i. you will never love them any way new enough to be novelty.
they’ve been adored, adorned, admired, doted on, devoted to—they’ve had
sacrifices of life&death done in their name, do you really think your gifts
of trinkets and cream are all that impressive? you might be amusing,
temporarily entertaining, but that is your talent appeasing their vanity, not
their hearts. poems to them bolster their ego, not warm their affections to you.
your love for them will only make Taking you easier, not make them love you
back.
ii. if they do love you back, know they have different
definitions for that. know they are not always nice, not always pretty, not
always safe. more look like a mouth too-full of too-sharp, dripping,
stalactites/stalagmites-not-teeth than golden warm mornings, basking in their
(many) arms. be ready for this: their obsessions are more likely to burn out
than to bloom.
i. they will not appreciate all your gifts, will akin them to
a cat bringing dead mice to their feet. this is fine. everything else you give,
they will find gorgeous. if you are vain enough, give them something of yours
to wear. if you are rash enough, give them something of yours to wear. they
will find it beautiful and every Other will know you’ve claimed that one. be
sure no one else, such as Not-Cat or even the crows, have done the same yet. a
human, no matter their talents, would be worth such a war. you must remember
this, if you see them keeping feathers-blacker-than-night in their
hair/pockets/pouches. you might be able to fool them from another Fair, but, if
the birds have gotten to them, there is no return. best to pick another that
can catch your attention. any of them would start pleased with that.
ii. to appear human while first wooing them is best. you will
need two ears, two eyes, a nose with (only!) two nostrils, 32 teeth, 206 bones,
and about 640 muscles that do not slide or slip or slush. both halves of your
(singular) face must react together, but not mechanically, robotically,
stiffly, or in any manner similar to plastic or silicon. one side of your mouth
must not be higher or lower than the other unless it is a facial expression, of
a half-smile or frown. your eyes must not be too close together, or too far
apart, your ears must be even, the spacing of your
nose-to-eyes-to-ears-to-forehead must all be within a certain ratio. if you
must, watch a good artist space faces to see the estimate. but you must not be
too perfect, either: your teeth not too straight or too white, your nails not
too clean or pristinely cut or without variation, your skin not too
blemish-free. you need some faults in order to appear human. you must maintain solid form at all times.
still, it’s likely they’ll know, regardless. at least, they’ll probably
appreciate the effort. (remember, being seen without protection is even more
telling. keep sugar and pewter/tin/aluminum with you at all times; these will
look enough like salt and iron. it is also advisable you carry ‘offerings,’
even if you never leave them anywhere. creamer cups are most popular.)
remember the mirage island shit in pokemon r/s/e how fucked was that nonsense
you had to talk to an old man once per day. then the game would generate 2 random number bytes. those bytes would have to both match the also random and unseeable personality values of one of your party pokemon. assuming you had a full party of 6 that was roughly a 1/10000 chance. thats rarer than finding a shiny. and this wasn’t once per random encounter this was once per day. this was the only way to find liechi berries and get gold pokeblocks
this literally sounds like some fake forum post from 2004 but it was 100% real they really put this in the game un fucking believable
between this, feebas, and the regis im beginning to think the fucking riddler played a part in the development of r/s/e
For those who are unaware, Feebas could only be found in one location by fishing in a pool of water. However there are 400 tiles of water, and only 6 random tiles will allow you to fish up a Feebas. These tiles are randomly generated when you begin the game so they differ between all other players.
The Regi’s, (Regirock, Regice and Registeel), all had a puzzle to unlock their domain. Written in Brallie, in some hidden caves. The puzzles required you to:
Find the Pokemon Relicanth and Wailord and have them in the first and last slots of your party. (In Emerald version these instructions were reversed, Wailord first, Relicanth last.) This unlocks the other 3 puzzles.
For Regice: Wait 2 minutes with the game on without moving your player. (In Emerald the instructions had you run a lap of the room while touching the outer wall.)
For Regirock: The instructions had you move right twice, then down twice, then have a pokemon use the move Strength. (In Emerald it was left twice, down twice and then Rock Smash instead.)
For Registeel: Walk to the center of the room and have a Pokemon use the move Fly, which is a move that would usually let you fast travel around the map, and doesn’t work indoors except for this one single puzzle room. (In Emerald Version, they had you use the move Flash instead.)
