#humboldt's gift

[derangedrhythms]

Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.

Saul Bellow, from 'Humboldt's Gift'

[theblackestofsuns]

Humboldt's Gift (1975)

Saul Bellow

Penguin Books

[thequietabsolute]

The Boeing tore off through shawls of cloud, the hurtling moment of risk and death ended with a musical Bing! and we entered the peace and light above. My head lay on the bib and bosom of the seat and when the Jack Daniel's came I strained it through my irregular multicolored teeth, curling my forefinger over the top of the glass to hold back the big perforated ice cubes — they always put in too many. The thread of whisky burned pleasantly in the gullet and then my stomach, like the sun outside, began to glow, and the delight of freedom also began to expand within me. … Once in a while, I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness — it feels so free! Then I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can also be beheld from yonder and am not a discrete object but incorporated with the rest, with universal sapphire, purplish blue. For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the eight-inch diameter of your skull? (I say nothing of the sun and the galaxy which are also there.) At the center of the beholder there must be space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing but a nothing reserved for everything. You can feel this nothing-everything capacity with ecstasy and this was what I actually felt in the jet. Sipping whisky, feeling the radiant heat that rose inside, I experienced a bliss that I knew perfectly well was not mad.

— Saul Bellow, from Humboldt’s Gift (1975.)

[sthefany16]

Hi guys😊😊

I just watched A Gifted Man, and I loved it 😍 it's just perfect, I loved the way the characters developed, and the bond they created throughout the episodes. Michael is an excellent professional and a wonderful person who just has to heal and free himself from his traumas. Despite his arrogant and arrogant ways ❤️ we can see how sensitive he is and who cares about others. An excellent series✨ I found the plot super creative and engaging, it's a crime that it was cancelled. Michael Holt is definitely one of my favorite characters ❤️ completely in love with him and all the characters. I will still hopefully wait for a second season. Ps: he's really talented, Michael plays piano and drums in the series, seeing him singing and playing with Zeke's band made me fall in love with him even more 😍 😍 😍 hahaha. Unfortunately I haven't found a video of them yet. ( Amazing, wonderful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful....🥰😍😍✨) And yes ladies... I accept fanfics of our super sexy doctor Michael Holt! ✨🫦🛐😍😍🙏

[power-chords]

I was a mess when I finished it for the first time!

[philosophybitmaps]

[lvthkllr]

It’s the opening of season as Anthony, Kate, Benedict, Francesca, Hyacinth, Gregory, Violet, and an extremely disgruntled Eloise break their fast in the drawing room.

*Humboldt walks in with the latest copy of Lady Whistledown in hand making his way to Violet and Kate. The newly minted mother and daughter read the first pamphlet since the end of last season as their eyes widen in shock*

Violet: *trying and failing to sound calm* Anthony dear, might you know when your brother will be joining us?

Anthony: I haven’t the faintest idea Mother, he seemed quite tired after returning from his travels yesterday morning. Maybe he is sleeping.

Kate: *anxiously* Perhaps you should go and hasten him along.

Anthony: Oh for the love of——Colin is a grown man. I will not go to his bedroom to wake him up!

Finally looking up from his newspaper he sees a strained look on Violet’s face and a Whistledown pamphlet in Kate’s hand.

Anthony: God in heaven, what has he done now?

Kate: It seems … it’s seems that Colin may have said something, well he said something——

Anthony: *raising his eyebrows in annoyance* Spit it out Kate!

Kate: I … well, it appears Lady Whistledown may have heard him say that he would never dream of courting Penelope Featherington.

Violet: And he had apparently said so in the company of multiple, eligible bachelors, at last season’s Featherington Ball.

As the elder Bridgerton children hear the last of the details they begin to chime in.

Francesca: Now Anthony, calm down. I am sure that is not what Colin mean——

Benedict: Well whatever else could he have meant Fran?!?

