the color purple in a field somewhere / i have seen the tops of clouds / after all this time / to take on the kingdom of god / no wider than the heart is wide / raina csurik primary school
okay i don't know how to send images in asks BUT you are already aware i voted for margay so it doesn't matter. can you do.....a 2.0 version of "carrying all the pieces of me forward," with the handyman theme replaced with -- "there is a crack in everything that's how the light gets in" + nostalgia/wistfulness + being yourself/loving yourself somehow. maybe a small flower growing in cracks or light in a broken window or an abandoned/overgrown house? or not idk, the important part is the feeling
happy pride ! to the faggots and freaks, the trannies, the boygirls and girlboys and the he/him butches and she/her twinks ! to the gendervague and the genderfucked !! to every trans and nonbinary person at whatever stage they’re at !! and to the eggs and the questioning ! to my bisexuals and pansexuals and omnisexuals and polysexuals and the lesbians w/ boyfriends and gays w/ girlfriends !! happy pride to the queers who wear battle jackets and the queers who stealth and every single one of you in between !! happy pride to my aces and aros !! happy pride all you funky sexual deviants and kinksters !! to my elders who faced decades of bigotry and lost many a loved one, and the youngsters learning our history and experiencing it themselves !
I love you all so so much I love us and who we are and I ask you: be kind to each other
has plenty of leisure time to spend with friends or on personal hobbies.
gets plenty of sleep, clips her nails regularly instead of picking at them, washes her face every morning, and brushes her teeth twice a day.
goes to the gym regularly and/or practices a martial art.
is comfortable having conversations about sex, at least with female friends, and can use words like “clitoris” or “masturbation” without feeling awkward.
calls her parents at least once a week, and her brother at least a few times a month.
treats others with kindness, and respects their beliefs and preferences, be they evangelical conservatives or kinky genderfluid atheists.
knows how to pay taxes and rent an apartment.
is on track to have a career that she will enjoy, and that will allow her to provide for herself and her family.
loves herself.
i think i do all right on leisure time. not being in college helps.
i get enough sleep. i (usually) clip my nails instead of picking at them. i wash my face most evenings. i still barely ever manage to brush my teeth twice a day, but hey, three for four.
i don’t go to the gym or practice a martial art but i do go contradancing once or twice a month, and i play beat saber more often than that.
lol, yes.
i call my parents like….three times a month? maybe? brother less than that but we message, so it’s all right.
the scope of my world has expanded, i think, though mostly in the “kinky genderfluid atheists” direction, not so much in the “evangelical conservatives” direction. i don’t know that i’ve gotten any better at remembering to make a conscious effort to be kind and openminded, but i think there are places where it used to take effort and now comes naturally.
i do know how to pay taxes and rent an apartment. it’s still stressful but it’s not a mystery.
ahaha, this is a current source of stress. my career is not going to be what i was expecting. but this was my choice, this is the path i chose, and i know why i chose it, and it’s scary, but that’s what bravery is, doing things even though you’re scared.
i’m getting there.
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the woman i hope i’ll be when i am thirty:
is mindful of she spends her leisure time. sets herself positive goals, books to read, hobbies to take up – maybe embroidery, that’s always seemed fun. does not mindlessly browse social media, at least not often.
goes to bed and get up earlier. gets more productive hours in in the morning, gets more hours of daylight.
still contradances, or does some other exercise at least as often.
is confident in her talents and skills and abilities. feels good about her prospects in her career. thinks of herself as capable and competent. is not afraid she isn’t good enough. it’s not just that she knows, on a logical level, that such feelings are imposter syndrome – she’s actually gotten over the imposter syndrome, she’s put in the work and found a way to make it so those negative feelings aren’t her instinctive feelings anymore.
wears lipstick at least once every week or two. wears sunscreen regularly in the summers.
reliably eats enough, even when she’s traveling or at her in-laws’.
sees her parents with some regularity. ideally, lives within a few hours of them.
is a mother. this will probably solve the getting up earlier issue all by itself.
is good to her spouse, even when she’s tired and inclined to be crabby.
is part of a social community that isn’t intellectually-focused.
has taken good care of her body and doesn’t have any worse back problems than i do, knock on wood.
loves herself. i think another five years might do it.
I don’t mean any of this in a weird way but if we’re interested in breaking down binaries, we can’t cling onto the binary of cis versus trans. If gender expectations are as constrictive as we say they are, then this imagined class of people who are okay with gender expectations 100% of the time with no complications is just that. Imagined. It’s similar to “neurotypical” as an imagined class of people who are completely comfortable with the social and mental expectations of their jobs and would never understand what it’s like to get overwhelmed or feel out of place. The unintended implication is an obsession with labelling and pathologizing that says that it’s not gender or workplace norms that need to be interrogated, it’s you.
The truth is that you can be outside the binary without formally committing to calling yourself nonbinary. I am a cis gay man who feels most comfortable and affirmed when I’m free to wear earrings and garments I bought in the “women’s” section. I tell people my pronouns are he/him because it’s the simplest explanation, but they/them and even she/her are comfortable, even validating, in the right circumstances. There are a lot of cis gay men just like me. Am I actually nonbinary and just in denial? No. Being a gay man is deeply meaningful to me. Am I encouraging nonbinary to start calling themselves cis and questioning whether they’re actually nonbinary? No, and I feel more comfortable in my own manhood knowing I have the option to leave. I just want us all to define ourselves on our own terms. I want celebrate common ground and shared queerness with trans people and not have to overstate our differences. We treat it as a political and moral obligation to fine tune our labels for the sake of establishing who’s allowed to say what, who’s allowed to relate to who, and I have to ask: Are we committed to breaking down boundaries or not?
It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.
He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.
Like, look at this stuff????
It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that’s just really fucking cool to me!
Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.
And then there’s this one:
The Fantasy
For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.
The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.
But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn’t afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.
Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.
This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.
“The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.
"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn’t fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.
"We often fantasized about Dick’s joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles.” - Al Bean, about TheFantasy.
Long was the way that fate them bore O'er stony mountains cold and grey Through halls of ireon and darkling door And woods of nightshade morrowless The Sundering Seas between them lay And yet at last they met once more And long ago they passed away In the forest singing sorrowless
dude stop trying to garner context and character traits from the objects in my room i know youre doing it. stop clicking on shit im not gonna tell you about - oh that picture is of me and my dad. yeah he’s not really in my life anymore i just keep it around cause im sentimental- DUDE
