“Keep Fighting.

online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.

One day you think: I want to die. And then you think, very quietly, actually I want a coffee. I want a nap. A sandwich. A book. And I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friends, I want to sit in the sun. I want a cleaner room, I want a better job, I want to live somewhere else, I want to live.

To try to do anything in this day and age is courageous. Even if you suck at least you’re fucking doing something. You’re creating something. You are doing SOMETHING. That in itself is a courageous act.

my farm girl blues

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

When I was in middle school, I tried to learn how to crochet. I knew how to knit already, so I figured ‘how hard could it be’ and used my Christmas money on a brand new set of aluminum hooks and a how-to book.

To say it was difficult was an understatement. I spent hours pouring over my book, begging to gain some inkling of understanding from what felt like incomprehensible runes. My reward? One lopsided trapezoid of lumpy fabric and a resolve to never pick up a crochet hook again.

And so life went on, I finished middle school and high school without giving crochet so much as a second glance. In college, I read about how crochet couldn’t be replicated by a machine, it was unique in a way that knitting and many other fiber arts weren’t.

For Christmas last year, my girlfriend gave me what I now consider to be my most prized possession: a crocheted plush of my favorite pokemon. I raved over her skills and, since she never learned how to knit, we decided to have a yarn date at some point and teach each other our respective skills.

We never did get around to that yarn date. She passed a few months after our declaration, leaving me to inherit what was left of her yarn.

Nearly a decade after my initial attempt, I got ready for the toughest battle of my life. My weapons? One skein of yarn, a YouTube video, and a crochet hook that I had somehow never gotten rid of.

I slowly made my way through the video, redoing my work a couple times until I was satisfied with my product: a small, slightly misshapen rectangle.

I looked at my pristinely-made pokemon plush with hope for the first time in months and thought to myself, ‘maybe crocheting isn’t the hardest thing in the world, maybe you were just 12.’

Maybe this isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Maybe I’m just 21.

yes & no by natalie wee

*in the 2020s* he would do numbers on twitter *in the 2010s* he would get shares on his blog *in the 1990s* he would be a wiz on the multi-user dungeon *in the 1950s* he would get ratings on the television *in the 1930s* he would command the masses on the radio *in the 1880s* he would do dots and dashes on the telegram *in the 1790s* he would do arm signals on the semaphore *in the 1600s* his prints would be distributed widely *in the 1400s* he would sound the trumpet in battle *in the 700s* his words would be passed down by oral tradition *in the 300s* he would do smoke signals in the sky *in the neolithic* his artifacts would enter the archeological record *in the pliocene* his bones would be preserved in the sediment *in the mezozoic* he would do permineralization in mineral rich groundwater *in the paleoarchean* he would facilitate recombination of his genome *in the hadean* his molecules would self replicate in the early ocean *in the matter dominated era* his stellar nursery would collapse into a star and an orbiting cloud of dust *in the cosmological dark ages* quantum fluctuations in his density would form the first cosmological structures *10^-32 seconds after the big bang* his elementary particles would dominate in baryogenesis *in the plank epoch* he would do cosmic inflation in the energy dense early universe *10^-43 seconds after the big bang* he would be

we hunt the mighty pasta BEAST

and breadsticks are its BONES

ALFREDO FLOWS inside its veins

its organs are CALZONES

Ruth Awad, “Reasons To Live”