Francesca: *shooting an annoyed look at her brother and speaking in a hushed yell* You are not helping!

Benedict: Eloise, you are uncharacteristically silent. Are you and Miss Featherington not friends? Have you nothing to say?

Just as Eloise opened her mouth to respond Colin walked into the drawing room.

Colin: Good morning family! Now Hyacinth before you ask, I do have your gift however it may take until the end of the day to find it in my luggage, but my valet is on the case!

Looking up from his already full plate Colin was welcomed to the sight of his older siblings staring at him with worried looks, Kate with her face in her hands, his mother with an anxious smile, and Anthony looking angrier than he had seen him in years.

Colin: Is something the matter?

Anthony: *now seething with noticeable anger* Why yes something is the matter. Lady Whistledown has just informed the entire ton of your comments from the end of last season.

Colin: Whatever do you mean?

Anthony: Well, ACCORDING TO LADY WHISTLEDOWN YOU TOLD A ENTIRE GROUP OF MEN THAT YOU WOULD NEVER DREAM OF COURTING PENELOPE FEATHERINGTON!! Have you no care for her reputation, FOR HER FEELINGS COLIN!

Violet: Colin, just tell us that you did not say this.

Colin: Well …

A chorus of groans and voices echoing out “oh no” and “Colin!” rang out in the drawing room.

Anthony: *whispering to Kate and his Mother* I am going to kill him.

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Franz Boas

Franz Boas was not the father of American anthropology. But the fact that so many people think he was shows how thoroughly his relentless energy transformed the discipline as we know it today.

Boas around age four

Boas was born in Germany in 1858. He grew up in the shadow of events that happened a decade earlier: The famous ‘Revolutions of 1848’, when people across Europe demanded an end to imperialism, monarchy, and the poverty caused by the Industrial Revolution. Boas grew up in a household of “forty eighters”, and became deeply committed to the ideals of liberty and progress which drove the revolutions. As a young man, Boas received a rigorous education and spent most of his free time outdoors, exploring the natural world. Like his idol Alexander von Humboldt, Boas combined a romantic wonder at nature's rich diversity with a naturalist's love of science, rigor, and classification.

Boas was Jewish, but not because he wanted to be. His parents were wealthy merchants for whom 'progress' meant shedding the ancient superstitions of the past. He didn't have a choice: Germany had given Jews the right to vote and own property, but remained an antisemitic place. Boas was labeled a Jew by others. So he learned to be fearless: In college when he was insulted he demanded a duel. He and his opponent would don goggles to protect their eyes, and then use their sabers to try to slash open each others’ face. “With the damn Jew baiters this winter one could not survive without quarreling and fighting.” He wrote his worried parents, reassuring them. “I remain unmolested since every student here knows that I would not be shy to defend my affairs with the sword.” He was not exaggerating. "He bears the mark of his German university training literally," the Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa noted, "in a somewhat disfiguring scar across his face". Indeed, one of the first things people noted about Boas were his scars.

Although he was academically gifted, Boas ended up doing a Ph.D. in the unprepossessing university of Kiel. His sister Toni was ill and the Boas family was tight-knit: He went to go live with her. The result was a miserable experience writing a Ph.D. on the color of seawater. His main discovery was that it was incredibly hard to measure the color of sea water. Later on, when he studied how perception is shaped by culture, these insights would come to help him. At the time, he was miserable.

Then love struck: Boas fell head over heels for Marie Krackowizer, a German-American lady whose family of “Forty Eighters” had fled to the US. She loved him too, but they could not be married until he got a job. For that, Boas needed to “habilitate”, a level of education above a Ph.D. He decided on a trip to the arctic, where he would study the influence of geography on Inuit people. He paid for it by writing an account of his travels for a German newspaper, and with a gift of money from the man who would be his principle benefactor in years to come, his uncle Jacobi. His parents insisted that he take along the gardener, Willie, so that he wouldn't be alone.

