pencildavis

[pencildavis]

This legitimately needs to be in future literature textbooks to capture the Covid-19 Pandemic.

[pencildavis]

Anime tropes that make me laugh

Glasses character says something serious while holding their glasses up with their fingers for way too long, with their hand in their face so they probably can’t see a fucking thing.

[pencildavis]

Loved it ���‍❤️‍💋‍👩💃

Season 2 of GLOW has been amazing so far, but even so, I didn’t expect this scene.

[pencildavis]

Cute nicknames for smol chillren

Thunder child

Sweet pea

Cecerino

Short stack

Shortcrust

Puggle

Chickadee

Tatertott

Bugalugs

Prickly pear

Cannonball

Chicken

Sprocket

[pencildavis]

Why do so many pop artists talk like they didn’t do a sound check before recording?

“Turn the mic up”

“Bring the beat in”

“Just let it ride”

“One two”

[pencildavis]

If this postal survey returns a “no” majority I don’t know how I’m going to process that. How do you deal knowing that most of your country, at the very least, doesn’t think you worthy of marriage, or at worst, finds you repugnant and damaging to children?

[pencildavis]

The Best Daytime Drama Series Ever

OMG, guys! Remember Passions?

[pencildavis]

Who to be today

I get so frustrated and confused talking with you sometimes. What do you want from me? Say it and I'll be it. I just don't know who I'm supposed to be with you.

But that's why I love you. I've got no choice but to be me. You are one of the few people who genuinely wants me to be myself and not some convenient version. It's painful sometimes.

[pencildavis]

Things that I'm worried about

Buying a house - that I will put myself and my family into a spiral of debt that we won't be able to climb out of. That the market is so inflated right now that we will lose money. That buying with family will put us into the same kind of stress our current shared living situation is putting us in. That the neighbours will be terrible. That 20 years of working and saving won't be enough to buy in the first place. That we won't be able to do anything remotely expensive again. That we won't find anything we like by the time we said we would be out. That we will live so far away from work and family that I will spend most of my time commuting and will lose time with you. That I will have to go back to full time work before I'm ready. That we will end up spending decades in jobs we hate for the money. That you will have to go back to work and we won't have anytime to spend together as a family. Imminent war - Nukes. Nukes. Nukes. Nukes. That in the face of the apocalypse the world will turn hedonistic with no future planning leaving the younger generations to pick up the pieces if everything does turn out ok. That it doesn't turn out ok - how would I end it for myself before it got too bad? Could I end it for others? What if there isn't enough warning time and we have to live/die through it all anyway. What a terrible way to die. I mean to die anyway is terrible but to die that way - utter hopelessness on a world scale. To be surrounded by others and not feel any connection to them because each of you is consumed with the knowledge that you ruined the whole planet. Climate change - that we don't blow ourselves up but we slowly boil, starve and choke ourselves and the planet to death. That I will be ok but my son will live through unprecedented natural disasters. That mass migration will turn the hearts of men cold and closed. That what is lost can never be regained. That we are so selfish.

[pencildavis]

Movie idea

A couple of office buddies who after watching the antics of two popular co-workers, who are obviously attracted to each other, slowly realise they are the extras in an office rom com. The buddies then spend the rest of the movie becoming the leads much to the confusion of the romantic duo and the rest of the cast.

[pencildavis]

Skip, skip, skip...

Feeling sorry for a song that you’ve skipped so many times that you decide to let it play through this time so it doesn’t feel unwanted.

[pencildavis]

Slow burn revenge

You can have this one for free. Pick a random song in their music library and change the volume settings for that one song way uppppppp. Make sure it's not one of their top played songs - if it's one of the more obscure ones then they are more likely to forget or leave it so then it's a gift that keeps giving.

[pencildavis]

