#nahman

[stellar-waves]

omg it's nahman reedus!

Whoa! I missed a lot while overseas, and while I catch up here as well as get back to work on my own stuff (here and in real life), I knocked this baby out in just under 5 hours as a huge THANK YOU to everyone who left notes on my work while I was gone. Every single one means so much, especially at a time that I was about ready to give up. And I will do what I can to make sure that feeling gets reciprocated. ❤️

But there's one beautiful human in particular that not only has made me feel seen and supported, but who I know is going through an extremely difficult time and deserves all the love in the world: @celtic-crossbow. Please, if you can, help her out by donating to her GoFundMe because every little bit helps. (And don't worry girl, I'm already sending the full quality of this sucker to you via email! 😘)

When life gives you lemons, Norman Reedus gives you hearts. ❤️

(And I will forever say his name like my dude Flanery does because...well duh.)

. . .

[luxe-pauvre]

What does it mean to participate and benefit from a culture you also want to denounce? Is denouncement enough? It’s a question that’s dominated another arena of online discourse over the last year: literary criticism. There was Lauren Oyler’s viral criticism of Jia Tolentino’s popular book Trick Mirror, where she accused Tolentino of pointing out problems in culture as a means to an end, as if she had no option to actually resist them through behavior. “Tolentino’s elective self-confinement,” Oyler wrote, “is supposed to make her seem like a martyr, but what she sells is not herself; it’s a shoddy mode of thinking that says everything a person does… remains a matter of ‘survival’ rather than a demonstration of priorities and desires.” You’ll find a similar line of thinking among those who defend ‘selling out’ with the idea that it’s everyone’s right to “get their bag,” no matter how much doing so compromises their stated moral framework. Last month, in a piece for The New Yorker called “Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?,” Katy Waldman made a similar point to Oyler, but about novelists instead of essayists. “These self-conscious times have furnished us with a new fallacy,” Waldman writes. “Call it the reflexivity trap. This is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance.”

Haley Nahman, #24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect

[noodledesk]

My friend Michelle did that for me a few months ago. She came to my apartment and watched me clean out my coat closet, offering opinions and words of encouragement while tucked between pillows on my couch. Technically speaking, I was capable of doing this on my own, but for unknown reasons, felt unable to do it. Her presence transformed the chore into something else—a creative project, a laugh. My college roommate and I had a term for this, “quiet company,” coined when we discovered it was inexplicably easier to do things with someone else hanging around, even if they didn’t technically help at all. Sometimes I forget what social creatures we are. How much of a difference it can make to not be alone—to help or be helped through the mere act of coexistence. - Haley Nahman

[artem1sc0re]

Hehehehehehehe Norman

I was bored in a free class because I had nothing to study for atm so this was born

Also with a piece of embroidery I did of the origami logo! :D (if it looks off-ish this was the first time in like 5 months I’ve done embroidery most of that time was for coursework 💥)

[phantomthievez]

in time too, this shall pass (hyperfixation on a game that is not and has never been popular and is, objectively, really bad)

[dadyomi]

Thursday 4/20, Sotah 22: Sorcerer (Derogatory)

There are so many super quotable passages about vanity and false righteousness and pretending to be a good person in today’s daf, but I’m sorry, I can’t get “Sorcerer (Derogatory)” out of my head. 

[unobjectif]

An excerpt from Maybe Baby, which made me feel better this weekend, and my sisters boyfriends fresh pasta set up

[hiding0utinadream]

[foresmeforever]

“…Missing from scheduled days and passive entertainment is the texture from which surprise and delight emerge: the true unknown. I think this is why our impressions of other people and of the world can start to feel so airless and depressing when we spend too much time at home or online—it still isn’t where life actually happens.”

- Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby - Nov 3 2024

[stellar-waves]

my friday flanery fix that sums up how this week has been. 🫨 (video source)

one week until i finally meet him. i’m freaking out. 😱

[luxe-pauvre]

The primary tenet of neoliberalism as it’s currently employed is the idea that societal problems can be solved through individual action. But we know by now that these issues are systemic and will persist even if the majority of us learn to behave. So what does liberation actually look like? If it’s not simply personal choices—whether as a means to reclaim one’s power, as Ratajkowski might argue, or as a means of survival, like Tolentino might argue, or in one’s own disinterested pursuit of pleasure, like Stagg might argue—then perhaps it’s something much bigger and disruptive. Something that would challenge our beliefs, and completely revolutionize our desires, rather than simply justify or recontextualize them until we can live with ourselves. At the end of her piece about Natasha Stagg, Husain put it this way: “[If] political agents, rather than exposing venality only to bemoan it as a given, [were] to commit themselves to more emancipatory forms of (ideally collective) action, then it seems reasonable enough to believe that the contours of a desirable career and covetable ‘lifestyle’ might eventually look different from what Stagg as a writer and we, as readers, are currently able to envisage.” I think she means that instead of focusing on “putting the ladder down” so that we may help more people escape the toxic runoff of a toxic culture, we move the ladder to safer ground. Or perhaps get rid of it altogether.

Haley Nahman, #24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect

[noodledesk]

My friend Michelle did that for me a few months ago. She came to my apartment and watched me clean out my coat closet, offering opinions and words of encouragement while tucked between pillows on my couch. Technically speaking, I was capable of doing this on my own, but for unknown reasons, felt unable to do it. Her presence transformed the chore into something else—a creative project, a laugh. My college roommate and I had a term for this, “quiet company,” coined when we discovered it was inexplicably easier to do things with someone else hanging around, even if they didn’t technically help at all. Sometimes I forget what social creatures we are. How much of a difference it can make to not be alone—to help or be helped through the mere act of coexistence. - Haley Nahman

[morganmerylhodgepodge]

Of all the characters for this comic so far, I did NOT expect ya boi to be the hardest to draw.

[thesummertimeproject-deactivated]

"The problem in the long run...is that you feel like your life is a race against the clock. That’s no way to live. I know some people think it’s productive to operate under that kind of pressure, as if it will necessarily lead you toward making things happen, but just as often I think it has a paralyzing effect. Or it does lead you toward decisions, but rushed ones. Regardless, it’s not enjoyable. There’s an alternative path, I think, and it’s not disregarding the reality of your situation completely, but simply trusting yourself to navigate it as it unfolds in the present, and to do that with spirit, curiosity, and enthusiasm. This also means trusting that your future self will have the tools to process whatever fortunes or disappointments befall them. You don’t actually know how you’ll feel in 10 years about any of this—you’ll be different then, full of new perspectives and desires you can’t imagine yet. You don’t need to protect your future self by treating your present like a precursor to “real” life, thereby demeaning it. Your present matters. It’s actually all you have."

-Haley Nahman on Dear Baby #174

[dadyomi]

Saturday 4/1, Sota 3: In Locust Parentis

Seems timely, as Passover is almost upon us, even though Joel 2:18 is not about the Exodus. But also DEAR LORD SOTA IS BORING ALREADY. 

So I did go look at Joel, and the poetry of the Prophets is, as always, dramatic and beautiful even in translation. 2:18 is brief, but well, 2:19....

In response to His people 

The LORD declared

“I will grant you the new grain,

The new wine, and the new oil,

And you shall have them in abundance.

Nevermore will I let you be 

A mockery among the nations.”