#haha......ha

[hqmillioncorn]

 Lalapril 4/6: Blessing

As Cocorn loaded up the last of their things into the cart he wondered if going back to the Twelveswood would be a good idea. Elelote had told him it would be a good thing to reconcile with his family and whatever happened, she would have his back.

It would be nice to speak to his parents again.

Lalatov had just finished packing the last sweets away in his bag when he heard a sudden knock at the door. The sudden knock caused him to knock his bag over and spill out most of the sweets he had just put away.

“I’m here! I’m just cleaning up some things!”

A quick look under the door confirmed his suspicions, there were two pairs of feet right outside. It shouldn’t have surprised him that his parents were checking up on him. Especially with what he brought up that morning.

“Lalatov, sweetie were coming in!”

“J-Just a minute!”

Lalatov pushed his bag and even everything on the floor under his bed as quickly as he could. His cover hadn’t been blown so far and he was going to do everything in his power to keep it that way.

Before he could even tell his parents to come in, the door was already open.

“Hi mother! Father! How can I help you?” Lalatov sat on the bed, his small legs dangling a little ways from the floor. Though he knew he was short that didn’t stop him from trying to hide the evidence as much as he could. “Is this about what happened at the Conjurer's guild? I promise nobody saw me fly up to rescue that chocobo chick!” Besides, everyone knew chocobos are incapable of snitching.

Centaurae and Miminelo looked at each other, confused, and wondering if the other knew what Lalatov was talking about.

“...You know what, never mind about that. What were you two going to say?”

Both decided to ignore whatever he said in favor of dealing with the first problem first.

Centaurae decided to be the first to start. “About your question this morning. We just wanted you to know that-”

“That you’re going to let me visit Ul’dah with the other conjurers?!”

Lalatov was so elated at his mother’s sudden and out of character turn of opinion that he stood up on the bed in excitement.

“Nope.”

His excitement was incredibly short lived and he dropped back down to sitting immediately.

“Your mother and I were discussing it and we are both sure you won’t be missing anything from staying here and continuing your training in Gridania.”

Lalatov knew they were skirting around the actual problem. He was sure that both of them knew they were too. 

The only reason Lalatov wanted to go to Ul’dah was to find out more about his father’s part of the family. Ever since his father had accidentally slipped up and told him he was from there Lalatov had been asking question after question to his parents about where they came from and what they did before he was born.

And every question he asked was met with the same answer.

‘You don’t need to know.’

Lalatov was getting kind of sick of it.

His parents were hiding something. He was sure of it.

“And it wouldn’t be safe for you there.” Centaurae added.

“Why wouldn’t it be safe for me?”

Lalatov looked up at her only to have her look away. It was something she rarely did but Lalatov knew by now it meant she was trying think of something to divert the conversation elsewhere.

“I just want to know! Why! Why are you two hiding things from me?!”

“We are not hiding anything from you.”

“It sure doesn’t feel that way.” Lalatov mumbled to himself. From the way both his mother and father were staring him down he was fairly sure they had heard him. “I just���Please tell me. Mother, father, what are you hiding from me?”

Miminelo stepped forward, he placed a hand on Lalatov’s shoulder. “I promise, we’re not hiding anything from you. And that is the end of this discussion.” He noticed Lalatov’s personally made safety-wand sticking out from under the bed.

“Let me get that for you.” Miminelo reached down for the wand and for a second Lalatov felt a surge of panic all over his body. It took all the strength he had not to twirl his hair as he often did when he was nervous. 

Luckily, his father quickly grabbed the wand and handed it back to him without anything out of the ordinary.

It was bold of his father to promise that they weren’t hiding anything when he had just handed Lalatov the wand his parents had drilled into his head that he always needed to keep on hand. 

Or else.

Centaurae walked over and laid her hand on Lalatov’s head, fluffing up his hair. “You’re better off here. Where you’ll be safe.” Her voice was soft and condescending.

“And where we can watch over you.” Miminelo added. 

Lalatov frowned, there was that thing again. The being safe thing. What were they even talking about?

“Right. Okay. You’re right.” Lalatov figured it was better to just agree with them. That way it was guaranteed they would leave him alone sooner than later.

There was another brief exchange between Centaurae and Miminelo. Their stares were stern and deadly serious. Each knew exactly what the other was thinking. There was no chance that Lalatov could ever be out of their sights for so long.

Not after everything they did.

“Um, if you don’t mind…?” Lalatov’s small voice cut through the tension, “It's getting late so I was wondering if I could get ready to go to bed?” Though his parents had told him he wasn’t allowed to leave with the others he was still allowed to see them off.

“Right, of course.” Miminelo hopped off the bed and walked his way towards the exit.

 Centaurae followed behind him, stopping right before exiting the room. She looked back at him, “Remember Lalatov, your mother and father both love you very much and we only want what keeps you safe and alive.” If her actions from the last fifteen years of Lalatov’s life proved anything, it was that she wasn’t lying about that.

“Then will you tell me?”

Centaurae looked confused.

“Will you tell me why I’m like this?”

Centaurae opened her mouth slightly and for a moment Lalatov hoped that he would finally learn everything he wanted to know for years. Those hopes were almost comically short-lived when his mother closed the door to his room without a word.

He would leave first thing tomorrow.

[shutinthenutouse]

[meme-dealer999]

[troythecatfish]

[doctorsiren]

Day 20 of Sirentober / Doctober

Hands / Journal

You can tell who never made a deal

Available as a print on my Etsy Shop

[justanartistiguess]

Kingerrrrrrrrr 😭😭😭

[aesthetic-uni]

It’s that time of the year again

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[itsfunny-bcitstrue]

🧎🏽🧎🏽

[meziniart]

Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves

[shutinthenutouse]

[meme-dealer999]

[troythecatfish]

[catchymemes]

[outsideyourhousewithaknife]

Knitting is great it's just a fidget toy and periodically you get a scarf or some shit