the worst trait of me and my family is probably this: we never learned to say the word sorry.
i) my best friend and i, we are no people. knives? maybe. liars? definitely. but people? i’m not so sure.
knives were never forged to be tender (what a shame, what a shame) and we too, fall and slay what we meant to protect. him and i, we go for the throat when we clash. we hurt and bleed and oh, i should be terrified, i should be running for my life, but all i am is tired and a bit lonely and would really like his arms around me.
( “can we please stop fighting now.”
“oh god yes please.”)
because time and time again, this man has held my heart in his hands and cleaned its festering wounds with cotton dipped in alcohol (always the healer, always the lover) and wrapped gauze around them with clinical precision. and i have walked through the maze of his head and tended to his withering garden, have dragged the sun and fresh air and all the oceans to the barren land to make it bloom (always the poet, always the lover).
him and i, we have never needed words because we are knives forged in the same fire and at the end of the day, we both know that he will be the one who wordlessly stitches my broken heart and i will be the one who sings him to sleep.
ii) let me paint you a picture:
blue that fades into red that fades into black that fades into blue that fades into red. loud, clashing and nonsensical. a pit in your stomach that was dug with desperation and blunt fingernails. how do you colour anger that is also pain, grief, hate, love, fear and truth? the smell of the paint is foul and clogs your windpipes. blunt fingernails and blue and black and madness. can you bear to look at what you created without flinching?
that’s what anger looks like on my father. a horror. a mottled bruise. a hellfire.
all his life, my father has been scorned, belittled, beaten, spat on. his mother didn’t love him right because her mother didn’t love her right. my dad loves like he hates. something is fucked in his head and heart and his words fade into black and blue and red and this shitshow always ends with me sobbing, bleeding, dying on the floor. my father watches with his hackles raised and his eyes red and wide and glowing. once wounded, an animal never sheathes its claws. it strikes the ones it loves and walks away with its head held high and hands trembling.
but here’s what happens when the curtains close: he pulls me into his arms and brings me tea. he wipes away my tears with hands that has moved mountains to make me smile. he kisses my forehead and tells me that his mom didn’t love him right. my grief is like anger and indignation and love. i wrap my arms around him and cry all the tears he never had the luxury to. who should say sorry, really? is it him or his mom or his mom’s mom or this stupid fucking world? my father has never said the word sorry. he never needed to. this is what love looks like on us. a horror. a mottled bruise. a hellfire.
iii) despite it all, i am not usually an angry person. i take after my father and my mother, after all. i rage like my mother (quick, loud, fire that burns out almost as quickly as it sparked to life) and fight like my father (aim, shoot, bullseye). my sister does something even mildly upsetting and before i know it, i’m cursing her to be miserable till she dies. not even an hour later i’m draping myself over her shoulder and bugging her till she rolls her eyes and smiles ever so slightly.
(“do you have no shame?”
“yeah no i don’t think so.”)
my family and i, we never learned to say the word sorry. because the word sorry never meant sorry, not to us. because at the end of the day, that’s all it is: a word. and it sticks to the back of my tongue and the dents of my molars and gets tangled in my mouth when i try to spit it out. so i grab it by its throat and thread it into my being. i find it so much easier to hide my pathetic inability to do one thing that doesn’t scream that there's something wrong with me with the truth of another three words:
“i love you”
and they are always echoed back to me, just a few million times more tender, in ways only we can understand.
“yeah, i know.”
“that’s great, but there’s no escaping dishes duty.”
“oh, shut up, you.”
“what’s that for?”
a pause and a hum.
“i love you too.”
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i think stoner dave is a inherently good concept, but also consider this: stoner rose
dave grew up with andrew tate like bro strider, who was probably so anti drugs. like dave and rose are hanging out and rose casually drops, “oh yeah, when i was high that one time-” and dave stops and is like, “😟” because he 100% thinks weed is addictive.
bro probably told him when he was younger that if you smoked weed it was the same as like crack. he’s horrified, he goes home and he’s like, “karkat!! bad news about rose 😟” only for karkat to be like, “oh yeah i’ve had edibles with her before.”
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Comparing oppression can sometimes give you insight as to what other groups of people go through. It teaches you what you have in common with people seemingly different than you are, and teaches you how you are different and how you can ally yourself better with other peoples.
However, if your goal is to prove you suffer the most between you and another person, you'll likely find that there is no conversation, just an endless barrage of back-and-forth to prove which of you deserves to be listened to.
The reality is that you don't have to be in the most pain in order to be listened to. So often, we are inundated with this idea that the person suffering the most is the only one who ought to be listened to, and it sends the message of "holy shit, I guess I don't matter. I guess I deserve to suffer if others are going through worse," and that's just unreasonable and unfair. Who has it worse is entirely contextual and changing, and sometimes it is subjective - as in, something that is earth-breaking for you is an average tuesday evening for the guy next to you.
Kill the cop in your head that says your voice will only matter if you prove yourself. Listen to other marginalized people and know it isn't a competition to see who can prove themselves most worthy of tine and energy. Our resources can (and should) be multifaceted and able to help a variety of peoples.
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I bought a drop spindle at an SCA garage sale a while ago, and today found a bunch of blue/green roving at a thrift shop (8 ounces!!) and decided to try spinning it up. I found your intro post and it says batts are better for beginners than roving. Can I turn one into another? Is it worth it to try?
That's awesome !
And yes, you most certainly can turn a roving into a batt (using a blending board) and also a batt into a roving (using a hackle). Blending boards are niche tools though, and for the cost of buying one blending board, you could buy several batts.
You can make blending boards, though.
If you get carding cloth--70 or 90 TPI (teeth per inch) are good all-arounders--and staple it to a wooden board of slightly larger dimensions, then you've got yourself a blending board for usually about 1/4 - 1/2 the price of just buying a new one. (My blending board was about $100 USD, to give you an idea of the general price. They're one of the more affordable fiber processing tools)
You can also just do away with the carding cloth entirely, and make something which is similar to a blending board, with the key differences being that's its both quite a bit worse and free (or very cheap). Either drive a bunch of finishing nails through a wooden board (you want about 1/2 inch or a centimeter of the nail tip exposed on the other side, in an ideal world) as close together as you can, or else tape several pieces of robust cardboard together and drive the nails through that. That's what I did (the cardboard version specifically--actually, found some pictures !) early on in my spinning career when I wanted to blend colors. Disclaimer: I didn't ever actually attempt to pull the fiber off as batts; this was like a 2x4 inch surface and they would have been pitifully small. But I did pull them off as rolags which spun up just fine, and which are also a better beginner fiber prep than roving is.
As to whether or not its worth bothering with any of that... no, not really. To be extremely honest, I'm not positive that 'beginners first rolag made on makeshift nail board' would actually be easier to spin than roving in any capacity (fiber processing and preparation is as much of a skill as spinning is, and like I said the nail board is notably worse at what it is attempting to do than a blending board is, although it does still do it), so.... if you want my firm advice: buy a batt. if you can't buy a batt, give the roving a try as is. if the roving isn't going well, really only then is it worth attempting the stuff I just described.
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You know how Naruto has an actual legendary beast who killed his parents inside of him that is constantly messing with him around and Sasuke has the voice of his older brother who killed the whole Uchiha clan on his mind constantly pushing him around.
And then Sakura has like,,,, her repressed feelings that are actually strong enough to break the Yamanaka clan jutsu and be considered a second spirit on its own.
Everyone there was dealing with loads of traumas and Sakura's was just the experience of being a bullied pre-teen girl with no nepotism on her side.
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