I hate in the MCU or anything when the aliens or whatever are attacking and everyone’s just ‘oh yeah we be chilling just cowering over here’ as if seventy percent of humanity isn’t really angry all the time like catch these hands motherfucker I’ve bitten people for trying to steal my chips you think you can just steal my whole fucking planet YEET HERE COME MY TEETH film people be using responses to natural disasters but I promise if human sized things came to throw down humanity would be ready to fuck them up like yeah you got laser guns I got this dope ass stick I just found let’s go you ugly fuck
silentwalrus1: #yeah bicht!!!!!!#gimme the battle of new york with fuckin chitauri comin down and the shift manager of the times sq H&M has finally had Enough#Tracie bout to kill this alien with a traffic cone#’ JUST PRETEND THEY’RE TOURISTS’ she screams choking out goddamn Lizard Lite with her lanyard#10 feet away a park slope mom is beating an alien to death with her four year old’s knockoff eco friendly razr scooter#every single retail employee gets ten years’ worth of therapy in one day#captain america’s kill count: 83 aliens#kathleen from accounting: 94 and also her boss
Humans are biolent, angry little creatures who live under a constant state of stress and have very little sense of self preservation. #whatsmykillcount would be trending in Twitter while people posted videos on every available platform. Like honestly Earth is not the one.
You never know you’re from a Death World until somebody tries to conquer it.
i just had the weirdest moment, i was feeling my front teeth with my tongue because they’re the tiniest bit crooked, and then i had the thought “i’ll check if they’re also crooked in my other mouth” and then i realized to my shock and confusion that i have only one mouth, leading me to believe that in a past life i was a terrible monster with two mouths
A few months ago, I thought to myself “Mmm I’m so tired… how much longer in this one again?” and I knew instinctively what I meant by ‘this one’ was this body and this life. I then spend a few wide-eyed moments having an identity/existential crisis like how many times have I been on this earth to have such an instinctive response to being bone-weary to my soul? No one can really answer, especially not me.
Well, right now I’m in Philadelphia (where I’m moving for an amazingattorney position) and I’m sitting in my best friend of eight years’ place, after we saw an apartment, got ice cream, made dinner, talked about—everything, so many things, all of them meaningful or lighthearted, and important to me or her or both of us.
So I’m pretty good.
It’s funny you ask me this question, though, because it’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot in the last couple years. (The state of the world being what it is.) And what it comes down to, for me, is a question of framing. No one questions there are bad things happening in the world, if your optimism is founded on bad things not happening, then you’re going to be largely disappointed.
But bad things don’t happen in a vacuum. We aren’t living in an amoral universe, or if we are, humans ascribe a hell of a lot of morality to it—to the point where bad things happen, and people are offended by it. People get angry. Then they get angrier. People want answers to why the bad thing happened, and how to stop the bad thing; some people even give up their relative comfort and dedicate their lives to stopping the bad thing, or risk violence and death and arrestto stop the bad thing; after the dust has cleared, they question whether, now that we’ve theoretically stopped the thing, was that sufficient? Were we really addressing the bad thing, or are there other things we should be doing instead, to stop that bad thing more completely and effectively?
In these days and times I cling, so strongly, to the fact that I am not alone in my anger and confusion. No one is. There are people standing alongside me who are even more angry, more disappointed; that I share a world with the angriest people you could find. I’m such a mild optimist, I get disappointed and depressed when I find out the world doesn’t obey my rules. When people let me down, when we aren’t our best or even our mediocre, I just have feelings.
Some people have riots.
I take incredible heart in that. However bad the world gets, people are there, ahead of and with me, and they’re fucking pissed. The universe can never be truly amoral. because there are those people, and I can trot after them, believing in goodness and truth and love because there’s also this profound and complete anger. It races ahead, a product of fury, faith and conviction. (It’s hard to communicate to the more comfortable people in my life, but it exists, and endures, and anger that demands an answer. Jesus had a whip of cords, modernity has more weapons at its disposal.)
And then, at the end of the day, I spent a couple hours sitting outside a park, watching a bunch of kids between 7 and 12 play one of those inexplicable circle games—I watched them for an hour and genuinely could not tell you the rules. But the sun was weakly out, and there was green grass, and children of various colors bouncing a blue ball on the concrete. I wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t anything, and sitting there, I thought—jesus, I am so profoundly lucky. To be sitting here, content in my safety, warm in the sun, watching this. Children, also safe, playing a stupid game I don’t understand except they’re standing in a circle with a blue ball and playing it.
The universe doesn’t guarantee our safety and happiness. Even other people don’t guarantee our safety and happiness, and they actually have an active will that could make a promise like that. But despite that, safety and happiness exist.
Terrible things happen, and despite that, good things happen too. You can either focus on the former, or the latter.
So I’ve written before about how to lose yourself in activities, how to make friends, how to get out of the four walls of your apartment (which will drive you mad, if you don’t) and experience your new city on its own terms. So I won’t talk about that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about the invariable, unmovable, awful terror. And how you will survive it.
