#also it was relevant.....trust me

[royce-melborn]

sometimes therapy is paying $100 to talk about lotr and eurovision

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I've been doing a lot of reflection as of late, especially after this past class.

This past class was about the Torah and Tanakh in general, and the way the rabbi talked about the commandments (specifically the ten commandments) has made me really reflect on how I interpret them, specifically the fifth commandment, or honoring your mother and father.

This is a commandment I have wrestled with for a long time - in fact, it brought me away from g-d at multiple times. I was severely abused when I was incredibly young by my mother, and I used to feel insulted at the implication that I were to honor her while she got to live a better life. It was hypocritical, in my eyes.

But this rabbi surmised that this particular commandment was because parenthood is an act of creation, something that is like the g-d from which we come from. My realization is this: I don't think we're necessarily meant to take even these commandments literally.

I this particular commandment is more of a call to honor creation - creation is a gift, and like any gift, many people simply will not like it and will discard it. The person who abused me created me, but she did not honor creation. She didn't honor me, but I can still honor it.

I have started to honor creation much more. I'm too young, too unstable, not mature enough to be a father (though I fantasize about it), but I create all the time. I create relationships, I create with my hands through crochet. I create memories, I create my world. And I can honor who I am and where I came from that made me who I am. I've been learning one of the mother tongues of my family (Italian, since part of my family originates there) and it was judaism that inspired me to do this.

I don't think g-d wants me to honor my abuser. I think He wants me to remember the Holy action of creation. When I am a father, that act of creation will be Holy, and indeed, I am already joyful about the thought.

I have seen many people struggle with this particular commandment, but I think this perspective helps me personally. I don't think I ever have to forgive my abusers (plural), and I don't think I am commanded to simply because they happened to be family. I am commanded to recognize the holy, to elevate the mundane. In doing so, I will remember g-d. Through creation, I honor g-d and everything he has done for us, for me, and for our collective people.

[horreurscopes]

i like my body when it is with your body.

[cirrus-grey]

I do feel it might be important to point out-

MAG100:

MARTIN: Sorry again that the Archivist isn’t actually in today, um… but I should be… absolutely fine to take your statement if it, um, if that’s okay with you?

LYNNE: Er… yeah.

We don’t actually see it happen, but it’s very likely that Martin introduced himself to Lynne/Celia with his full name here before turning the tape on – he already knows her first and last name to do the statement intro a moment later.

MAG190:

CELIA: Sorry, we haven’t been introduced, you are…?

GEORGIE: Oh, um, of course, sorry. This is –

ARCHIVIST: Jonathan. Jon. Sims.

MARTIN: Uh, Martin. Hello!

…And she gets Jon’s full name in the tunnels, as well as a reminder that a “Martin” associated with the Institute is traveling with him. It’s impossible to say how much she remembers from the time before the apocalypse, of course, but I do think it’s likely that Celia has known Jon and Martin’s names this whole time, and has simply been waiting for the right moment to bring Sam in to help her look for them in this new world, too.

[lgbtlunaverse]

While rereading mdzs I am once again shocked by how talked about the "you were the only mistake he ever made" line from Lan Xichen to Wei Wuxian is and how heated it gets some people because honestly... I don't think he actually even believes that.

Stay with me. Look at the actual line. (I Included 2 translations for comparison's sake)

Firstly, yes he is mad at Wei Wuxian in this scene. But his biggest moment of anger was actually before this. By this point he's realized that Wei Wuxian forgot what happened after nightless city (and therefore ISN'T stringing along his baby brother on purpose) so he has in fact calmed down a bit.

Secondly, notice that he starts by talking about how his uncle felt. This is not Lan Xichen making a value statement about what he thinks. When he says Lan Wangji was proper and righteous he is talking about him being a model lan, he's talking about their family and clan's perspective of Wangji. Indeed, in their eyes, Wei Wuxian is the only time Lan Wangji was ever not the textbook perfect Lan.

