Someone: Thank You!

I feel kind of bad for the new girl marrying into my family. not because there’s anything wrong with my family, to clarify, but just because there’s so many of us and even we have trouble keeping track of each other.

like, I met her and she was super sweet, and then she asked her fiancé how he was related to me, and he just kinda stared at me and said, “um... I’m not sure, actually. I don’t know. we’re... cousins?”

and then we started trying to remember how we were related. eventually I was like, “his mother and my grandmother - no, I mean, his grandmother and my great-grandmother were sisters. right?” I say to my cousin. he shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “You probably know better than me. that makes us, what, third cousins?” and I’m like, “I think it’s second cousins once removed...” (tbh, I’m not actually sure if my understanding of the family labeling system is correct.)

and this girl is just looking at us, a little nonplussed, because I’m at her bridal shower and her to-be husband isn’t even sure how he’s related to me, and there’s dozens of people at the party and not even all of us are there, and her wedding is literally next month and she is never going to remember all of us by then. if ever. (lol I still mix up some of my own cousins)

Everything is covered in pollen. I’m done

Humans are awesome

[unrelated] This is a restaurant in vietnam and its so cool??

Captain Marvel Nothing to Prove Moment

So, watching Captain Marvel was awesome and made me feel super happy and strong!

The only bit I felt conflicted over was that part at the end where Yon Rogg was like, “I’m so proud of you! Fight me! Prove to me that you can win without powers!” and Carol just blasted him.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love that. It’s exactly what she should have done, and it’s a very satisfying moment for her character. But...

See, I didn’t feel conflicted about it because it was the wrong thing to do or it was emotionally unfulfilling or any of that nonsense. I felt conflicted about it because of how much I related to it. Because he started talking, and I had that moment of, what the hell do you mean you’re proud?! What kind of gaslighting, two-faced rubbish are you spewing now?!

And then he said “Prove to me,” and I was torn between laughing at his obvious, kind of pathetic attempt to make a more powerful foe deliberately handicap herself, the niggling irritation that comes with a man trying to convince you to prove yourself to him when you owe him nothing, and anger at the fact that some part of me felt like Carol had to. That some part of me felt it necessary for her to try and please him, prove herself to him, even though she owed him nothing and he was clearly trying to manipulate her into making herself less than she was again.

Because I know that feeling of constantly having to prove yourself when you’ve already done it a thousand times. That feeling of trying to get a man’s approval of your competence, that if you do more, prove you know more, do it faster, do it better, maybe you’ll finally feel like you belong, like you’re equal and you’ve finally, finally earned your place. 

And then she blasted him, and I was so proud of her for doing that, for not falling for his manipulative BS and for knowing her own worth and knowing that she had nothing to prove. But at the same time, I mourned the lack of gaining his approval. I didn’t want to, but I did.

We are so conditioned to need male approval in all aspects of our lives. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of falling head over heels to prove ourselves to some random jerk, of wasting our time and energy to show him that we deserve a place and that we deserve to be heard, sabotaging ourselves in a hopeless effort to get him to confer value upon us.

But the thing is, we already have that value. We deserve to have a place. We have nothing to prove.

And that’s why that moment at the end of Captain Marvel was so powerful, so satisfying. She knew her own worth and didn’t let a man talk her out of it.

In my junior year I became fast friends with a guy named Joe. We talked about our lives and ideas and so many other things - he told me I could tell him anything. I told him about how deeply I mourned my grandmother’s death. We hung out at school, I beat him at chess, we texted late at night. I was so glad we were friends. I even offered to start carpooling, to drive him home when I found out he waited at school for two hours for someone to pick him up, and his house was barely out of my way.

Then...I don’t really know what happened. Everyone was convinced he had a major crush on me. We were a pretty small school, so gossip got around fast. Everyone kept asking me what I was gonna do when he asked me to prom. I assured them all that Joe and I were just friends and that I didn’t like him that way and I didn’t want to date him. A week later, he just kind of...stopped. He stopped talking to me. He stopped answering my texts. He didn’t sit near me in classes anymore. I still drove him home. He didn’t even say hello. He just sat in my car and stared at his phone. 