Boas posing in a German photography studio for an image to share with people demonstrating what his life had been like in Baffinland.

Boas spent a year in Baffinland, an island in the far, far north of Canada. The trip was unbelievably dangerous: Ships had to dock at the edge of the ice and then people would walk across the ice to the island. In the winter it was -40 degrees. Luckily Boas was energetic, focused, and driven by huge energy. He was the sort of person who was disgusted at himself for only working 20 hour days. He did research during the day and read Kant at night. Above all, he came to see Inuit people as people. "The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down on them," he wrote to Marie in a letter that was spattered with the blood of the raw seal liver he had been eating.

Boas's trip was a success. He habilitated and married his sweetheart Marie. Together they created a loving and warm family. Professional success eluded him, however. Antisemitism made it difficult for him to find a job in Germany, so he moved to the US, where Marie’s family was — there were more opportunities there and Franz was also attracted to America as a land where his political ideals of liberty and freedom were more realized than they were in Germany.

Franz and Marie's wedding portrait.

Unfortunately, Boas found that there were few good jobs for geographers in the US. What people were interested in was Native Americans. Back in 1879 (when Boas was still in school) anthropology as a modern discipline was born in the United States. The goal was to understand the 'natural history of mankind', which in the US meant the origins of Native Americans. Were had they come from and what were they like? Previous answers -- tenuously derived from the Bible -- were clearly inadequate in light of new theories of evolution.

So Boas retooled himself as an anthropologist. He made multiple trips to the Pacific Northwest, a region that he is most closely associated with today. Still, he struggled. He got a dream job as a professor at Clark, a brand new university — only to have the university close down after a few years. He organized anthropological exhibits at the World's Fair at Chicago, hoping it would lead to a permanent position, but it didn’t. It was a dark time for Boas. His third daughter, Hete, was born in Chicago, caught whooping cough, and died in his arms. She was ten months old. Finally, Boas took a job at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and started teaching part time at Columbia. Finally in 1899, at the age of forty, he got a permanent position: He was now a faculty member at Columbia.

"Boas with the George Hunt family. Left to right, standing: David, George, Lalaxs'a, Mary (Ebbetts), Jonathan and Franz Boas. Sitting: Marion and Lucy. From row: Mary and Stanley" from Franz Boas: An Illustrated Biography

At Columbia, Boas was cutting edge. At a time when Harvard and Yale were just beginning to update their medieval curriculums, he had a Ph.D., the new research-focused degree that had made German universities world famous. Boas made history by being the first person in the US to offer a Ph.D. His students included Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, and many others.

Boas was also a tireless organizer, sitting on boards of journals, foundations, and associations. These positions allowed him to control funding and direct it to students. He was also a close friend of the millionaire feminist and activist Elsie Clews Parsons, who herself funded an entire generation of anthropological fieldwork. Boas worked his students very, very hard but also showed them tremendous loyalty. Boas not only lent money to students in times of need, in one case he signed on as a guarantor of a student loan, agreeing to pay it if the student defaulted.

Boas around the time he began working at Columbia.

True to his principles, Boas believed in meritocracy: If you could do the work, that was all that mattered. As a result he trained a generation of female students at a time when many universities didn’t accept female students at all. He also had few illusions about how much a white person could learn spending their summers on a reservation. For him, the best anthropologist was an insider with scientific training. As a result, he mentored scholars like William Jones (a Fox Indian) and Zora Neale Hurston.

 “Elsie [Clews Parsons] and colleagues at. Lounsberry, mid-1920s. On the porch, Elsie (in shadow on left) talks with Pliny Goddard; on the steps are Margaret Mead, Esther Goldfrank, Franz Boas, and Mrs. Nelson”. Via Deacon’s Elsie Clews Parsons. This picture illustrates the close ties Boas had with his students.

