Help Me Start A Secret Society

The older u are the more compelling and s*xy and complex u and your life become so the glorification of youth will always remain ludicrous to me

of course the first ever sin was a woman eating

its sooooo ugly how confident so many dudes are in producing the most average music and art … … . .…… ..  where is their shame …   why did i get taught so much more shame than is useful to me 

It spoke to you so strangely, in a voice that slipped between waves of softly droning static from a television screen.

When we un-packed it, the Paris curator was embarrassed to discover lipstick marks on its cheek: someone in the Louvre had played at being Pygmalion—or Hadrian—and kissed it. And who could blame them? Up on a pedestal, center stage, the effect of its beauty was jaw-dropping.

“Ever since I could remember, I had feared being found wanting. If I did the work I wanted to do, it was certain not to measure up; if I pursued the people I wanted to know, I was bound to be rejected; if I made myself as attractive as I could, I would still be ordinary looking. Around such damages to the ego a shrinking psyche had formed: I applied myself to my work, but only grudgingly; I’d make one move toward people I liked, but never two; I wore makeup but dressed badly. To do any or all of these things well would have been to engage heedlessly with life — love it more than I loved my fears — and this I could not do. What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: to go on yearning for “things” to be different so that I would be different.”

— Vivian Gornick, The Cost of Daydreaming - NYTimes.com (via arabellesicardi)

Ritual Dagger, 17th century or earlier, Eastern Tibet, Kham region. Gilt copper alloy and rock crystal.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to to the person holding it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead - you first,” “I like your hat.”

- Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses"