Oh BITCH this is a mood

The Parent Trap (1998) dir. Nancy Meyers

Whoever these cosplayers are, they are heroes. Slay

even though it's not spring break i still believe in you <3

if high waisted jeans go out of fashion one day my life is doomed

nothing’s out of fashion if you don’t give a shit

Fashion designer here! Fashion is completely made up. It’s major social function is to highlight class division and express allegiance to various subcultures. Wear whatever the hell you want as often as you can, and donate to ethical resale outlets

transfemme and transmasc solidarity!
(prints available)

here's to the people who HAVEN'T "always" known they're trans. here's to the people who didn't realize it as a kid or a teen, but later in life. here's to the people who didn't know what being trans was until someone else introduced it to them.

i didn't realize i was trans until i was exposed to the term 'transgender' in my college's pride group. i didn't have a word for the feelings i was going through, so it took me a lot longer than others to realize what was going on. it's alright if that's you, too. you can realize it at any point in your life, doesn't matter when you realize it, you're still trans.

my 🏳️‍⚧️ paintings... so far!

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

...Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but...

Years and years ago, I read someone's experience of finding out that his mom's boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.

But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn't the clues he'd missed or anything-- it was that, one time, they'd been working together on some kind of home project, and he'd been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance-- and his mom's boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he'd been that the boyfriend had been there, how they'd both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment--

And that's why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white-- it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.

I had a similar experience during my internship this summer. My job was to sort through and archive the papers of this woman from Arkansas in the 1920s-1970s.

And folks, she was a hateful person. Truly. The amount of absolutely vile racist, antisemitic, xenophobic material I had to wade through was soul searing. Pretty much any -phobia or -ism you can name, it was there. She went hard on the white supremacy and Lost Cause bandwagon.

But she was also a loyal friend, a level headed problem solver, a dutiful sister. The family genealogy experience, a cat lover, an active member of her community. I went through her personal letters and her diary and learned about the minutiae of her life. Right now, I'm probably the single person on this planet who knows the most about her.

That experience would have been so much easier if I could hate her. Instead, I was treated to the very hard lesson that every single person who has ever lived was a complex, multifaceted human being. I empathized with this woman, recognized experiences we have in common.

Working with this woman's memory for eight hours a day, treating her material past with the respect I'm sure she wouldn't give me, was extremely difficult. But I learned a lot about myself, my professional ethics, and how I interact with the world. It was a humbling, valuable experience, and I think the world would be a better place if more people had the chance to do something similar.