And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing.
“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“
She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.
A few years later, when she was 25 or so:
“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“
During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry. And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”
A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.
the most depressing quote from her diaries:
“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires – a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”
As far as I can tell I am the only person on the planet with my first name/last name combo (I have an extremely specific habitational surname and a first name from a different cultural tradition) but I’m wondering how common it is to be the only one these days, with increasingly creative combinations and spellings. So out of curiosity:
I didn’t realize how disgusting light bulbs were till I had to dump THOUSANDS of them into a gaylord. I am now dingey and smell like grandmas ashes
Pardon me?
i forgor not everyone knows what gaylords r but it’s these big bitches watermelons and shit come in, we use em to store paint and bulbs lmao
You mean a box???
I work in a warehouse and have to deal with these all the time. They’re called gaylords because they were popularized by a company called Gaylord iirc. You get used to calling them gaylords but every so often you say it to a person who doesn’t know and it hits you.
One time at work, I texted my boss about an order of them that came in by saying “there’s a 1400lb gaylord in the warehouse. besides me, of course.”
its always fun when we get new ppl at work that get whiplash when they hear us scream across the shop for three gaylords
hot tip! if you ever find yourself googling gloryhole in order find a picture to show someone else what it looks like (pictured below btw), REMEMBER TO TACK ON GLASSBLOWING AT THE END
The place I work has a sign reading “PP MOD GAYLORDS ONLY” and I can’t take a picture of it cause HIPAA but it makes me laugh every time
I work in hospitality in the condo industry. When a condo owner has a friend or family member staying at their place, this is called a Guest of Owner. Guests of Owners often need Parking Passes issued to allow them to park at the complex.
Of course, this is so common that we just abbreviate it all to keep things simple in our system, which means I am frequently finding myself at work saying completely seriously, “Hold on, I need to get done with all these GOO PPs. Do you know if we already gave this GOO his PP?”
EMBROIDERED ‘PEACOCK FEATHER’ CAPE
QING DYNASTY, LATE 19TH CENTURY
The long cape entirely
constructed with layers of overlapping peacock feather shaped panels,
each panel finely worked in satin stitch, the silk threads in tones of
ivory, yellow and blue on the eye of the peacock feather, and the
surround intricately worked in peacock feather filaments, with one cloth
button on the collar and another near the waist, finished with Imperial
yellow lining
absolutely not. i know it’s useful for time sensitive posts about current events, but it can really kill the longevity of other posts. not having timestamps used to be a big part of the tumblr experience, and it still should be
I mean you can just not look at it if you don’t want but often it’s good to see if the bad or out of date post you’re looking at is from yesterday or 2014. I have been on this site since 2012 and have a lot of posts floating around from 2014 that I might not necessarily agree with now because I was a teenager then and I’m almost 30 now. On more than one occasion recently someone has come onto posts of mine from 2014 guns blazing because they thought the post was recent and were quite embarrassed to discover that the take they got worked up about wasn’t a recent discourse but was rather a decade old and was part of a larger conversation at the time but now lacks the context with which it was shared. Save yourself the embarrassment of yelling at a ten year old cloud. Turn on timestamps.
WYM it kills the longevity of posts. No tumblr user in their right mind looks at a post they like and chooses not to reblog it because it’s “too old”. I still keep getting notes from posts over a decade ago
can’t believe tiktok is actually getting banned, twitter is infested with bots and brainworm-infested musk bots, facebook is king of QAnon, instagram caught the plague from facebook and is dying a slow death in real time… and as the dust settles… only Miss Tumblr is left standing… failing upwards once again
I think there’s a lot of optimism around American kids moving to REDNote as an antidote to the, frankly, ridiculous propaganda that Americans have been filled with regarding China and the Chinese people since birth. I have met Americans who believe that all of the Red Scare era propaganda about China, from breadlines to mass executions, is still the case for ordinary citizens in Beijing (and very few Americans who can name Chengdu and Guangzhou).
However, Chinese people on the app are often attempting to warn you, in a very polite and evasive Chinese soc. med. way, that REDNote content is still strictly moderated and content critical of the state (Uyghurs, the recent invasion of Hong Kong, even the economy!!) or supportive of certain identities the state is not cool with right now (Muslims, queer people, etc) is routinely deleted, blocked and so on.
I’m concerned because discussing any subject deemed political in a Chinese context often requires knowing a second language of nuanced implications and statements that can be gleaned through what’s not said rather than what is. I’ve seen American kids claiming that because China is a “communist country” (yes a communist country with the second most billionaires in the world 🙄) it doesn’t even have a right-wing that could be onboarding you with shitty ideas, but well, that’s very much not the case, and the Chinese online right even has words for white people like this lol. The same way the United States portrays China as a dirty country of starving peasants, China portrays the United States as extremely socially divided due to a lack of racial hegemony and nationalist (by which they mean neo-Confucian collectivist) spirit.
Individual people in both countries are cool, but American kids moving to REDNote, where they can’t even discuss minority issues and are forced to play within the sandbox of a government that is just as censorious and diabolical as the United States, isn’t going to end racism lol, especially not if these kids lack the necessary education and awareness of Chinese culture, history and social issues to actually meaningfully learn from the experience and what the Chinese users are saying without saying.
Anyway, it is deeply frustrating that the trend of social media, from Yahoo-Tumblr to whatever happened to twitter to this, is censorship laced with -phobia and -ism.
So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that’s what’s on my passport. I’m pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.
I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office… and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn’t be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?
They’re my fucking hero.
So… I heard from a friend of 20+ years who works for the State Department who confirmed to me in so many words that they can assure me, without specifics, that “all of the suppositions you have made here are true.”
So… yep. Passport folx at the State Department really did work incredibly long hours this week just… shoveling every passport out the door (and prioritizing the ones that might be A Problem come Monday) and yes, they did On Purpose make sure that all of them weren’t just DONE but MAILED and out the door and in the hands of the USPS so that they can’t be told to pull those passports back and deny/destroy them.
This also means they got the OK for the mountains of overtime from the Biden administration to get that done.
This is what I mean when I say that the Good Work is often not glamorous and that we have to prioritize things which actively and immediately better the lives of our siblings. The State Department worker who was still in the office last night at midnight Pacific time stuffing my passport into an Express Mail envelope and making sure that it was in the hands of USPS has done more liberatory work for the trans movement than 100 people endlessly auditing the language others use to describe their lives ever will.
These next years are gonna be real hard. Find something tangible to do for yourself and others, however small, and do it as hard as you can.
amhrancas 