The Pre-apocalyptic "omg Moooom" Phase:

one day I'll be living peacefully in a nice cozy apartment and nothing's gonna bother me

german words i wish existed in english

a messy and incomplete list

nachvollziehen (v.) -- to understand, but less empathetic. i.e. i see the steps that brought you to that conclusion, but i don't understand you.

doch (interj.) -- you're wrong and really it's the opposite of what you said. often said with a healthy dose of sass. i.e. "this isn't a good movie." "doch. (it is)"

frech (adj.) -- somewhere between naughty and sassy and silly. when you're being a bit of a brat, you're being frech.

dreist (adj.) -- audacious, but far more colloquial. when you have the goddamn audacity, you are dreist. i.e. to park that far over the line is dreist as hell

heimat (n.) -- home, but stronger. a home is wherever you have built a life, but heimat is where your roots are. heimat is where you feel pangs of nostalgia when you go to visit your family for christmas and see the shop at the corner.

weltschmerz (n.) -- literally 'world-pain'. the world sucks and sometimes you just sit and feel the pain of it all. that's weltschmerz.

existenzberechtigung (n.) -- the right to exist, often in a comedic context. i.e. pineapple on pizza has absolutely no existenzberechtigung.

fernweh (n.) -- literally 'far-ache'. the opposite of homesickness, the desire to go far away. i guess wanderlust is similar, but that is also a german word, and this is more painful and visceral

schweigen (v./n.) -- the act of not speaking. silence, but more deliberate. the palpable feeling that people are withholding their voice.

verschlimmbesserung (n.) -- when an update with the intention of making something better actually just made it worse. looking at you @staff

Fuck them. Fuck them for laughing. Fuck them for being so mindless. It hurts even worse knowing laughing at pain wasn't a conscious decision. It came so naturally to them.

Fuck them for having the power to hurt me without even thinking about it.

//—i thought about adding what situation exactly I mean but does it even matter

this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability

the impossible return

unavoidable that you will be the villain in someone else's story. You will be painted in an unfavorable light. You will be the irredeemable one. and all of this will happen despite how nice you might usually be or how kind or how respectful or how warm. and you will just have to move on.

“Please, let him be soft. I know you made him with gunmetal bones and wolf’s teeth. I know you made him to be a warrior a soldier a hero. But even gunmetal can warp and even wolf’s teeth can dull and I do not want to see him break the way old and worn and overused things do. I do not want to see him go up in flames the way all heroes end up martyrs. I know that you will tell me that the world needs him. The world needs his heart and his faith and his courage and his strength and his bones and his teeth and his blood and his voice and his– The world needs anything he will give them. Damn the world, and damn you too. Damn anyone that ever asked anything of him, damn anyone that ever took anything from him, damn anyone that ever prayed to his name. You know that he will give them everything until there is nothing left of him but the imprint of dust where his feet once trod. You know that he will bear the world like Atlas until his shoulders collapse and his knees buckle and he is crushed by all he used to carry. Dear God, you have already made an Atlas. You have already made an Achilles and an Icarus and a Hercules. You have already made so many heroes, and you can make another again. You can have your pick of heroes. So please, I beg you– he is all that I have, and you have so many heroes and the world has so many more. Let him be soft, and let him be mine.”

— Please, let him be happy ( j.p. )

What I can't cope with, OK, is L.M. Montgomery's use of bedrooms as a site of both autonomy and belonging. When Emily arrives at New Moon, she has to share the bed with Aunt Elizabeth and feels she is in bed with a griffon but when she moves into Juliet's old bedroom in the "lookout" she is overcome with the sense of nearness to her mother as well as having true space and freedom for the first time at New Moon. Later, she loses a lot of this sense of place and independence moving into Aunt Ruth's spare room where she doesn't have to share a bed, but can't even choose the pictures hanging on the walls - at the same time she loses her freedom to write fiction. Jane hates her bedroom at 60 Gay Street, finding it "hostile and vindictive" - in many ways just like Grandmother Kennedy, but at Lantern Hill, her father lets her choose everything that goes into her bedroom and she is allowed self expression. Her friends give her gifts to furnish it, as emblems of their love for her. Like Jane, Valancy has no control over the furnishings in her room, from the painted floor to the tacky artwork to the dingy and unwelcoming furniture, but she's so constrained that her only rebellion is to throw the jar of potpourri out the window because she's "sick of the fragrance of dead things". To have a sense of self, she imagines a magnificent castle as an escape and is delighted to find Barney's house is just as good a place to be who she wants to be - free from her family, making her own choices. Anne, upon marking the first anniversary of coming to Green Gables, reflects on the garrett room and finds it "as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although unmaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine." Before Green Gables her life was probably a mix of dormitories and makeshift beds in attics that she couldn't change, in versions of her life with no freedom or affection. THEIR BEDROOMS ARE SYMBOLS FOR THEIR LIVES OK. When their rooms are controlled by others, their inner/emotional/creative lives are constrained. When they have their own rooms, they have autonomoy, they choose furniture, they have freedom, they have themselves, they have love, they have me gnawing armchairs about it.

Also funny that both Valancy and Emily are tormented at various times by inescapable portraits of queens - I do wonder if LM had one in her home that no one would let her take down.

i think we should be talking about the semi-recent advancements in cystic fibrosis treatment like all the time every day. there hasn’t been a drug like this since AZT medications for HIV infection it is truly fucking miraculous and very important

I'm an intern and my job is to enter addresses from hand-written letters into the database and did you know that Joshua Neumann from Hermannstreet 4, Cologne, has a life too

Oh

He's a principal in a small town. I googled it.

A mid-50s couple donated 100 dollars to our cause and I said that's very generous of you and he shrugged and said is it really

Oh

I guess it isn't really. Not for us.

When I came back after New Year the woman I've been working a lot with saw me in the office kitchen and hugged me.

I googled a scrawled address to decipher it and the town was so pretty I'm going to go there on a day trip with some friends. By train. Like we did 2 years ago.

You know what I'm saying, you know it.