sophieinthewaste

[sophieinthewaste]

[sophieinthewaste]

On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness

by Arthur Guiterman

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf, And I don’t feel so well myself.

[sophieinthewaste]

Very occasionally, Twitter has some good advice.

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Ada Limón, "The End of Poetry"

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MATINS - Louise Glück

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㋡🥀

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I think the reason so many LOTR ripoffs fail is because they make their Aragorn analogue the main character, when the entire point of Aragorn is that he’s “the person the villains think is the main character, but is Not.”

Aragorn seems like a traditional King Arthur style hero— he has huge Main Character Energy because he’s supported by destiny, by bloodline, by all these magic artifacts and prophecies, and etc etc. Frodo and Sam are Just Some Guys. Aragorn recognizes that Sauron understandably thinks he’s the main hero of this story ….and he pretends to believe it too, spending the entire series using himself as a diversion to prevent Sauron from seeing Frodo and Sam.

Aragorn’s whole thing is that knows he seems like the Main Hero of this legend to people who don’t know better —- but he also knows that he isn’t, and that his role is just to keep Sauron’s eye on him in order to protect the people around him.

And it works! Sauron is so fixated on defeating his Legendary Destined Archenemy with Extreme Main Character Energy that he completely overlooks the two ordinary little guys who were the real threat to him all along.

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“A poem begins with a lump in the throat.”

— Robert Frost

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Fireflies in the Garden

by Robert Frost

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

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Such Silence

by Mary Oliver

As deep as I ever went into the forest I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old, and around it a clearing, and beyond that trees taller and older than I had ever seen.

Such silence! It really wasn’t so far from a town, but it seemed all the clocks in the world had stopped counting. So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied.

Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility. What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason. I hope everyone knows that.

I sat on the bench, waiting for something. An angel, perhaps. Or dancers with the legs of goats.

No, I didn’t see either. But only, I think, because I didn’t stay long enough.

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3 am thoughts:

There is something so freeing about finding pictures of yourself when you were younger and feeling so much compassion for that kid. You smile at their chubby cheeks and bright eyes and think, “you were so young, you didn’t know anything yet! But you were trying so hard. I’m so proud of you for getting through.” It’s so freeing because now you know how future-you will look back at the you that exists now. In this moment, you might feel like a failure or “not enough”, and because you’re oldest you’ve ever been, you think that you really should have it all figured out by now. But your future self looks back with an eye-roll and a smile. No matter how old you are now, they say, “PLEASE, you’re a baby! You don’t know anything yet! But you’re trying so hard, I’m so proud of you for getting through.”

And then pretty soon you don’t need your future self to say it to validate present-you, because you can start saying to present-you. After a while, you can hear the chorus of all of your selves rooting for each other, and each of their perspectives helps you navigate. Your future self knows more about your current situation with that 20/20 hindsight vision, and you can just trust that the lesson they learn from it will be worth it. You might feel inadequate, but your child-self looks at you with awe: oh my gosh, we did THIS?! Or, we got to go THERE?! Whenever you feel like a loser, remember that you are probably a 4-year-old’s idea of a mystic —because adults know everything, of course—and that you are the beautiful lesson plan for an elderly-you who sits back satisfied with a drink on the porch, basking in the wisdom you went out and earned for them.

What a sweet, mind-boggling web we weave as we pass through time. How lucky we are to get to know all of these versions of ourselves and to learn how to love each one of them (despite how damn tough some of these versions make it for us!).

[sophieinthewaste]

I’m trying to figure out what was missing from the first 4 episodes of Bridgerton season 3 (spoilers ahead!). I’ve already seen a lot of commentary that I agree with, but one thing I think would have fleshed out the story a bit would have been for the writers to give us a front row seat in Colin’s brain. I think we needed to see more romantic dreams about Pen that he couldn’t shake. We needed to watch him going over his memories of their past time spent together, re-contextualizing everything in light of this new attraction he feels, and realizing that the one he wants has been in front of him this whole time. Maybe we could have even seen/heard him writing in his diary about her, either processing these feelings deliberately or just finding himself writing about her even when he’s not trying to, surprised to find that she is his ultimate inspiration, not his travels or the mindless companionship he’d found abroad.

While we did get some of Colin’s interiority, I think we needed a whole lot more— it felt like the script just told the actor to communicate that Colin was wrestling with his new feelings by serving pensive looks, and to be sure, pensive looks were served!! But if Colin couldn’t have an actual, explicit conversation with someone about his growing feelings for Pen to spell it out for us, then the writers should have found other ways for us to fully experience the contours and textures of this internal development that weren’t just *Colin looks at Pen at the ball* and *Colin is distracted from his daily life* and *Colin has a very vague conversation with his mom* Especially since there weren’t that many Polin scenes in the first 4 episodes, we needed to see Pen being on Colin’s mind, not just deduce it by implication.

