cowardlyriver

[cowardlyriver]

#the white vault

My morning routine as a creature in the caves of Svalbard:

4:00 am - Get up, go to the bunker and scratch on the walls. Maybe whisper a bit

6:00 am - go back to sleep for an hour

7:00 am - Wake up and have a bath in the freezing water

7:45 am - Eat some fish, a slow, relaxed breakfast

8:15 - Do my rounds of the caves, check no one has gotten in while I slept

9:00 am - If there's no one there to torment, I do some light reading

10:00 am - Sort out any new teeth boxes or just do some general tidying to make sure the ominous atmosphere remains

11:00 am - Make my way up to the bunker to destroy some equipment

1:30 pm - Lunch

2:30 pm - Make my way up to the bunker to imitate someone there

3:45 pm - Go back to the village and wander

5:00 pm - If no one has come down, I might go back up and do some more imitating

6:00 pm - check up on the snow storm

7:00 pm - My work day is over

7:30 pm - eat dinner (more fish, a polar bear or someone I caught)

8:15 pm - More reading, maybe distort the twisting passages

10:30 pm - I go to sleep

[cowardlyriver]

[cowardlyriver]

[cowardlyriver]

some things are better without polish. there's something bland about perfection, about something so smooth that nothing sticks to it. i like to feel the rough edges and know that it was made with human hands, informed by human thoughts. some things of higher quality have less heart. there is beauty in unrefinement.

[cowardlyriver]

here's to everyone who has ptg in their spotify wrapped top 10

#hell yeah

[cowardlyriver]

“Listen: my father speaks Urdu language of dancing peacocks rosewater fountains even its curses are beautiful. He speaks Hindi suave and melodic earthy Punjabi salty rich as saag paneer coastal Kiswahili laced with Arabic, he speaks Gujarati solid ancestral pride. Five languages five different worlds yet English shrinks him down before white men who think their flat cold spiky words make the only reality.”

— Shailja Patel (via two-browngirls)

[cowardlyriver]

here it is a very long collection of poems that have squeezed my heart or even held my hand 🤍

if only the young were trees by mahmoud darwish

the meaning of birds by charles smith

song of the open road by walt whitman

at the kitchen sink by camille a. balla

every day as a wide field, every page by naomi shihab nye

feeding the worms by danusha lameris

still by marc alan di martino

do stones feel by mary oliver

you are who I love by aracelis girmay

the patience of ordinary things by pat schneider

comfort by jennifer k. sweeney

mowing by ada limón

nights in the neighborhood by linda gregg

valentine for enest mann by naomi shihab nye

there are birds here by jamaal may

winter poem by nikki giovanni

I’m feeling fabulous possibly too much so but I love it by mary oliver

shoulders by naomi shihab nye

entrance by rainer maria rilke

what I carried by maggie smith

like a small cafe by mahmoud darwish

another day by greg kuzma

keeping things whole by mark strand

meditations in an emergency by cameron awkward - rich

dead stars by ada limón

to the young who want to die by gwendolyn brooks

the world has need of you ellen bass

you reading this be ready by william stanford

in the country of resurrection by ada limón

the round by stanley kunitz

notes on waiting for the dog to find the perfect place to take a shit while morning cuts through the sky, fresh from another darkness by hanif abdurraqib

late summer after a panic attack by ada limón

on a train by wendy cope

good day by kait rokowski

dudes we did not go through the hassle of getting these fake ids for this jukebox to not have any springsteen by hanif abdurraqib

the cats will know by cesare pavese

the way to keep going in antartica

[cowardlyriver]

“Akari (燈)” by Soushi Sakiyama (崎山蒼志) - Jujutsu Kaisen 2nd Season - Ending Theme

[cowardlyriver]

by the way, my favorite reading of satosugu's relationship under a romantic lens is that they never got to tell each other how they felt. not because they were insecure, or noticed too late, but because the right opportunity never came in the jjk novel, there's that bit about how when they were young, as long as they were together, nothing felt uncertain, so think about it: they were so sure of the future, so sure that everything would work out, that they felt no rush on changing anything. they knew they loved each other and maybe they even knew it was mutual. but they spent their free time and most of their work/school time together, they bought souvenirs and phoned each other when they were apart, they sparred, they fooled around, and for the moment that was enough. they had the whole future ahead of them. and then things started to come to an end. gojo didnt even noticed the distance until it was too late and geto obviously saw no point in doing anything about his feelings at that moment. even if they tried to give it a shot, tried to find a gap for a serious conversation, they were probably unable to. they spent all of their time on different missions and their free time usually didnt match. gojo was putting all of his focus on evolving his technique, and geto was simply exhausted by the flood of curses. so it just never happened. i know its a kind of heartbreaking concept, but ironically its the interpretation that comforts me the most. it leaves the feelings untouched in the past, and even tho they think (wrongly) the other doesnt feel the same anymore, ultimately they at least know that they were able to love and be loved the best that they could.