Footnote: There was also a misprint in the original Ruby Sapphire Guidebook which showed the Pokemon Trapinch as having no evolutions, making the Vibrava and Flygon unobtainable to those who didn’t accidentally levelup Trapinch until it evolved seemingly for no reason.
one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.
what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.
im serious about that “stop saving things for special occasions” bit tho like. even if u aren’t in your 20s. thats for everyone. its one of the most useful things ive learned lately
stop! just stop. eat the special snack. drink the expensive hippie tea. use the incense or the bath bomb or whatever you paid way too much for because you were feeling really bad and retail therapy makes u feel alive
when we save things for special occasions/rainy days it contributes to us feeling like A.) our day to day existence is lackluster and B.) you have to be feeling a certain level of Bad, or have to reach a certain level of Socially Accepted Achievement, to enjoy things
just give yourself stuff. there are definitely sometimes reasons to withhold things from yourself – as motivation, if it’s something you consciously want to use sparingly, etc – but at least for me half the time it just turns into self-flagellation and also cool things and cool experiences and nice treats just collect dust while i wait for some fabled day when i convince myself i finally Deserve it
just fuckin give yourself stuff dude. life’s so mindblowingly short
my grandmother died having only used her china like twice in her life. during the year or so before her death, she was starting to package up and give things of hers to her kids, and gave mom the china while sighing “oh i wish i had used the china more!” and mom tried so hard to convince her to just keep it, then, and eat corny dogs off it if she wanted. she insisted she couldn’t possibly, you need a special reason to use the fine china.
when nana died, we used her fine china as our everyday dishes for years. i was 18 when she died, and never really stopped having that in the back of my head.
now, when i hear myself say “i wish i had a reason to wear/do/eat/use X!” i hear nana regretting never really using her china. and let me tell you a thing:
spaghettios taste great when eaten from fine china.
I’ve seen this post making the rounds. Just wanted to add something to it that my sister-in-law once told me:
“A ‘special thing’ can make any occasion special.”
She told me this when I objected to her opening a really expensive bottle of champagne just to watch a movie. And you know, she was right. The champagne was amazing and while we always sit around and watch movies, that bottle made that night a really special occasion that I will always remember.
So, cut yourself a little slack and remember that an ordinary day can become special.
My mother has always had a habit of buying what she calls “love gifts”. Essentially she would buy me my favorite snack or take me to get iced coffee or buy me fuzzy socks something like that
Her reason for that was simply because she thought of us at work and wanted to get something as a way of saying “I was thinking about you and I love you”
Now as a kid I just took the presents but when I got older I felt a little bad
She didn’t always buy something small, sometimes it was some new makeup or video games or something else that was more than just a few bucks
When I told her “hey mom it’s sweet that you do this, but you don’t have to go do this all the time. You can just wait until a special day or a special occasion”
She just looked at me and said “but Samantha, this is a love gift, and I love you every day not just the special ones”
And ever since she said that I haven’t objected again
This is so important!!! I’ve done this my whole life but have been trying to break the HABIT.
By holding back these desirable things from yourself for a time that you feel worthy, you are adding to the intrusive thoughts that you are not good enough, that someone is more deserving than you.
Wear your favorite shirt to the grocery store too, not just on your birthday or the first date with a guy who you’ve met once before. Wear your favorite shirt ESPECIALLY when you don’t “feel worthy”.
If a dog has a favorite toy it’s not going to ignore it and play with a different one simply to appeal to this notion that we have to earn happiness and enjoyment.
Yes there are “special days” but ultimately there are just “days” and you only have so many.
Tl; dr: Wear the clothes, eat the food, life’s short.
@jhaernyl when I send you things they’re love gifts!
Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”
Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”
Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.
Things I did not actually realize was an option
What’s amazing is what happens when you do this with children. I hit on it when working at the foster home, where nearly all our kids were on the autism spectrum, and they weren’t “defiant” around me because I said things like, “How long do you need to stand here before we can move?” and “Come into the kitchen when you’re ready” instead of saying, “Stop staring out the window, let’s go,” or “Come eat dinner,” and interpreting hesitation as refusal to obey.
Yup, that’s way better for toddlers and younger kids. It helps when they don’t have the self-awareness, attention span, or concept of the passage of time to estimate when they’ll be ready by themselves.
I have also definitely found that doing the “okay when I finish counting down from twenty is getting up time” has been useful.
WELL OKAY WHOOPS XD I should not have been overspecific, I was just thinking about teaching this stuff to the parents at my job and your reblog made me immediately think of you with Banana and the kidlets.
