magicmoon65

[magicmoon65]

Mr. Gaiman, what's the best thing being famous?

I don't think there is one. It's pretty awful. I'd trade it for being unknown any day.

[magicmoon65]

it ok to not be ready

[magicmoon65]

[magicmoon65]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[magicmoon65]

[magicmoon65]

Any conspiracy theory about people going missing in National Parks is automatically silly to me. Like "Why are National Parks such a hotbed of disappearances???" because they're full of idiots. You've got thousands of people who've never pissed outdoors in their life wandering around the woods/desert/mountain with zero experience and zero gear and zero understanding that this place can kill them. You don't see as many disappearances in wild areas because people don't go to them unless they have some background knowledge. Whereas you get tour buses full of old folks and suburban families shuttling people into National Parks 365 days a year. If you took the same amount of buffoons and dropped them in the actual wilderness the disappearances would be significantly higher than at the parks. Use your brain.

[magicmoon65]

[magicmoon65]

Okay legally I have to try this rainbow goo, right?

[magicmoon65]

here is your reminder that all trauma is valid.

trauma is to do with how our brains process (or don't process) memories and experiences and that if something is traumatic for you then that is trauma.

it doesn't matter if you or someone else thinks it should be significant or not or if someone else went through the same thing and wasn't impacted by it. what matters is if it's significant to you and how it impacted you.

a huge part of recovering from trauma is allowing yourself to accept that you had it in the first place.

[magicmoon65]

Seeing other writers on tumblr talk about writing is so validating because all of them are basically:

“I hate writing but I love it more than anything but it’s agony but I have a million stories to put to paper but I barely ever write a word”

And like I’ve always felt this way and I worried it meant I wasn’t supposed to be a writer, which tore me to shreds. But no. That’s just the curse of being one, I guess.

[magicmoon65]

I was talking to a friend, asking if they've ever experienced something I've been calling "night stupid", where, late in the evening, you're in the middle of working and suddenly (or, sometimes, gradually) you're unable to do things well--and stuff that usually makes sense stops making sense. Yanno...just a noticeable and frustrating down curve in your overall ability to preform the tasks you're working on. and my friend responds, "Tired. Bees, you're feeling tired."

[magicmoon65]

Does it annoy you when the "see results" option has the most votes in a poll instead of any of the actual responses?

- yes

- no

- see results

#I really strrongly think we should have an abstsin button #where it shows results but doesn't count as a vote #and preserves tthe integrity of the poll results

[magicmoon65]

The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again

[magicmoon65]

@enbydragon02

you know I really wish I could be a jauntily-dressed little nonbinary fag wearing dark academia vamp-core outfits but the truth is ...I'm way too lazy. I'm pajama nonbinary. I wanna sleep instead

[magicmoon65]

I’ve always loved performing. Being the center of attention feeds me when I’m telling a story and it’s been like that since I was very young.

When I was four or so I went up to my nana one day while she was watching me and brandished my favorite book, Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar Baby. “I’m going to read to you,” I told her imperiously.

Obedient to my tiny whims she sat me on her lap and waited to hear what nonsense I was going to make up. Because of course, she knew I couldn’t read yet. It’s not impossible to read at four, but I wasn’t getting the kind of attention to make that possible.

To my nana’s astonishment I read the first page perfectly, with silly voices and everything, then turned and read the second page just as competently. I read the whole book while her jaw was on the floor.

She praised me effusively and ran to the phone. I was a genius! She had to tell my mom right away!

My mother was less inclined to hop aboard the genius train. She came to pick me up after work and held up a piece of mail. “What’s that say?” she asked me.

I shrugged in indifference. My nana frowned. “How about this?” she said, offering me a book off her shelf. I shrugged again, losing interest in this new game.

“She can’t read, mom,” my mother informed my nana. “She has the book memorized.” My mother was a child educator and had seen this exact situation more times than she could count.

“She read it page by page! She knew everything!”

That’s how my family found out I’m a very gifted mimic, but not a baby genius.

[magicmoon65]

[magicmoon65]

there is no 'base accent' so like all of this is entirely subjective tbc, just based on what people around you say and how you think you sound

pick whichever language you want to answer in if you're multi-lingual

#ye and modern standard english is the most understood one bc is what is in the media #why can ppl in like... Tennessee or Ireland can understand New Yorkers but NYers wouldn't as easily understand them