Your Only Job On This Earth Is To Be So Intrinsically Yourself That The Right People Gravitate Toward

Awet Aleu by Ashley Chappell for Elle Hungary Magazine September 2024

Adobe is going to spy on your projects. This is insane.

Cottongrass at Ercavallo #3 - Tita Secchi Villa , 2011

Italian, b.  ?

Oil on canvas  ,  70 x 90 cm.

Water lily harvesting in Bangladesh (2016) ph. Zakir Hossain Chowdhury

Monach butterflies (Danaus plexippus) rest in a tree in California, USA

by Robin Gwen Agarwal

Brick panel with a lion, from the Palace of Darius I, Achaemenid Empire, 522-486 BC

from The Louvre

If you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard - wait until you see the result of not having them.

open.substack.com

WHO GETS TO BE A WEIRD GIRL?

on ‘weird girl’ fiction, microgenre, and the unbearable whiteness of weirdness + a rec list

Throughout history and in our modern society, women are supposed to be: thin, silent, chipper, happy, pale, dressed modestly but not too modestly, sexy but not too sexy, young, reserved, sane, able-bodied, fertile, mothering, selfless, humble, restrained, and, above all, white. She has to be a She, she has to be cis, she has to wear makeup and dresses, skirts; she cannot under any circumstances be described as smelly, loud, brash, dark, or crude. She cannot wrinkle, she cannot stink, she cannot cause a scene. A woman is always religious, a woman is always married or seeking to be married, a mother or hoping to be a mother. To stray from this path is to become weird. While I personally do not believe that any act that subverts the status quo makes one queer, I do think it makes you weird. There’s an honor to that, to stepping outside of the very thin, very pale line set by mainstream culture. To exist as one’s truest, boldest self, to exist as a human being with warts and farts and smells, to be unusual and to react with the madness, the anger that this world we live in inspires is brave. It is weird to be brave, and it is brave to be weird.

Francois-Xavier Lalanne's Chat Polymorphe, 1968.