me, looking at the current state of the world, crying:I wish none of this had happened…
Gandalf, materialising in my conscience, smiling kindly: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, besides the will of evil.
Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library.
After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies.
People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose.
Also consider: a library has a duplicate book, and wants to hire mercenaries to transport it to a library that doesn’t have a copy of that book. The most well known mercs in the world show up to volunteer for the job because they haven’t read that one yet.
jolene by dolly parton is honestly such a powerful song. i ain’t even got a man and i have a terrible fear of that bitch stealing my man
The reason you don’t have a man is because she’s already stolen him.
There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is— particularly the artist— particularly myself!
Why does everyone say that they played someone ‘like a fiddle’? Fiddles are actually pretty difficult to play? Why not say ‘I played him like a recorder’? ‘Like a xylophone’? ‘Like a triangle’?
I think it’s got to do with detail and subtlety. If you play someone like a fiddle, that’s like, Iago or some shit. If you play someone like a triangle, you just told them there was free food somewhere when there wasn’t.
I’ve once read the following exchange:
“You played me!”
“Like the cheap kazoo you are.”
Which in my books is a pretty epic burn if we’re going to be making musical comparisons.
Sometimes “giving up” can be a valuable lesson. I’ve been thinking about this often lately during training – we are instructed to support our students in whatever challenges they set for themselves and not to pressure them into doing anything they’re significantly uncomfortable with. We let them set their own goals and don’t shame them for choosing not to climb all the way to the top of the rock wall, deciding not to ride the zipline, or backing out of going on the giant swing. Encouraging them to push their own boundaries is great, but push too hard and they won’t gain any psychological benefits from accomplishments.
I kind of wish I’d had more support like that as a kid. I was hard on myself. I refused to give up on anything, even when it made me utterly miserable or terrified. To this day, I have difficulty knowing where my boundaries are because I have almost always ignored them or pretended they didn’t exist. As much “strength of character” this may have created, it’s also put me in some really bad situations. Being able to “give up” and acknowledge that my personal feelings are as important as my goals and viable to change them has been very liberating.
sometimes I give up before I even get out of bed
This is excellent advice.
I used to be a much less effective programmer than I am now. I used to fuck up a lot more, mostly. You know what changed?
Let me paraphrase a thing I said in the internal company chat server last week:
“Okay, that’s the third really obvious error in the last half hour and I really need to reset, I’m gonna go spend half an hour with a blanket over my head like a bird pretending it’s night.”
And then I did it.
And then I came back and got stuff done.
What changed is I learned to recognize signs that I actually can’t work effectively right now and I need to stop trying and figure out what needs to happen to get me functional again. Food. Rehydrating. Shower. Shaving, because itchy face will absolutely make me grumpy and stupid. And sometimes I just plain don’t have the brain today, and if I try to write code, it will be bad. So I do other things, or hell, nothing. Because that will be less bad.
Giving up sometimes: Very important skill. If I hadn’t been willing to give up on a thing that was going badly, I think I’d still be trying to get even the first phase of a project done, instead of saying “okay I think this is ready to be tried out”.
the friend-turned-enemy, the hostage with stockholm syndrome, the POW who doesn’t know what’s real anymore, the brainwashed slave.
you know how hard the heroes have to work to get them back, and how much it hurts. how the victim attacks their rescuers, screams the manifesto of their captors as if it’s their own.
and those are people who were turned by the enemy, who have nothing to lose but their chains and their false sense of certainty.
so why would you think you can convert someone who was raised from birth to wrong thought, and only ever benefitted from it, and sees no personal gain from joining the right side, just by being an asshole to them on social media? or punching them in the face?
captain america brought bucky back by dropping his shield. luke skywalker redeemed darth vader by refusing to kill him. janet rescued tam lin by holding him tight while he turned into monsters and red hot iron.
and you think you can turn comfortable people into freedom fighters by calling them names?
humanity tells itself these stories for a reason. learn.
i’d like to point out also that tam lin, in pretty much every version recorded, says that he likes living in fairyland. it’s his home, he’s been treated well, he’s considered a valuable member of titania’s court, he’s grown up there and enjoys his life. he ONLY asks janet to free him because he’s a nominee for fairyland’s tithe to hell. not because he wants to escape fairyland. not because he loves her and wants to do the honorable thing by parenting the baby he impregnated her with. they’re making a bargain: she bails him out of paying for the literally charmed life he’s been leading, he resumes human life with her.
it can be an extremely badass, romantic story. but there’s an important, hidden moral: people don’t leave fairyland when they’re its shining knight. they escape it when they realize they’re its victim.
i wanna give a shout out to all lgbt people who thought they were another identity before realizing they were something else. lesbians realizing they’re trans men, bi/pan people realizing they’re a lesbian/gay, binary trans people realizing they’re genderfluid, etc. even if you don’t know if your current identity is the final stop, even if you think it’s a “phase”, or you don’t know what label fits you best, you’re on a journey to self discovery, every step matters, it shapes you into the person you are or aspire to be, and you’re not fake or a bad person for figuring things out.
YO PEOPLE scope this weirdness, i’m 36 and i still don’t know for sure what i’m gonna be by 40, so i’m currently stuck between butch dyke, ftx and full on straight ass dudebro. am i hesitating to claim full masc because of anxiety disorder? social conditioning that says i will never pass and therefore shouldn’t put myself at risk? genderqueer for real? ftm with hangups? for real, I DON’T KNOW!
but luka you’re so adamant you say
yes because i have made peace with not knowing for sure (most of the time, fuck u v much dysphoria)
the thing is, becoming ok with not knowing is a vital process that will make it a lot less important to define yourself and risk getting it wrong. less concern over the “what if” smorgasbord means you won’t nitpick your own experience so much and second guess every feeling you have. accept ambiguity and don’t obsess about what will come out of your egg when you’re done. get toasty under the feathered butt of the universe for now and just tell yourself that you’re here, you’re likely to be some variety of queer, and the world is just gonna have to get used to it.
just moving along like everyone else 