[cowardlyriver]

the coolest kids on the block

[cowardlyriver]

[cowardlyriver]

Can't sleep. Thinking too much about how geto started to resent gojo after toji and riko. He hated him because gojo grew from the experience that made geto fall apart. He hated him because it felt like gojo abandoned him. They used to be the strongest together but gojo left him behind as he progressed his technique. And while geto was battling against himself internally, gojo was too busy to see geto's struggle. Gojo failed to be there when geto needed him the most (to no fault of his own, he kept being sent out on missions). Anyway, my point here is I'm sad about the stsg breakup that was brought on by the realization that geto stopped looking directly at gojo after the incident. I will now be crawling into my hole of delusion where stsg is happy and nothing bad ever happens to them.

[cowardlyriver]

what made the kfc breakup scene so much more painful was the fact that you could see the despair in both Gojo's and Geto's eyes. Gojo because he couldn't believe that Geto had killed innocent people, Geto because he was so sick and tired of everything and he wished Gojo would stop shutting him out. because they had changed so much that both of them couldn't recognise each other anymore and the only thing they wanted was for the old them to come back

[cowardlyriver]

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

[cowardlyriver]

The two times i loved you the most in a car thursday

[cowardlyriver]

And also the way Barbie and Ken are role playing heterosexuality without any inherent sexuality of their own, without any understanding of what it means, or even any genitals at all! Just pretty-girl + handsome-guy = obviously a couple. And the way it fucks them both up! Because they’re both stereotypes, neither of them is a specialist version, no brain surgery or pilots license or Nobel prize for either of them. They’re just assigned the roles of Every Man and Every Woman. And Ken ends up doing Way Too Much because he’s hanging his entire self-worth on being important to Barbie. And Barbie just isn’t interested in him, she was assigned a boyfriend she didn’t ask for and doesn’t want and doesn’t know what to do with, just because that’s what society expects of men and women, that they will necessarily couple up and fall in love because… that’s what they do. Regardless of any personal quality of either party.

It’s about heteronormativity and amatonormativity and the unrealistic expectations society sets boys and girls up for from infancy. Barbie and Ken are every pair of toddlers sharing a sandbox while the adults around them call them each other’s little “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” even though neither party understands or is capable of understanding the implied meaning of that. Or wants to.

It’s a literal funhouse mirror of that weird pressure put on kids to perform heterosexuality from an early age. It examines how that leaves us unprepared for the complicated reality of actual relationships even if it turns out that you are heterosexual and do want sex and romance. Boys and girls aren’t really allowed to be just kids on the same team, so they grow up into men and women who generally want very different things from each other and are trained to look for it in everybody because anybody is better than nobody, and try to force it to work.

Barbie and Ken letting each other go in the end was perfect. Barbie the Every Woman realizing that she doesn’t have to be special, she just has to be, and Ken the Every Man realizing he has to seek validation elsewhere and lean on his fellow Kens for emotional support, WHICH THEY GIVE.

Truly a movie of all time.

[cowardlyriver]

the thing about barbie is that it captures the exact feeling of growing up as a girl. you begin with thinking everything is perfectly pink, that you are perfect, until.

until someone stares at you.

until you compare yourself to others.

until you feel the fear of aging.

until someone assults you.

until someone makes you feel unsafe.

until you notice the horrors of the world around you.

until you want to crawl into a hole where no one will look at you.

until you feel like you can do nothing at all.

and you have to find ways to stop these things. these things that you can not change, and barely influence.

and you think nothing in the world is fixable. you arent fixable.

until you see friends laugh together.

until you have a nice moment with a stranger.

until you look at the beauty of nature.

until you talk about these issues with others.

until you find community.

until you find yourself.

and then the world starts looking a little pinker again.