Because it is unmoveable, at least at first. There is….a certain measure of terror inherent in moving to a new place and right then, you can’t do anything about that except feel it. You can distract yourself from it, with long walks and fun meetups, mixers, and various other assorted activities. You can drink (I do not advise this, it’s not a good long-term strategy) or engage in risky sexual behaviors (ditto) or neither and see a therapist instead (yes, please). You can throw yourself into work, you can get a dog (something I’ve seen members of my cohort do) you can choose to hone one of your hobbies. There are a lot of distractions, the world is full of them.
But at the end of the day, you will lie in bed in a strange place, and the terror will be there for you. Waiting.
I’m personally convinced it’s because your brain thinks you’re dying.
After all, a tomorrow that doesn’t look exactly like today, or at least reasonably similar, translates as a terrifying and uncertain blankness. It’s an abyss. It may as well be death. The human brain—an extremely stupid organ, built to identify poisonous berries and remind us to run away from things with teeth—thinks you are stepping off the edge of the world.
The terror is limitless, and senseless, in that it feel endless and engulfing, and will not listen to sense. It doesn’t matter how many times you reassure yourself that this will pass. It doesn’t matter that you know—know, with a certainty born of experience—that the terror will slide, slowly, into familiarity and routine. There will be a morning when you wake up, and cannot imagine a time when your dresser wasn’t exactly there, when you didn’t take that route to work in the morning, or know exactly where to go for lunch. The blankness will give way, inscribed by all the great and small details of a new place, and you will be fine.
The terror doesn’t care. The terror is convinced that this time, this time, you will not be fine. This time, you are definitely going to die.
(Depending on how you define it, I have moved somewhere between five and nine times, and lived in over four states. It’s mostly a lopsided triangle through the Midwest: Illinois to Michigan, Michigan to Kentucky, Kentucky to Illinois. A brief couple months in Boston for an internship, then back to Illinois. The longest I ever stayed put was in Chicago: an astonishing eight years and six different addresses. A couple months in Kentucky, then on to Philadelphia, a city I’d seen for the first time when I was brought in for an interview.
I was terrified, each and every time.)
The terror doesn’t care about ambition or your wanderlust or your fancy, logical reasoning. The terror doesn’t care if you have done this five times or nine times; if you know it will be fine, if you have controlled for every variable, if you are an expert. You can stare at maps and take notes and get excited while making new and wonderful plans; you can breathe, in and out and in again. But the terror is a senseless animal, and it cannot picture tomorrow.
The terror says: you are stepping off the edge of the world. You are dying.
Unfortunately, the only way to prove it wrong is to point yourself in that direction and walk.
I will say the distraction helps. My transition to Philadelphia has been smoother, in many ways, because now I know to search “things to do + philly + this weekend” and get out of my apartment; I take long walks, I’ve picked up photography. What used to take me a year has taken me two months simply because I’ve pushed myself to get out into the city and not be afraid. I go into restaurants and bars alone; I visit museums. I ruthlessly, shamelessly, force myself to enjoy my life here, in this specific place.
Of course the terror is still there, and it sneaks up on me sometimes, but it doesn’t have to own me. And that—if anything—would be my advice. You’re going to have feelings, they’ll be messy and ugly and paralyzing but the only way out is through. Get on the plane, get off it again. Point yourself in that direction, and keep on walking.
This is the man you must fight at the gates of Valhalla to prove you’re worthy of that mighty hall
It somehow gets crazier. this teenager trained for months. he staged fights in his parents’ swimming pool to train for this epic match. he choose halloween night for the final showdown. and it was for a school project. he could have chosen any seafood, but he decided on, in his own words, “that big fucking octopus.” magnificent bastard.
Y’all missed the part where he dragged it ashore and divers saw him, got upset and sent some pretty rough stuff to his family. Then, at the Washington Fish and Wildlife meeting, he showed up and was like “yeah, it should be protected.”
Except that the giant pacific octopus is nowhere near extinct and actually doing just fine.
So not only did he wrestle, kill, and eat a giant octopus– he got it protected from hunting in several locations even though the species doesn’t need protecting.
Fucking legendary indeed.
So the only person they need protection from is this guy.
…what sort of school project requires you to wrestle sea life?
That’s just how Washington is
to be clear, the school project was to “draw something from nature.” nobody asked him to wrestle an octopus.
…now, I have misunderstood the spirit of a lot of art projects before but
what if our most iconic contribution to galactic culture is the haka?
not just the haka itself, but the concept of a war dance. some other species have dance or something like it, but it’s either specifically a courtship thing, or it’s very homey and cooperative, pretty much folk dance. the idea of dancing as a way to showcase aggression is just – wham, cognitive dissonance.
and then you add on the way humans will make their bodies do impossible things, and wear outfits that show off how muscular they are? and the music, my stars, it’s so violent!
everyone finds it extremely intimidating.
exporting war dancing was not intentional, per se. it’s just that some human pirate hunter decided to pull an iron man and broadcast ‘bitch better have my money’ on all channels while hitting some freight raiders and the crew had a lot of adrenaline to work out.
just moving along like everyone else 