Another hack: when you want to get up but are stalled by your brain and frustrated – stop. Breathe. Think about what you want to do once you’re up, without thinking about getting up. Treat it like a fantasy, no pressure, just thinking about something you’d like to do in the future. Instead of thinking “I should get up” over and over, think about having a bagel for breakfast, or getting dressed in your soft green sweater. Imagine yourself doing the thing.
I find that exercise often side-steps the block and the next thing I know I’m out of bed and on my way to doing the other thing I thought about.
Works for other things too, if you’re stuck on one step and having a hard time doing it, think about the step after that. Need to do laundry and you can’t get yourself to gather up your dirty clothes in the hamper? Think instead about carrying the hamper full of dirty clothes to the laundry room. And when you get to that next step, if you get stuck again, think about the step after it – you have a hamper of dirty clothes that needs to be put in the wash, let your subconscious handle the “carry hamper to laundry room” step while you’re thinking about the “putting them in the wash” part.
YMMV of course, and this doesn’t even always work for me (particularly not when I need to do a collection of tasks in no particular order, like packing for a trip… “pack socks, pack underwear, pack toothbrush, pack pants, pack shirts” is the kind of non-linear task list where this trick doesn’t help at all), but it’s something I’ve found helpful often enough.
This is one of the most beautiful threads I’ve seen on Tumblr simply because it deals so compassionately with an issue so many of us have and can barely even articulate to ourselves, let alone to anyone else. ❤
I think I get overwhelmed from the thought of all of the consequent steps, so maybe I’ll do the reverse of the advice above and try to focus on the first one.
@the-rain-monster i was just about to say something similar. that can work too sometimes. instead of going “ugh i need to eat something” for four hours, i try to focus on each step in turn.
and i mean each TINY step. just getting out of my chair has this many steps:
pause music
remove headphones
hang headphones on laptop screen
pick up laptop
leg-bend recliner footrest shut
set laptop aside
stand
and i reckon that’s why i get stuck on it; because i’m trying to treat it as one thing, while executive dysfunction is treating it as seven things, and choking on trying to skip to step seven.
concurrent with this is a method i call ‘junebugging’. which is where i go to the location of the thing i want to do, and just sort of bump around the region like a big stupid beetle until the thing somehow accidentally magically gets done. this is an attempt to leverage ADHD into an advantage; i may not have the executive function to make myself a sandwich on purpose, but if i fidget in the kitchen long enough, some kind of food is going to end up in my mouth eventually. and hell, even if i fail on that front, i will probably have achieved something, even if it’s only pouring all my loose leaf tea into decorative jars.*
@star-anise please may i give you an internet hug *hug!* because god how i wish anyone had known to do that for me when i was a kid. my childhood was one big overload, and like 99% of the huge dramatic meltdowns that made me the scapegoat/laughingstock/target of my entire elementary school were simply due to people not giving me time to process the next step, and interpreting a bluescreen as defiance/insult.
*this happened when i was trying to do dishes actually but the principle is sound
yeah i absolutely echo what j’s saying about the steps, it’s a lot like that for me too. i get overwhelmed at the prospect of something that should be simple, and have to slow down and sort out how many steps it’s actually going to take, and what a complicated endeavor it actually is, even if no one else thinks so.
also, i thought i should put in: try to honestly figure out what you’re averse to, that makes things so tough. making a whole bunch of decisions really fast? the potential of things to make a horrible noise? the shame of failure? having to put down what you’re doing now? having to clean up whatever it is you might go do when you’re done?
for instance, for me, the difficulty rating on anything goes waaaay up when a step of a task is ‘go somewhere people will look at you,’ which is for me about the unpleasantness equivalent of ‘jump into a very cold swimming pool right now’. you know you’ll be fine and even have fun once you’ve settled into it, but it still takes a lot of shuffling around and bracing yourself first to go for it. and some days you just don’t fucking want to go swimming.
i discounted this factor for years because i wouldn’t admit that i was so daunted by something so silly as as people looking at me. but, now i know what i’m so aversive about, i can factor it in to plans, and work around it, and be kind to myself. for instance, i was never able to get fit since highschool PE, because i couldn’t make myself go to a gym, or even out jogging. once i figured out the big problem wasn’t avoidance pain or difficulty, it was avoidance of doing a New Thing that i was Bad At in front of Unknown Quantities Of Strangers, which is like a triple threat of stressors, i started working out quietly and safely in my room at night, and i’ve been doing really good on it!
just moving along like everyone else 