Thirdly, what is Lan Xichen trying to say here? What is he mad at Wei Wuxian for? It's that he doesn't know Lan Wangji is in love with him. His anger is eased by realizing Wei Wuxian doesn't remember the very blatant confessions lwj made in the cave after nightless city, or Lan Wangji fighting his own clan elders for Wei Wuxian, and so had no way of knowing the whipmarks on Lan Wangji's back were related to him. But he is still mad, he still thinks Wei Wuxian should have been able to figure it out. So what does he highlight?

The fact that the only thing Lan Wangji, perfect model-Lan righteous Lan Wangji, ever defies his clan for is Wei Wuxian.

And Wei Wuxian has seen him do this! Even if he doesn't remember this one instance. Because Lan Wangji has been doing that the whole story through. Wei Wuxian has watched Lan Wangji blatantly stand against the entire cultivation world for him, and here Lan Xichen is highlighting just how unusual that is, how much Wei Wuxian must mean to Lan Wangji that he's willing to do that. The important part of the sentence here is not "mistake" it's "only."

Lan Xichen here isn't trying to say that he disapproves of Wei Wuxian, or telling him to stay away from his brother. Remember, the thing that made him mad in the first place was Wei Wuxian saying that he and Lan Wangji slept in seperate rooms. He thought they were together! He's mad because they're not!

At no point does Lan Xichen say he individually considers Lan Wangji's feelings for Wei Wuxian a mistake. If he ever did, it's clear he accepted them regardless long ago. Mistake or not, what he wants is for his little brother to be happy.

[rosekasa]

something that absolutely changed the way i approach goals was realising that it's never the thing that you want, but rather the feelings that you believe it will give you. without striving for those feelings, the thing is not going to make you happy.

for example, until i was eighteen i would daydream about having a Real Best Friend. like i wanted my disney channel bff you know?? and getting older felt a lot like 'okay it'll happen when i get to secondary school' 'okay it'll happen when i get to sixth form' 'okay it'll happen in fandom' and it just. never did. i kept getting sucked into friendships that made me feel shit about myself while all the people that seemed to want to be close to me would, for some reason, make me feel uncomfortable. but it was at the point where i was like, okay. what do i really want from a friend? is it the actual object of A Friend or is it what i feel like A Friend would allow me to do? so instead of looking for that Real Best Friend, i started allowing myself to feel like i deserved a Real Best Friend. i stopped deleting my messages even if i thought they were embarrassing, and i stopped worrying that people would think im annoying if i messaged them first, and i stopped being scared of being 'too much' whenever i shared my interests.

and you know what? within two months i GOT that Real Best Friend. within a few more i had Multiple of those Real Best Friends. it's been three years since that shift in my life and it's like All my friends are like my disney channel bff friends -- they genuinely care about me, they genuinely like me as a person, they invite me to their houses, they cook for me, they buy me random things when they think of me, and most of all they make me love myself more, when for my entire life the trade off for a friendship always felt like i had to hate myself a little.

idk. i just think it's worth remembering that the feeling of something is the most important thing to strive for. a thing without feeling is nothing

[accirax]

a surprising sequel?!

[scalproie]

Kazuya, Power and Freedom

[fucksutawneyphil]

whenever i’m like “maybe i think tara is stronger than she actually is” i remember how she went toe to toe with slade when they sparred and his reaction was to silently freak the fuck out

[gregoftom]

what do you mean you don’t think you’re gonna be buried at my side

[strangeconnoisseurhologram]

Make the sweeping edits you want to see in the world

[ssstarlighttt]

PEDESTALS part eight: new horizons

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[murderofsomeone]

what's your opinion of the afternoon from viewmonster ?

it's pretty silly I like it. some parts are fun to play on piano

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

the thing about chilshi is that i see it as super one-sided on chilchuck's part and that's some shit he's bringing to the grave with him

[andrrrgynous]

cherie currie being a terf was unexpected but i find it very audacious of her to claim ''dangerous hormones'' ''could'' have ''ruined'' her life when she was refering to a point in her life when she also was on a shit ton of drugs

[lanciilatte]

Cabby’s Gaps in Understanding

These scenes.