Thank you

I want to thank the Tumblr community, in particular it's younger users (around 14 to 18). I'm a 31 yr old woman and I found a number of posts very encouraging during a difficult time for me. My wife and I had just had our baby and I had gotten terribly sick (literally the day we left the hospital). I ended up being told by my GP to quarantine myself from my new family until my symptoms subsided. It was about 3 days and I was back with them but the sickness continued. Couple this with broken sleep (maybe getting 4-5 hours a night in maybe 1 hour blocks) and I was a mess. I got sickness on top of sickness. Short breaks and then colds. Gastro. Flu. Gastro again. A cycle of lowered immunity that lasted about 8-9 months. When you are sick, tired and holding a baby there's not much you can do with one free hand. I spent ages scrolling through posts. Some were just silly memes but there was a lot of genuine concern for online friends and strangers. Young people promoting methods of self care. Positive notes for those suffering. This wasn't the internet I grew up with. There was certainly interaction and commiseration with "kids like me", but it was never as open or vulnerable. You were always taught that the person on the other side might not be real (that's still true today, but we all know that despite the persona a person may present online there is still a person typing away). On the one hand, I was reminded of how intense everything felt at that age; the sadness and the feeling of needing to hide parts of myself. It brought back some bad memories. But it brought hope as well. That these kinds of communities exist. That young people genuinely want to help each other. They show concern in making sure people's identities felt valid and were respected. And often for people they had never met. Your messages may not have been meant for me, but they helped me keep some positivity when I was living hour to hour. Thank you.

[pencildavis]

Introducing

This should be my first post but it isn't because my brain doesn't always order itself that way. Let me start by saying this blog is for me. I don't have an audience in mind but if you read it and find useful then good for you. It's not an advice blog, or a political blog or a mummy blog - although I will probably post about all three. This blog is a coat hanger; somewhere I can hang up my hang-ups and examine them. You wear a lot of responsibility and you can't see it well whiles it's still on you. I've kept journals for a long time, some online, most on paper. It's a habit that comes and goes and I found myself only wanting to write when I was angry or upset. So while this blog might be a dumping ground I'll try not to make it a sad lump. (Do happy dumps exist?)

[pencildavis]

A little about my whiteness

Let me tell you about the first racist joke I told. It requires a bit of context or the very simple punchline may be lost.

Vegemite, an Aussie delicacy, is a thick black salty yeast paste enjoyed on buttery toast. Although thoroughly Australian, it was owned by Kraft (but now majority Australian owned once more).

Kraft also makes this over-processed, individually wrapped, resembling cheese slices called Kraft Singles. In the early 90’s some bright spark had the idea to combine the two into this weird yeasty plastic cheese hybrid - the Vegemite single. It was a short lived product.

Now the setup.

What do you call an unmarried Aboriginal?

Not very funny and all the sophistication you'd expect from a primary school playground.

Now, when little six or seven year old me ran home to tell my mum this hilarious joke, I had no idea the shame awaiting.

And that was how I was introduced to the concept of racism.

I would like to say that was the last time I ever did or thought anything racist, but as you should know racism isn't always so overt. So I'd like to talk about about my whiteness, and that requires even more context.

Whiteness is a minority in my immediate family, but not in my extended family. Most of my siblings are Asian, in various shades of brown. At first I thought most "white families were culturally diverse- ate lots of food celebrated different holidays and perhaps had a few hanbok or salwar kameez in their cupboards.

When I learnt that wasn’t the case I naively went to the other extreme. I thought my upbringing was so atypical it must entitle me to some kind of honorary Asian identity. Thinking about it now makes me cringe internally and wonder how many of my Asian friends I was unknowingly alienating.

I don’t make any claim to Asian-ness; knowledge isn’t equal to lived experience. But it made me think, what am I doing today that future me will realise “actually dude, that was pretty racist”? Or at the very least, problematic.

“Australia Day” came the answer. For many indigenous here, Australia Day, the day that the British flag was raised in Sydney as claim to the land, is regarded as Invasion Day. Every year on January 26th you’ll see the hashtag activism come out with #changethedate. I am in favour of changing the date, but I think maybe it wasn’t for the most helpful reasons. I’m a republican, in the sense that I want Australia to leave the the commonwealth and have a presidential system of government (in a nutshell) - not in anyway related to what the term “republican” means in the US. So the obvious answer in my mind has been “Australia should become a republic and Australia Day can be moved to that date. Everybody’s happy.”

Everybody’s not happy.

Convenient my solution may be, but I would be hijacking indigenous people’s struggle to get this country to recognise this is stolen land just to further some political cause. I have no idea if indigenous Australians want a republic or not. It might mean nothing to them but just the exchanging of hands the same stolen land.

In short, changing Australia Day isn’t about just changing a date and calling it a day (so to speak). The solution shouldn’t be convenient; if it were then we haven’t really accepted the painful legacy this country was founded on.

And am not suggesting that the whole identify of being white is just a synonym for racist - there’s certainly much more to my experience of being white than just that. But when examining how that shapes my world view, it helps me to just accept that I’m probably unknowingly doing/thinking something racist. I don’t take it personally - it’s just like all the other biases my psychology holds.

If I come from that default position, I can be more honest with myself and move past feelings of blame or defensiveness.