At the end of the year, I found out he was dating one of my friends. I didn’t care, but I wished that he would tell me straight why we weren’t friends anymore. 

I told my uncle that summer how I’d lost a friend that I cared so much for and he’d never even told me to my face. My uncle wasn’t sympathetic at all. He told me I didn’t know what it was like to be rejected, how badly it hurt. He said that Joe was justified.

I did know how it felt to be rejected. Joe rejected me, my friendship. I never saw him again.

Then came my first semester of university. I quickly met a boy named Nathan. Nathan was nice and good at the piano and thought I was smart and we got on pretty well. But I figured out pretty quickly that he liked me as more than a friend. So one night I asked him if he wanted to ask me out, if he liked me. He looked a bit awkward, but he said yes.

And I told him I wanted to be friends, but I wasn’t interested in dating. I was very clear. I said I didn’t want to lead him on. I wasn’t going to date him. He nodded and smiled and said okay, and I smiled back.

We continued to hang out every so often. When we sat next to each other on benches or couches he would slowly inch towards me as we were talking and our legs would be pressing together, and I would readjust and scoot away until I was nearly falling off the bench. I asked him to stop doing that.

One day he was dead set on a picnic early dinner in the university gardens. I told him it was a terrible idea - the mosquitoes would eat us alive. He persisted, and we went. We left ten minutes later because I was right about the bugs. Instead we just kind of wandered around campus. He pressed in close to my side and I uncomfortably realized it was kind of like a date. He told me I was pretty and that talking to me felt like talking to someone who knew everything. He looked at me with something like awe and I felt uncomfortable but told him thank you anyway. He walked me back to my dorm and made a beeline for the piano in the lobby.

He played a song for me while I sat on the chair behind him, unsure of what to do or look at or say. He got up from the bench and shuffled his feet a bit and asked me to be his girlfriend.

And I told him no. Exactly as I said before. He said “Why!” I said that I’d already told him I didn’t want to date him. He said that he thought if I experienced him taking me on a date I’d change my mind. And, well, I didn’t. After a bit more of this back and forth I told him sorry but no and he left. He was crying. I wasn’t happy. I wished he’d have just listened to me when I said I wasn’t interested, when I asked him to give me more space. 

I see him around campus sometimes. We don’t talk anymore. I wish that Joe and Nathan and all the others like them could just have been my friend. I wish they valued me, my company and my friendship, over my potential as a girlfriend. 

thoughts on the friendzone

[TRADUCCIÓN ESPAÑOLA] (thanks a ton, krissyraawr!)

—

when i was 5 years old my best friend was a boy named kyle who didn’t know how to knock on doors so he made dinosaur noises outside my window to wake me up in the summer until i demonstrated how to ball his fists and slam them against my doors.  we collected caterpillars in my trailer park and built them houses while we traded pokemon cards.  he wasn’t the only one.  there was ben, and mitch, and noah–but kyle’s the only one who hurt me, because when he tried to kiss me and i asked him why, he told me “because you’re a girl and i’m a boy, shouldn’t we like each other?”

i missed him so much and i wondered why he couldn’t just be my friend like he always was

Keep reading

Yeah, have any of you read The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter? (It’s the first book in a series called The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club.) The series features a blend of characters (specifically female characters) from 1800s stories such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Rapaccini’s Daughter, Carmilla, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Great God Pan, She, The Jewel of Seven Stars - and possibly a couple others I might have missed, because there’s obviously a lot.

Anyway, these books are a super fun read, and I highly recommend!

Schrodinger’s OC

I could not figure out what this was about until the last sentence

The wrong Dodo went extinct

If you get this and would like - answer with 3 random facts about yourself and send it to the last 7 blogs in your notifications, anonymously or not! Let’s get to know the person behind the blog! :) 💛💙

Oh I’ve never gotten one of these before! Thanks!

Let’s see...

I can sing songs in more than a dozen different languages.

One of the items on my bucket list is to pet (or at least see) a giant oceanic manta ray – these darlings can grow to be 23 ft across, although a more typical size is around 15 ft across.

I have two baby lemon trees (they’re about 4 months old and 6 inches tall) that I grew from seeds I took from a store-bought lemon.