Are the parallels of all time. I think it was absolutely intentional that their ‘niche intelligences’ were explained in this exact order on these separate, very important occasions. Cabby thinks Test Tube and Fan are defined by these intelligences, and acknowledges that it was reductive to discredit Test Tube later on.

They’re stronger together and made a rash decision out of how much they care for each other. This results in TBD being made, and TBD’s existence is the one thing that stumps Cabby. Cabby cannot understand using all the potential behind combined strength to make an emotional decision. She doesn’t realize Fan and Test Tube doing this is a possibility, nor does she understand Test Tube throwing away that potential due to emotions brought out by the situation.

There’s an emotional reaction on her part to this too. She wants to experience this bond and combined strength very badly. She wants to believe she can experience it, even though it probably would not come naturally. Of course it wouldn’t, as though she regards it as ‘something warmer’, she also mentions how it’s ‘more subjective’. Considering how much of her image and sense of self is lauded as objective and factual, this is a big deal.

She’s so fascinating in that way, that what she clearly wants more than anything is the one thing that trips her up. She can categorize people all she wants into whatever boxes she can think of. But she can’t understand anyone not chasing the thing she desperately wants. Especially if they threw the potential away for a reason like Test Tube’s: because of emotions stirred up by the immediate circumstances. That’s an uncomfortable prospect for her, that unpredictability you have to trust as a part of yourself, since it’s what you really feel. That might be one of the most uncomfortable things for her full stop. She can’t understand stifling the potential to achieve something she desperately wants for that reason. But then we run into another problem, she doesn’t know how to openly discuss achieving that connection. It’s something she can’t even talk about comfortably without relying on someone else’s expression of feelings to draw from. Even when outlining a strategy with objective information, which is the definition of her comfort zone.

Now it’s caused a problem in her research, in her game plan. It’s gotten her eliminated and it’s gotten her nowhere with the biggest mystery/challenge to her database we’ve seen her tackle. But research has nothing to do with her goals, other than to be insurance that things never get too far off course. Though it is very telling that one of the clearest signs of her sense of lack is how it interferes with her research. How it interferes with her database, because the easiest way for her to realize a sense of lack in herself is through an extension of herself, right? Her files are that extension of herself.

This idea of her knowledge being all that she sees or presents herself as is not concrete yet. But consider everything else and her elaboration being “I am a piece, Test Tube is a piece, and our combined strength is—was… a piece.” There’s all this strategy and ‘sake of the game’ talk, but she’s really trying to reflect on the feelings brought out in both herself, Test Tube, and everyone else. She has to ‘evenly divide’ the moving parts of the situation in order to justify how she feels about it. She has to evenly divide people to understand them, she approaches the social aspect of the game in the way she knows how. She frames it like it only makes sense to do so, but deep down she puts so much of herself into her writing because she wants to understand others. “To understand them” is the reason she gives for making files on people. She could’ve elaborated if she wanted to… But she preferred to leave the reason unstated and move on. Before we can delve into that idea, we need to detail Cabby’s own understanding of herself first.

She more-so sees people as what they do, and their actions rather than who they are. Whether she views herself that way and then applied it to others or the other way around I don’t know. But she definitely makes a habit out of keeping track of peoples’ habits. She doesn’t just do it to pass time, she’s fascinated by it. She’s fascinated for the wrong reasons though, as a true logician fuelled by information would not be so comfortable with predictability. She’s not only comfortable with it, but depends on it to understand the whole set of said knowledge. This is all very similar to Fan, however she is far less inclined to include others’ emotion in her fascination or perception. In Cabby’s database, Clover can be a ‘sweet girl’ but she cannot be a ‘source of sweetness’ or ‘someone who makes me feel me sweetness.’ There’s no spontaneous action involved, only a type of person.

