Among The Stars On A Friday Afternoon (2022)

I love eight year olds because no one else these days has the courage to lie blatantly to your face with the conviction of a sixth-century martyr

Ada Limón, “To Be Made Whole”, On Being with Krista Tippett

Why is it always "born in the wrong generation"? What if this is the better option you got? What if you were born to be a 1950s lounge singer or a 1300s weaver and already had a lifetime of that, doing what you love to do and what you do best, and spent the whole time thinking "I wish I could do this in a better time, where I could do it more freely from the bottom of my heart, and not have to worry about the things that hold me back"?

You get to make soap with ingredients the soapmakers a thousand years ago could not have dreamed of combining. You get to work with fabrics an ordinary tailor could never have gotten their hands on. Write the gayest love poetry in iambic pentameter without having to worry of being tried for sodomy. Hell, you could have eight kids and bake bread while barefoot without worrying how many of your runts survive to adulthood.

You can draw designs for stained glass windows that the church would never let you, and instead of thinking how your talents would have been groundbreaking back in the day and how they are wasted now, you can imagine how a thousand years ago you may have been drawing the same designs, thinking "I wish I could just do this without having to worry about viking raids and the plague."

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

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37/ 365 Things That Don’t Suck, Take 3:

picnic blankets

you know what, screw falling uncontrollably in love. Nah man. I want to meet your eyes across the room for the first time and start grinning. A slow, spreading smirk. I want to think 'oh, you bastard. I've been waiting for you. Hello.' and I want you to smirk back.

"It doesn't have to be like this. We could have it so much better"

Calligraffiti in Chicago, Illinois

My new meds make my skin throw a fit. It’s not terribly bad, just a few things here and there, but it’s bumming me out because I’ve never really had too many run-ins with acne.

My four-year-old sister, however, is under the impression that it’s just “3D freckles”, and that they look very, very pretty. She wants all of my freckles to “pop out”, especially the ones across my nose; they’re her favourite.

And it puts me in this weird position where I can’t say, “No, this is acne, and it’s bad,” because I don’t want to teach her that it’s a bad to have unclear skin, you know?

Because the more I think about interactions I have with children, the more I realise that children will consistently compliment “flaws” until they’ve been taught not to.

Like, a kid at the library, whose sister has vitiligo, saw my scars once and suggested that his sister and I should be cats for Halloween, since I have “tabby skin” and she has “calico skin”. “I can be a black cat,” he immediately added. “It’s not AS cool, but they’re the spookiest.”

When I started losing weight, my little brother immediately demanded that I gain it back, because I wasn’t as comfortable to cuddle with anymore.

And my other little sister always wants to wear her paint-stained clothes to school so that “everyone can tell [she’s] an artist”.

I don’t know. I guess talking to little kids just reminds me that all of this superficial shit we worry about really is 100% made up.

Philip Levine, “The Mercy”

Ophelia (2018) // November Nights, Arden Mae // House of the Dragon (2022-) // Persephone Returns, Emily Rose Cole // Ophelia, Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser // Mystery of Love, Sufjan Stevens // Fire with Fire (1986) // Spring and All, Cathy Park Hong // On-drakón (2015) // The Complex Sentence, Tony Hoagland // The Musketeers (2014-2016) // [from a letter], Sylvia Plath // 1883 (2021-22) // The Leaving Season, Jihyun Yun // Dorian Gray (2009) // The Lady of Shalott, Alfred Tennyson // Anne of Green Gables (1985) // Advantages of Being Evergreen, Oliver Baez Bendorf // Ophelia, John Everett Millais // Hamlet, William Shakespeare // Melancholia (2011) // Wild Geese, Mary Oliver // Revenge of the Sith (2005) // Summer Morning, Mary Oliver