A Convenience Store Cat Spirit 

strawberry hill house in london, england

as someone with a bachelor’s degree in english, i am inexpressibly tired of people telling me to get highly specific jobs that often require highly specific degrees. “just go write for a magazine!” you need a journalism degree for that. “just teach!” you need a teaching certificate, and also fuck you. “just go work at a tutoring place!” tutoring children with learning disabilities, which make up the majority of the clientele at those places, requires not only a teaching certificate but a specialized master’s degree. “just go work at a library!” you need a master’s degree in library science to be a librarian. it is actually a highly skilled and extremely competitive field. you don’t just “go work at a library,” you train for years in the vain hope that you will get one of handful of available jobs. “just go work at a library.” the nerve. the unmitigated gall. “just go work at a library.” ugh.

bringing back this meme because i can’t stop thinking about it

Anastasia Trusova on Instagram

Another point for why it’s important to own your own copies of music and media, and not use streaming services, is because the copy you own can’t be taken back.

(This is also a good time to remind people that yout*be to mp3 converters still exist).

people change you and sometimes that is the worst thing in the entire world because you used to like yourself a little more but now you hate the flinch that lives in your shoulderblades and you overthink every moment and you never set a boundary without feeling internally destroyed and it fucking sucks because they shouldn't get to do that, they already ruined your life the once, it shouldn't echo into the future

but also people change you and sometimes that is the softest morning and the best surprise. realizing that you can divide things into perfect thirds without trying because you were a sibling in a group of 3 and always needed to measure out things. you learned to skip rope and step around cracks from the kid down the street. you love the way your favorite english teacher influenced your writing.

you're old enough these days to know your mother was right and you should take a coat just in case it gets cold but you are still too young to have outrun the thunderstorm of your childhood. you arrange your spoons the way you learned growing up but you've since reorganized the rest of your kitchen to make sense to you and the way that you like working. you fold your clothes actually still based on the marie kondo method (you just like the habit of it) but you allow yourself to just-loosely-chuck-some-of-it-in because really who has the fuckin' time for it.

you still can't be in the room while people look at your art (some kind of weird mix of guilt, shame, and embarrassment) but you picked up certain words and phrases from friends that help you slow down and treat yourself a little bit gentle with it. you always take other people's crafts with a reverence like praying, but you can't help that when you see your own work from a few years ago, you mirror someone else's snort of disdain. you saw other people's bodies and freckles and stretch marks and scars and you realized they are all still fucking beautiful to you, almost obscenely so, because they belong to someone you care for so deeply that it blocks out the sun - but you can't help the little flash of self-judgement whenever you pass a mirror; the voice from too-many years of 90's and 00's skinny-means-you've-won.

and it's kind of funny because you meet someone new and while they're making friends with you, you get to see these little stories playing out of them. you meet your mom and you think oh that's where they get the accent and you meet their college roommate and you think that's the same joke you both make and you meet their friend and you think ah so this is explains the oddly vast knowledge of freshwater lakes

and then one day in the mirror you reach your hand up to push back your hair and you think - oh shit, that was them. or you make a comment and you think ah, stole that from someone else. or you stand in the store and get that random flash of they would totally tell me to buy this. and it is like a little strange river to bind you to them - that over all this time and space, their hands guide your hands and your heart in silence. it is good and it is bad and is so precious and so horrible. it is both proof of love on this earth and it is also the thing that is keeping you hurt.

a little promise that is probably true: somewhere out there, your hands are ever-so-often guiding them too.

non-confrontational cowboy that wont turn around after the 10 paces

part of what makes tragedies tragic is the story being preventable from the outside but unpreventable from the inside

You would not believe your flies if ten million fire eyes lit up the world as I feel asleels.

Cuz they’d fill they fill the open eyes and leave sockhops everywhere you’d think me rude but I would just stand and

dance.

I’d like to make myself a fly. Planet eeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarth Sloooooooooowlyyyylle.

It’s hard to say that I’d rather Seal the deal when I’m a 𝕤𝕟𝕒𝕚𝕝. Cuz everything is never as it meeeeeeeeeeeeeeemmmmmmees.

Cuz I get a thousand bugs from ten thousand lightning hugs as they try to teach me how to fuck.

a fox trot above my hugs a sockhop beneath my 𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖘 the disco bug is just hanging by a thread

day 212 | *cue laugh track* [id in alt]