on storytelling and repetition
“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”
— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)
“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”
— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017
“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”
— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021