“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”
— What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness?, Jess Zimmerman (via xshayarsha)
“I feel like we, in fact, live more than once, in multitudes. Like every moment, every day, every week, every month, every year. It’s almost forever. I know life seems long and painful sometimes, and short and painful other times. It’s a collection of experiences that only you have and each experience accumulates and is constantly expanding, like the universe. So I encourage you to keep an open mind about the largeness of your life because I’m excited about it and I hope you are too.”
— Sufjan Stevens Prospect Park July 18th, 2017
Ever look at historic art and writing and artifacts and just realize we’ve all only ever been human
On saturday we went to the library and I got out a charming wee book for my little one called "1 is one". Now I am obsessing over the author, Tasha Tudor. Writer, illustrator, gardener and crafter, basically my ultimate goals 💛💛💛
“Boredom is different nowadays. It’s about super-saturation, distraction, restlessness. I am often bored but it’s not for lack of options: a thousand TV channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless net radio stations, innumerable unlistened-to albums, unwatched DVDs and unread books, the maze-like archive of YouTube. Today’s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.”
— Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past