“my friend the electrical engineer,” i say, or of someone else: “my friend the Canadian,” “my friend in Denver.” and i am down south, states and miles away.
“how did you meet?” they ask, puzzled by how far-flung my friendships. “the internet,” i say, a little proud, a little defensive because the next words are inevitable.
they always ask with a mix of amusement and horror. always. “have you met in person? no? how can you be sure it’s not an old pervert in his mother’s basement, a serial killer on the prowl?”
how can we be sure of anyone? the man who married a pastor’s daughter, then shot his pregnant wife in the back of the head–they thought they knew him. but these anonymous souls: they’re my friends.
we talk of books and ideas, family and differences in where we live and why we do what we do, and trade stupid jokes like candy, sweet and inclusive and joyful. my friends. my soul friends, who i meet on the internet.
friendships are not born of handshakes. they’re born of shared things and shared interests and sometimes just because you’re human and i’m human, and that praise God is enough.
@ all my soul friends, I would tag you individually but basically if we’ve talked more than a couple times you are probably on the list and you know who you are. Bless.
This is lovely, and very much how I feel about my internet friends. Love to you all.
When I tell the story of Achilles, I tell it like this:
Once there was a wedding, goddess to mortal man. She wasn’t
very happy about it. Who knows what he thought. When orders come down from
Zeus, what idiot says no? But they were married, and there was a child, and that
child was almost something more than human.
I say almost because
he was still human in the way that mattered most: he was mortal, doomed.
Imagine being Thetis, his mother, pale and ocean-eyed, looking down at this
tiny scrap of life and knowing you would have to watch it die. I don’t think
any mother could stand it. She did what she could to protect him: bathed her
baby in the Styx, the river of death, and he had little to fear from ordinary
weapons after that. But a mortal is a mortal. Achilles was born to die.
There were two deaths woven for him by the Fates. Achilles could
have had a long and happy life, beloved and honoured, surrounded by kin, living
in peace and good fortune, dying at the last mourned by children and
grandchildren who would honour his memory as long as they lived; and when the
last of them was gone, Achilles’ memory would pass away from the world as well,
the final embers of a long-banked fire going dim.
That was one death.
The other was simpler: to die young and be remembered
forever. A brief bonfire blaze of life and then eternal glory.
How do you choose?
Maybe for you it would be easy. But remember Achilles was
young, he was proud, he was beautiful and swift and strong almost beyond what
is human, and he lived in a world of brief lives and brilliant deaths, a world
of hero-songs and clashing bronze. For him it was not easy.
can we take a second to ponder on the fact that a kids movie did lady armor better than the entire film and comic industry
guess who i’m talking about
did you guess? Well you’re fucking WRONG because it’s Susan goddamn Pevensie
They gave her light armor, appropriate for a small archer:chainmail, an arm brace, chest plate, and a light skirt she can easily run around murderizing dudes in the face in
her hair is also only loose in the promo pictures because Susan is fucking busy not dying because her hair was flying into her eyeballs so she braids that shit back
her mail shirt is also loose enough that it doesn’t impede her arm movements it’s almost like she’s dressed for a fight wow
I like the pinks and purples under her bitchin as hell leather armor here, because you don’t have to be masculine to shoot someone in the goddamn face
Everyone, including the actress who played her, agrees that Susan was the most boring of the Pevensie siblings, yet the filmmakers had enough respect for the character to dress her in practical light armor. And didn’t have to bend over backwards to slap on “feminine features” (read: giant boobplate) to make sure no-one confuses her gender.
Would other female characters in life action get non-exploitative clothes if they were also played by underage girls?
~Ozzie
PS: Props for archer costume with puce as its primary color instead of green!
I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.
Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating. It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.
This idea – You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself – hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.
In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.
Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.
You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.
So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.
But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair.
And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.
So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.
Yes! We actually had a perfectionism group in treatment and one of the things they taught us was how perfectionism can actually lead to avoiding stuff & doing less. It’s definitely important to understand this.
One long term strategy I’ve heard is to promise yourself you’ll only work for a smallish period of time (at a date before it’s last min of course). Do you work for that time, and then you congratulate yourself for what you accomplished even if it’s not as much as you wanted, and then no matter what you actually stop. Your brain realizes that doing work can actually be a manageable experience & it starts breaking the association between doing work and stress/sadness/guilt etc. *Lowering* your standards & working before it gets super bad can help with this
I do this all the time and it is the most frustrating thing in my life. Combine 1) problem I do not feel I have the authority to solve easily (especially dealing with older men) with 2) moving target for success or unclear parameters, and 3) other, less fraught things to do at the same time and I will ALWAYS procrastinate like crazy and wait until the problem is on fire and giving me high blood pressure and insomnia and dehydration from stress. Over and over again and it makes me absolutely insane. Every time I lower my standards it works, and I am good enough at managing relationships + being hard to pin down on specifics + willing to work insane hours for a few days/weeks to make up for the procrastination, but it sucks. This advice is worth trying.
Steel Phoenix Studios 