All this is to say: I think Cabby can understand certain emotions driving your actions, but those actions all have to be rational and controlled. She doesn’t understand emotions being a large part of the decision or action itself. This is what consistently trips her up. She can account for the base emotional state of people, but not what they’ll do when emotions that suddenly arise in them or change unpredictably are involved. What someone will do ‘under pressure.’ Not following the same patterns over and over. She can understand the patterns she sees, she can’t understand that everyone is a unique example of the ‘type of person’ she sees them as. I’d say this is where Cabby and Fan’s insular perspectives line up and then diverge again. Cabby plays with accurate information she’s perceived and that’s the fun part. Fan has fun with perceiving information without that close consideration to accuracy, since trivia is more of a decoration to him. For Cabby, she is a decoration to the trivia. She needs to perceive things objectively and accurately for her own pride, and she needs to preserve this information in order to put it to use. Because of course her understanding needs to be useful, to be helpful, otherwise she’d be doing it for the sake of knowledge. What she extra doesn’t understand is that if she’s doing this for own reasons, for pride or for a clear end result being a comfort, she’s already been making rash decisions fuelled by emotion. She’s making ill-advised decisions and *mistakes* by disregarding her own fallibility. There’s no way she can always keep up this image when that image has an emotional strain and her goals don’t take into account how to mend emotional struggles. The thing is, her emotional struggles or even her mistakes aren’t something she looks away from. She just doesn’t know what she’s looking at, or what she brings to the table that she would rather get from other people’s input. She doesn’t know it, nor can she begin to express it yet, but she has her own warmth inside her objectivity, she doesn’t need to gain that ability from someone else. She could win people over if she showed up as the ‘girl who puts herself into her database to calm herself and help others’ and not the ‘girl who cares more about her files than anyone, including herself, so imagine how she feels about *you*.’

The number one decision she needed to be making, is the kind of decision she can’t fathom someone else making. Acting upon a spontaneous desire to help someone, no matter if you have the perfect plan or even a plan that makes sense. Or, in the competition sense, helping people through their problem instead of keeping track of their problem just running its course. Looking out for the team in an honest and upfront way, instead of waiting for that perfect ally to come along and spark a change. This is especially unrealistic since a ‘perfect ally’ for her would have to be one that’s earned her respect and given her new insight. Cabby makes that very difficult to accomplish, in fact, she makes it harder every single time she seeks out information on her own.

But she could do so much good if she just realized that. She’s already done a lot of good without directly intending it. Cabby’s research is what gets Clover to question how she lives her life. She kickstarts Clover’s entire arc. Cabby’s research is also what helps TBD start looking for answers, and one of the things that let her know Test Tube was hiding something regarding those answers.

She overall needs to become more comfortable with spontaneity related to both emotions and information. If she were comfortable with that, then her needing ‘constant input from other people to feel alive’ wouldn’t result in her looking at people reductively. If she stopped looking at people reductively, she could see them more as ongoing projects, not instalments in the history of her perception. Then, finally, she could see that she herself is one of those ongoing projects that can be fulfilled by warmth and efforts to change for good. Not just reliability when things go wrong, but taking initiative in making things right.

Since she still just ‘wants to win people over’, she’s still figuring out what all the moving pieces are. The ‘why’ and ‘what’ she did wrong. But she wouldn’t have gotten to this point so easily if she didn’t care about how others felt. She cares that her mistakes hurt people, that’s why she’s reevaluating her thought process immediately after being shown that was the case. She wants to make things right, but she has to step out of her comfort zone to do it, and understand that ‘right’ changes in an instant from situation to situation, person to person. But she’s been shown her impact, and she readily accepts it once she stops clarifying her intent. That’s a great start. It’s the same start that Test Tube made once. I’m confident it’s the start of something better, considering the way she found out she was wrong is that she’s upset people outside of ‘the sake of the game’, that says a lot! It definitely couldn’t have been because her pride was damaged, since she was kind of really frantic and openly kinda pathetic while grasping at more answers during her last moments on the show. If only she knew the gap in her understanding that’s damaged her pride beyond caring for it is directly linked to the one damaging her growth. I would love to see these ideas linked again if Cabby and TBD are truly acquainted one day! Acquainted, or able to meet as friends who learn from each other, not as a mystery or problem to solve. That would be the perfect resolution to Test Tube realizing she made Cabby’s mistake before she could learn who TBD really was.