In fact, Boas was an uncompromising opponent of racism. Famously, in May 1906, he traveled to Atlanta University at the invitation of W.E.B. Du Bois and gave a speech claiming black people were biologically equal to white people. This was not a small thing in the Jim Crow South. Four months later, 25 black people were killed in Atlanta in a riot against black people that turned into a massacre. Then in 1909 Boas and a team of twenty researchers made 13,000 measurements of the children of immigrants to see whether they inherited their parents’ ’racial’ features. To his own surprise, Boas found that they didn't -- height, weight, and other factors were the result of the environment, not heredity. His students did similar research. Margaret Mead wrote a paper demonstrating the black people in the Midwest (where there was a strong public school system) did better on standardized tests than poor southern whites: schooling, not race, seemed to determine intelligence. Southern politicians repressed the study.

Boas’s relationship with indigenous people was more complicated. He was not a champion for Indigenous rights. He considered Native Americans conquered by the US and on the verge of cultural and biological extinction. His goal was 'salvage': to make a record of a disappearing culture the same way we have a record of Ancient Greece and Rome. He worked with many indigenous informants like George Hunt, who he paid to write letters detailing their customs. This relationship remains an object of scrutiny today: Did Boas exploit Hunt? Was Hunt Boas’s teacher and mentor? How much should someone be paid to write descriptions of salmon fishing in 1900 anyway?

Whatever we think of Boas’s relationship with Indigenous people today, at Columbia no one thought Boas was a friend to white people. He was considered a dangerous radical who had to be canceled. Not only did Boas attack the racial foundations of America, but when the US entered World War I, Boas was became a public enemy for opposing the war. Remember, this was a time when people where lynched for being German in the US. Columbia stopped paying him. They kept him from teaching undergraduates. They took space away from the department, leaving him with just his office. Boas was, essentially, canceled by the right.

What’s more, Boas's life was beset by personal tragedy. In addition to the death of his ten month old daughter in 1894, in 1924 his daughter Trudel died of polio. In 1925 his son Heini was killed in a car accident. Then in 1929 his wide died in a hit and run accident - the driver who hit her was never found. Boas's misery was palpable even before Marie's death. In 1927 he wrote to his son Ernst:

"I have not the light spirit of others and when I do not work, or else am intensely occupied with something else I can think of nothing but Trudel and Heini. They are there when I get up in the morning and when I stop work at night they are there… If I do not work these thoughts would destroy me." [L-Z v2 275]

Franz Boas featured on the cover of the 11 May 1936 cover of Time Magazine. In his old age, Boas's fight against racism became popular in America again as the US prepared to fascism in Europe.

Late in life Boas received the recognition he deserved, becoming a world-renowned scientist. In America, his anti-racist thinking became more and more recognized as America geared up to fight fascism. In Germany, an event was scheduled to give him an honorary degree. The degree was canceled and his books were pulled from the library and burnt by the Nazis. His last great work of activism was to help Jewish and leftist scholars flee the Nazis and get visas to come teach in America.

When Boas retired, he handed Columbia a gift: despite its attempts to derail him, he had created perhaps the greatest department of anthropology in the United States. And yet here failure dogged him. He had hoped his students Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir would come to Columbia to continue his work. Instead they stayed at Berkeley and Yale. His successor became Ruth Benedict, but she was then pushed aside by the administration and replaced by first Ralph Linton and then Duncan Strong.

Boas suffered many setbacks in his life, but he also overcame many obstacles. He lived an extraordinary life: Born before the Civil War, he lived to see the Pearl Harbor bombings. He trained the anthropologists who went on to start departments at Yale, Berkeley, Oregon, and many other places. He produced his famous ��six foot shelf” — enough books on Kwakwakwakw that is longer than I was tall. After his death, his grandchildren and George Hunt’s grandchildren had a family reunion, and Hunt’s great grandchildren study anthropology in University. Despite his incredible age, Boas did not live to see just how influential he would become. Although he did not know it at the time, he became one of the few people Boas did not quite Although he may not have recognized or admitted it, he had in fact become one of the most important anthropologists in the world, and left an indelible imprint on the discipline for generations to come.

