Like many others, I am simply trying to find the good things in life. Time and time again I've learned the sad lesson that life is neither simple or without obstacles, but I'm trying to find the bright side...
Ask me anything
If you have achieved something, please remember to observe a mandatory period of basking in the warm glow of your achievement like a lizard on a stone, lest you teach your brain that effort is futile, actually, because it didn’t get to enjoy its happy chemicals, so, naturally, nothing good ever comes of trying. (And no, avoiding punishment is not a reward!)
I recommend, like, 5% of basking time in relation to whatever time you invested into achieving the thing minimum. And if you can’t make your own bask, friend-brought is fine (= tell your friends!).
entering this great new phase of my life where, when someone treats me like shit, instead of going “oh man I guess I’m a piece of shit” I can whole-heartedly go “christ alive, what is wrong with you? you can’t treat people like that” and it may sound simple but it took a long time to get here and there’s no fucking way I’m going back
people have the audacity to equate vanilla with “plain”. the fruit of a delicate orchid pollinated by hand. worth its weight in solid gold and beyond. the fussy black-and-cream jewel of the american continent. you sick son of a bitch. imagine a world without vanilla. no blondies. no pound cakes. no crème brûlée, no coke floats. no cream soda. no satiny new york-style cheesecakes. no warm apple pie à la mode. no velvety complexity to bring out complex notes in chocolate desserts. no depth of flavour in your cakes and cookies and milkshakes. all in just a few precious seeds or grams of paste or perfumed teaspoons of liquid black platinum. what you don’t understand could fill the library of alexandria seven times over and then some. you ungrateful bastard i’m going to kill you
Happy holidays to everyone whose holiday isn’t what they want it to be. whether it is illness, poverty, distance from loved ones or something else that’s making things tough for you this year, i hope that you can find peace and warmth. i hope that your year will end and start on a brighter note
Girls will be like Idk why im so unproductive recently and then you ask whats going on in their life and they list eight lifestopping crisies and then say ‘yeah but i should be fine :/ ’
[Image ID: Tumblr tags: #important! #racism #antiblack racism #sometimes men talk to me about this because they think i’m a man i can 100% confirm it’s on purpose. End ID.]
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
[Brief clip from a previous video, which has the caption “When I have to send my husband to the store.” A white person is writing a shopping list. As well as listing the items and quantities, they are including what aisle each item can be found on, how much it costs and a painstakingly made little sticker showing exactly what it looks like.]
[The main video starts. A black person with glasses is standing in a bathroom, holding a toothbrush, talking to the camera.]
So that is a video of a woman, like, literally piece-by-piece word-for-wording what her husband’s trip to the grocery store for their household is going to be.
And I saw another creator stitch this video, talking about – I mean, they had a really dope word for it, and I can’t remember it right now, but it’s about performed incompetence and how, actually, what this husband is doing is exaggerating their own incompetence and exaggerating their own incapability, to force the labor that they don’t want to do (this husband) onto their partner, right – that their wife will hopefully be like, “oh my gosh, it’s just easier for me to do it myself so I’m going to do it myself, you’re good.” And now they’re absolved of the need to, like, contribute to the household.
So, actually, that performance of incompetence is an investment that that husband is making for his future self, if you know what I mean? It is like a patriarchal investment. And it’s two-pronged, right? One, you don’t have to do the thing that you don’t want to do, which is go to the grocery store, but two, you’ve set the expectations for your own capabilities so low that whatever you end up doing is incredible.
So now I’m going to do my favorite thing, which is to make it about race. And I’m actually going to say that in a parallel sense – like, that is a patriarchal investment that the husband is making into his future self, but I think that, actually, in the same way, mediocrity is a gift that whiteness gives to its own future.
You know what I’m saying? That whiteness performing mediocrity sets the bar so low that the generations that will eventually inherit the legacies of whiteness can do anything and feel entitled to, like, riches and fortune, right?
And we also accept that performance of incompetence, that performance of mediocrity, and then accept the bare minimum from whatever white person or whatever beneficiary of whiteness comes along and does [pinches fingers together] juuuuuuust more than we would expect from them.
And I think that, because of anti-blackness, it’s the opposite for black people. Right? Like, to escape the violence of whiteness you have to perform such excellence, and inherently the bar is constantly getting higher and higher, until you have all these superhuman black people who are just getting by.
I recently found out why my mom would never sleep around me when I was a kid. Like she’d never let herself take naps or sleep if I was awake, ever. Or if she did, she would lock her bedroom door.
So when I was 6, I was asleep in my bed in the middle of the night when I hear a loud bang, like a pot being dropped and come out to the living room to see my mom standing by the window, with just a huge pile of spaghetti all over the sill, and a pot on the ground, and I ’m like “Are you gonna eat all that?” And ya’ll she get’s BIG MAD and yells at me and chases me to my room but then a little while later a bunch of cops show up and ask me a bunch of random ass questions about my art? Like this one cop lady keeps asking me to draw dragons for her?! And they seem mad as hell
I didn’t want to get arrested so I just never asked my mom for spaghettis after that. Lesson, learned. Don’t ask mom for spaghettis or she’ll call the damn police on you.
So I have this memory in my head, and it goes unquestioned until I say it outload for the first time a few months back and as soon as I say the words “When I was six, my mom called the cops on me for asking for spaghettis” My adult logic slams into place and is like “Hang on. Your mother definatly did not call the police on a 6 year old for asking for spaghetti.”
So obviously that’s not what really went down. I call up my mom to tell her how I remember it and on top of her figuring out why her kid has always been really cagey around spaghettis for the last 3 decades she tells me what really happened.
So on that night, a man tried to break into our house through the front window. It was just my mom, and her kids so she did what she felt she had too and shot him in the head. He’d been wearing a helmet, which landed on the floor under the window.
Now I just want ya’ll to put yourselves in my moms shoes for a minute here. This woman has just taken a human life. The trauma of that- the instant agony, the panic, the guilt, the fear- all of it hitting her at once, her only solace the knowledge that her children are safe. She protected her daughters. No matter the cost to her soul- her children are safe.
Then she looks up and sees her six year old staring at the inside of this mans head before saying “Are you gonna eat all that?”
I suspect they were trying to keep me busy and distracted while they cleaned up the corpse in the living room?!?
