itstrickytobehuman

[itstrickytobehuman]

[itstrickytobehuman]

“I don’t know how to reconcile that my favorite piece of media was made by someone awful.” Because they’re a shitty person who made something good. It’s not that rare of a phenomenon. Shitty people make good things everyday. A piece of art being made by a terrible person does not make its effect null and void and making good art does not redeem a terrible person. People who are irredeemably nasty can say something true and honest on occasion. To reevaluate a work after finding out more about the artist’s horrendous biases and actions and still find things that are honest and true even when consuming it through a critical lens, that is a beautiful thing. If the artist’s actions and words completely destroy it for you and distort the meaning you once found, it’s okay to feel a sense of mourning and loss at that.

This is not to say that you should continue to lavish social and financial capital on the artist because you enjoy their art but to say that enjoying art made by horrible people does not mean you are in some way unclean.

[itstrickytobehuman]

idk if this is a contreversial take or not but i think that the ideal internet experience is being able to remove specific things (triggers, nsfw, gore) if you truly dont want to see them but overall being also shown things you aren’t interested in. i think one of my fave things about tumblr is seeing like 50% of my dash be about fandoms im not in, bands i dont like and quotes from books i dont want to read rather than this endless feedback loop of tiktok showing me ‘exactly what i want to see’ in a trap to keep me online as long as possible and blind to communities outside of my own. i want a mix of curating my own experience and a healthy dose of content i don’t already know i want to see, yknow?

[itstrickytobehuman]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[itstrickytobehuman]

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

[itstrickytobehuman]

How did you train your cats to not wake you up?

By rolling over and stubbornly feigning sleep if they did.

Their brains are little cause-effect engines. If standing next to your face and yelling until you feed them doesn't actually produce that result, they'll eventually stop doing it. You just have to outlast them.

[itstrickytobehuman]

The older I get the more I admire people who are earnestly, genuinely into whatever their thing is. I know it sounds like an annoying cliche but unless you're being cruel or hurtful there is really no need to be normal about things. The dude with the bad fake accent at the renaissance faire is having the time of his life. The people having photoshoots with their fashion dolls are loving it. The old lady with a yard unreasonably full of tacky ass lawn ornaments is having a blast, HOA be damned.

Don't waste your time being too cool to have fun, y'know?

[itstrickytobehuman]

The Lark

[itstrickytobehuman]

one thing tumblr has unironically done to improve my mental health is completely rewrite how i view disgust as a concept. there is no higher compliment to me than being told i have something wrong with me and should be ashamed of myself when i'm just living my life in a way that is perhaps odd and hard to understand, but ultimately as harmless as you can get in our society. which probably wasn't the intention of all the advice i got in therapy to reframe my negative thought patterns as more positive ones, but it's doing great things for me.

[itstrickytobehuman]

I’m still hungry.

[itstrickytobehuman]

arrival of dawn

[itstrickytobehuman]

The Druid and the Raven.

Once again a simple figure practice becomes a whole-ass painting.

“How am I supposed to get over you if you keep sending ravens to me?” I just want them to be happy 😭

[itstrickytobehuman]

there are corners of this website where the year is still 2013. and sometimes, on beautiful nights when the veil is thin, you can find them . if you know where to look

[itstrickytobehuman]

stop letting miserable people on the internet convince you that you must have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything that has ever existed.

[itstrickytobehuman]

is that person actually "demanding emotional labour" from you or did you follow one shitty therapist on twitter

[itstrickytobehuman]

something that makes me happy: "weißt du, wie der Sommer riecht?" und die damit verbundene Erinnerung an die Sendung mit der Maus an heißen Sommersonn(en)tagen :)

Das hier?

Oh gott, ist das süß!

Was mich glücklich macht: Wenn ich einen Samen gepflanzt habe und irgendwann die erste Knospe durch den Boden bricht!

[itstrickytobehuman]

the epidemic of grown adults playing tiktoks at full volume in public is rampant why are you acting like a 7 year old with their first ipad you have a mortgage