Sources: This was drawn from Rosemary Lévy-Zumwalt's two volume biography of Boas. The quote from . The reference to 1879 as the 'founding' date of anthropology comes from https://www.jstor.org/stable/658142?seq=1 . The Te Rangi Hiroa quote is from Na to Hoa Aroha volume 3. The blood stained letter is from George Stocking's "From physics to ethnology", p. 148

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

[spaghetticat3899]

I made these refs back for this year’s Artfight, but never got around to finishing the rest of my characters’. I nickname these three “the main trio” because they’re the three splatoon characters I draw and like the most. All three have a thing in common, albeit for different reasons: they all don’t go by their original names! If you’d like to read character ramblings, look below the cut, if not, you may do what you like.

Things to note: My Splatoon characters are stuck in Splatoon 2 purgatory, so the weapons, ages, and all that are stuck in that time period. (R) and (UR) is short for (restricted) and (unrestricted), which is referring to if the height is measured within a canon limitation, or without canon inkfish heights in mind.

Mochi

Dawn “Mochi” Funboruto

cis female (she/her)

Aged 16

5’ (R) - 5’7” (UR)

Mochi is an interesting inkling, not actually originating in Inkadia at all, instead from a far-off city by the name of Arrecife. She’s childhood friends with Slick, and only moved to Inkopolis because he’d shown it to be a hot spot for things of interest. She’s a Humboldt inkling, but cursed with an unusually small stature compared to her relatives, making her appear as an average inkling. Evidence of her ancestry can still be found in her sucker rings, which, unlike most inklings, are still very-much there. She’s described as sisterly, laid-back, and sarcastic, but can also snap to a very energetic, mischievous, and havoc-causing individual. She never seems to stand still, even while relaxed, quite fidgety by nature. She tries not to overthink, which can lead to poorly thought-out choices that result in unpleasant outcomes. She’s easily persuaded by bribes of food or money, which some of her friends take advantage of for her to do stupid dares, tasks, or for her to not blackmail them. She jokes around and doesn’t usually bring up serious subjects unless she thinks it’s important. She often has to be the straight-man around people like Slick, but also can join in on the mischief. She’s also agent 4, but it doesn’t really become super relavent. She goes by Mochi just because she feels like it, nothing else, really.

Slick

Mason “Slick” Stone

cis male (he/him)

Aged 15

4’11” (R) - 5’5” (UR)

Slick is a goofy character, son of a single mother and always trying to get up to antics. He is from the town of Arrecife, childhood friends with Mochi, and forming a chaotic duo whenever they decide to meet up. He’s quite full of himself, exasperates his accomplishments, and thinks he’s practically irresistible. Despite his arrogance, he possesses a heart of gold, and just wants to befriend anyone he can. He may not be the brightest, but he tries his best, even if it doesn’t work out. He has no concept of boundaries, and has broken into people’s houses to give them gifts. He went out of his way to befriend Hachikō, despite the people around him scoffing at him for it. Despite Hachikō’s not-super-great-but-understandable Inklish at the time, Slick was very accepting and thought it was more funny than anything. As their friendship grew closer, Hachikō moved in with him, and they currently share an apartment. Slick gave himself that name because he wanted to sound cool and dissociate with his father.

Hachikō

Hachikō “Hachi” ??

cis male (he/him)

Age unknown (~16-17)

5’1” (R) - 5’9” (UR)