It was still a lot of fun to watch, I took to calling Lord Debling Debby and that made it a whole lot better. Honestly Pen should be with Colin, Cressida should be with Eloise, and I should be with Debby. Can’t wait for part 2!!

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I think I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of my life as a test, where I need to get as many things right as possible and avoid the bloody wounds of the Red Pen at all costs. I’m still working on this, but I find that reframing life as an exploration or voyage is more helpful. I am on this cosmologically radical adventure, because even as this whole human thing has been done over and over, there has never been a ME before. Because I am the universe experiencing itself, I need to focus on doing right by the universe and just experience, observe and catalogue and take notes and just steep in it all. Both failures and triumphs are just things that go in the Captain’s Log; both are fascinating, both are things to learn from, to carry with me as integral steps on my journey. I’m not being tested, I won’t be punished for a low grade on life; I’m navigating the uncharted waters of being me, and I’m gonna explore the heck out of them while I still can.

[sophieinthewaste]

I feel so late to the party, but it’s only been in my early 20s that I discovered the ~joys of fandom/fanfiction~; a past, snobby version of me would hate to say it, but it’s honestly been profound for me. I stumbled into AO3 when my chronic illness relapsed and I was bedridden; my brain was so addled with fatigue and brain fog that I couldn’t pick up a book, so I thought fanfiction might be a nice way to try to read again without having to trudge through longer works.

I could wax poetic for a long time about what I ended up discovering when I got into reading and writing fanfiction, but one of the most important things for me was seeing how fandom communities worked together to create a sort of multiverse of story. I timidly searched for fics for a TV show where my favorite character dies and his death had left me reeling with feelings that almost felt like real grief. But then, to my surprise, here on this site were hundreds of stories where this character was still alive, happy, well! Hundreds of storylines where death was not a necessity, not his destiny, where he got the life and happiness that he deserved. Suddenly, the storyline of the show didn’t have a suffocating grip around my throat; the show’s storyline is one version of the story, yes, but it does not have to have ultimate power over me. In one world that character dies, and in hundreds of others he doesn’t, at least not until he’s good and ready. There was space for all of these storylines, all of these possibilities, and I could gain something from as many of them as I wanted to explore.

This was not only comforting in terms of my relationship to story, but also healing in my own life. I felt utterly helpless in my illness, like a puppet on strings controlled by some biochemical reality in me that I couldn’t defy or even name. I felt like I was at the complete mercy of this storyline in my life, that illness had taken over the entire plot and I just had to lie there and take it.

Of course, fanfiction was no medical intervention. (If only.) But it did help me learn: you don’t have to be at the mercy of a story that kills you. You can change it. You can add to it. You can rewind, or go forward, jump to an AU. Say “yes and,” in that glorious way that fics all coexist under that expansive, inclusive umbrella of their fandom. You have that power over story just by your birthright of having an imagination. I couldn’t wave a magic wand at my failing body, but I could work to stop my brain from writing stories where I would never heal or be happy again. I could decide to tell the story that, instead of being a wretched good-for-nothing corpse, I was a person who was surviving, whose “best” just looked like taking the next breath and that was enough. I could see all the ugly of my circumstances but also open myself up to all the coexisting subplots of my life, that there was still beauty and light worth living for, even if it was just found in a smile or a laugh inspired by a great fic.

Fanfiction helped me learn that stories are ours, including (and especially) our own stories, and I will always be grateful. I’m sure a lot of my fellow fic readers/writers discovered this freedom and agency long ago in the trenches of middle school, but better late than never!!

[sophieinthewaste]

I was walking across my liberal arts college campus the other day and I passed by a mom with her little children on the quad playing with a frisbee and climbing trees. I had already moved on by the time I heard a sweet little voice from behind me ask her mother, “is that where the students sleep and live?”, the girl probably pointing to one of the buildings nearby.

In the moment I couldn’t quite say why, but this struck me as so delightful and yet so profound, I immediately pulled out my phone to write the phrase down. The little girl was ostensibly asking if the building that she saw was a dorm, but what vaster questions she provokes!! As a student, I know where I sleep but… where do I live? And is sleeping separate from living? Is sleep a sort of cyclical death that I enter into each night, out which I am reborn into living each morning? And isn’t it so true, that sleeping and living are ultimately the two activities that comprise human existence? Isn’t that what it all comes down to?

I think this is what they mean when they say the ~liberal arts experience~ To that little girl, wherever you are, thanks for being my philosophy professor, and I hope that you love where you sleep and live <3