Hachikō, an amnesiac found in a place he feels lost in. He’s agent 8, and his story of venturing to the surface is one that only some know of. His Inklish is practically perfect in the current day, with only the slight hiccup and forgetting some words. He’s quiet, observant, and tends to appear stiff around unfamiliar people. He doesn’t talk much, instead thinking to himself a lot, sometimes staring off into space and getting lost in thought. He can be quite chatty if asked about anything of interest to him (ink weaponry, birds, etc). He tends to fidget, sometimes needing to occupy his hands by drawing. He takes most things seriously, or as they’re spoken, which has led to him not understanding jokes, and not always pinpointing sarcasm. He’s quite paranoid and constantly worried about being outed as an Octoling, or something going horribly wrong. It’s not uncommon for him to get sick due to being exposed to unfamiliar surface pathogens. Upon reaching the surface, he discovered he had a pollen allergy, which has lead to mockery by his friends for “sneezing like Lil’ Judd”. Slick is who he’s often seen with, eventually even being roommates with, almost always being the nervous straightman to Slick’s antics. Roxanne (agent 3) often babies him and comes to his aid, even when it’s made obvious that he’d rather her not. He appreciates her kindness, but not being infantilized. Hachikō picked his name because he had no memory of his original name, picking one that seemed familiar to him (might’ve heard it in a story once).

Bonus xenos!

[lesewut]

The "West-Eastern Diwan" by Goethe - A bridged beauty between Occident and Orient. Published by Prof. Dr. Heinrich Düntzer, Berlin and Stuttgart, 1878.

It is said, that Goethe used the "oriental mask" to cover his pantheistic ideas, speaking trough the lips of the newly translated poets. Next to the Hafez' poems, which where published and translated by the orientalist Joseph von Hammer, other literal and scientific sources were used as inspirational impact and to refine the tone of the great masters of Oriental poetry, like the academic achievements of Prof. Wurm, Prof. Paulus (Orientalist in Heidelberg), other translations of cultural impact like Rückert's "Östliche Rosen" (~ Eeastern Roses) the Mewlana-Transaltions of 1819 and the collection of August von Platen called "Ghaselen", Goethe corresponded with Boisserés and with one of the Grimm brothers. Wilhelm von Humboldt praised the authencitiy of Goethe's work.

The "East-Western Diwan" is the last great cycle of poetry Goethe has wrote, his interest for Persian poetry arised in the time of the Rheinbund. It can be traced, that this period of time disillusioned him, the diving into another time and continent is essential for escapism, but as Goethe and his field of interest and curiosity is as deep as wide, he must felt like thrown like a freed bird into new heavenly realms. The "Diwan Atmosphere" was created by reading several works and taking in Oriental elements. So we can find "Madschnun and Leila" interwoven in the heart-shaking correspondence between Suleika and Hatem in the "Book Suleika". Expressions of the Dervish Hafis of Shiraz can be found, Tarafas, Labid (Prophet Mohammad called him the poet, who said the most true words; Labid converted to Islam and wrote eologies, but it is said, that he stopped practicing ?), Zoheir, Saadi and Hafez. Saadi was also known as a sheik and was called "Poet-King" (or King-Poet, if you like :P) and if we would compare the structure of the poems, it is more likely, that Goethe imitated Saadi, rather than Hafez.

Goethe is playing wonderfully with expressions, merging wine and tears, praising the dust of the lover as better than safran and comparing the loved one to a drop of water and the lyrical-I as desert sand. Numerology is emphasising the cultural background, drawing a link between the poet and the priest, pairing mystics and religion into ecstatic relief. This wonderful work is a gift, for everyone, who sometimes had the feeling of getting ripped apart by two forces. It feels like the made-up gap between Europa and Asia is nothing but a fiction, like a forgotten song of our cultural cradle. Let us share the pomegranates of our culture, let us nourish from unkown fruits to break our borders, to sharpen our discernment, to truely lift our feet and recognize the extraordinary.

[thequietabsolute]

A poet is what he is in himself. Gertrude Stein used to distinguish between a person who is an 'entity' and one who has an 'identity.' A significant man is an entity. Identity is what they give you socially. Your little dog recognizes you and therefore you have an identity. An entity, by contrast, an impersonal power, can be a frightening thing. It's as T. S. Eliot said of William Blake. A man like Tennyson was merged into his environment or encrusted with parasitic opinion, but Blake was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own crystal. There was nothing of the 'superior person' about him, and this made him terrifying. That is an entity. An identity is easier on itself. An identity pours a drink, lights a cigarette, seeks its human pleasures, and shuns rigorous conditions. The temptation to lie down is very great.

— Saul Bellow, from Humboldt’s Gift

pg., 311

[afrenchaugurey]

So... as I am freezed on most of my WIP where everything sounds wrong to me, I decided to go with this one. I wrote the beginning a few weeks ago and it's directly inspired by one of my current read : Andrea Wulf's "an history of Nature" (I read the French translation as I found it second hand), which is an Alexander Von Humboldt biography (and a total feeder for my "18-19th century history of natural sciences" obsession)

So, as I was blocked, I decided to try something New(t) and the journal form should be freeing as entries are short and it's not "structured" as fiction(I'll see with time, I guess).

For now it's just the foreword.

Rolf Scamander speaking in this excerpt :

A long time ago, when I announced my decision to travel the world to study Nature, my grandfather gave me the most wonderful gift. He offered me his illustrious suitcase, charmed by his own grandfather a century before that. As all the Wizarding World knows now, the magic object accompanied Newt Scamander during his naturalist adventures and played such a role in our History that this case may be as (most?) famous as his carrier.

Let me tell you that this passing of the baton, as I undertook my own expedition (just out – as himself in his time – from teenage years’ hiccups), sounded like a colossal token of trust from him, but as much underlined the expectations that the association between my family name and my personal aspirations raised in our community.

Here is the link

I hope you'll enjoy !

[power-chords]

The intellectual hit writer of middlebrow literature and the culture-hungry middle-manager gangster, both consumed by ambition and anxiety and ambivalence… ;)

[physically-vampiric-medic]

What are you waiting for, Jane? Just knock on his damn door.

Jane stands outside Humboldt's office, hand twitching as he clenches it into a fist and knocks, gently, as to not startle him.

"...Doc? It's Jane. Jane Jamison?" He clarifies, not entirely sure if that other Jane had made nice with him yet. He definitely should. He knew that man had it somehow much worse than he did.

"I um... Brought something for you."

A mug of hot chocolate and a peppermint stick.

- @emotionally-clumsy-soldier

[ The knocking at the door was unexpected, though the polite gesture was appreciated. ]

"Oh- just a moment!"

[ He quickly fixed his appearance to be less alarming. Jane had gone through enough, he certainly didn't need to see the doctor looking so disheveled and mildly unsettling. He then approached the door and answered it, ]

"I am very sorry for the state of things in here, Jane. If I had known you were coming over it would be a lot less of a mess!"

[ It took him a second to process the gift, but once he did notice it, he had not a clue what to say. ]

[reynita9]

started a book club with like 11 people and I inadvertently chose the book we’re going to read based on a recommendation from someone I met one time- a warm hearted anarchist from Humboldt.. anyways I’m becoming aware that the book will force me to share a lot of my perspective on the world we’re alive in, the moment we’re alive in, the purpose of the time we’re alive in, and also just how anarchist my ideals are. Which often people misconstrue as being conservative because of how distrustful I am of the state. Anyways I confidentially know where I stand.. which I understand can be a controversial position to be in.. I don’t make a lot of space in my life for people who entertain these conversations with me, even tho I love it. Because the way I think is so far out I’ve chosen to be in relationship with people who tether me to the reality we are in, but now I’m seeing this as a moment where I can let my paradigm shine. I resource myself and learn and collect knowledge from every person in my life (we all do I know, but I keep people with different opinions than me close bc of how much they teach me haha) Anyways. I am intelligent, i research, and above all one of my biggest gifts in this lifetime is my foresight. Aaaahhhhhhhy hahahahaha. Well. Baby steps. I don’t think anything will be offensive to anybody, but they may think I’m a massive idiot or something. yolo