ladysarashina

[ladysarashina]

hauntings in the anthropocene - jeff vandermeer

[ladysarashina]

"wait...you're telling me this behavior isn't normal?" it is normal you're just used to people on social media pathologizing every human behavior so you assume anything outside usual societal expectations is a sign of mental illness which is actually a mindset that contributes to psychiatric abuse. annnd SEND POST

[ladysarashina]

Antique Victorian era Raised Enamel Amber Glass Pocket Flask for Whisky, Moser, Bohemian Art Glass, c. 1850-80

[ladysarashina]

love that i failed to make the intended point in my last post but to get back to the moderation frame… i listened to an interview with a practicing dermatologist, and she and the interviewer said so many things that illustrate the frame. just to name a few:

1. interviewer said that skincare culture is getting ridiculous and all the influencers look greasy lol, and that you don’t need all the products they recommend. then she said that all she has had done is “a little laser work”! just a bit of LASER WORK… lest we think her immoderate about her skincare

2. the derm said similarly that you don’t need a 20-step skincare routine (again, implying that she had a more moderate approach than those influencers), and then proceeded to describe an 8-step skincare routine that minimalist skincarers could use

3. the derm also said–because cosmetic procedures were just expected and normalized in this conversation that absurdly positioned itself as critical of skincare culture–that people have gone overboard with products and amateur “work” and that the reasonable thing to do is go to a dermatologist for the basic work: fillers, botox, and lasers! she said thank goodness we’re not doing the kardashian thing anymore… really cosmetic procedures are so moderate now

the interviewer fashions herself as a no-nonsense, not-like-other-girls voice on this topic, and the derm came in with the same attitude. the irony! they raised the bar in the name of moderation. it reminds me of disappointment-to-bubbies-everywhere m. pollan’s injunction to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” which puts on an air of easy-breezy moderation but is incredibly demanding, oppressive, and vague–in short, crazy-making.

just do a little! (but actually a LOT.) WE aren’t the ones being immoderately demanding–that’s the influencers. moderate, rational, effortless. :))))

[ladysarashina]

“Philosophy too is the result of two conflicting forces — of poetry and practice. Where these interpenetrate completely and fuse into one, there philosophy comes into being; and when philosophy disintegrates, it becomes mythology or else returns to life.”

— Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

[ladysarashina]

Im sorry but what does god is lack mean ? In simplistic terms ? Also the real? Im sorry i know nothing or theology i just really like your blog and takes on stuff!!!

you dont need to be sorry-i'm sorry for being confusing! these are lacanian terms. lack is that feeling of absence that you encounter if you stop for a moment. we all carry it--something is missing/there must be something more/what will complete me/etc. we have this lack. we move through life with it, trying to fill it all the time--with love, food, faith. the Real is something we can't describe. it's sublime. it's a hum. it's the something-bigger we look for. we get glimpses of it, sometimes. i call these glimpses 'holes in the real,' or cuts in the real.

sometimes in life you find that you've gotten close to that something-more-ness. you find something special, something that makes your whole body hum. you find a god-spot, a cut that opens up into this bigger Real. we can find it in relationships, in community, in movement. we co-event god: we are made, and god is made, in moments that bring us closer to this hummmmmm

[ladysarashina]

All perception is a form of being touched, and all touch is metamorphosis.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

[ladysarashina]

You have to touch me in order for me to touch you. And you only feel me because you are also feeling yourself at the spot where I am exploring your boundary with my fingertips. Only by feeling myself can I feel you. And only by feeling you do I feel myself. To be sure, I exist before I have touched you: I am already a subject with a body. But I am conscious of this body to a much greater extent insofar as I can allow it to be touched by your body and thereby feel myself. Both touches are inseparable from one another. They are bodily, materially, physically inseparable and can only occur simultaneously. By touching you, I must open myself up to be touched by you. In order to be able to open myself up, I must be able to open myself to someone: I must allow a concrete other to touch my boundary.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

[ladysarashina]

what is your eye color. what is your favorite color. what is the color that appears most frequently in your wardrobe. what color is your favorite blanket. what color is your water bottle.

#literally brown green brown green brown

[ladysarashina]

[ladysarashina]

Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre

[ladysarashina]

                   … just stood there in the living room           looking around at all I’ve collected—                    taking inventory of what’s gotten in           without invitation                     and what I won’t let leave.

— Ryann Stevenson, from “HOST,” Human Resources

[ladysarashina]

                                This body isn’t a trial run                                 for your real life.                                                         Take your life

                                in your hands. Make your hands useful                                 or you’ll be sorry.                                                          You say sorry

                                more than anything else.

— Natalie Wee, from “Ten Years after Diagnosis,” Beast at Every Threshold

[ladysarashina]

what you don't get is science exists because people can love. medicine exists because people love each other enough to want each other to live long healthy lives. astronomy exists because someone loved the stars and the planets enough to track them through their ever changing position in the darkest night. science exists because humans are curious little creatures and we want to know the world around us and understand it like it does us. we know stars and planets worlds away, we've sent cameras worlds away, all because we love the universe, and we also put love in those satellites!! we sent the sound of a 100 languages, lovely messages, the sound of rain and a laugh, all out there just in case there's someone in the universe looking for us like we do them, and so that they know that they were never alone, and we sent them the most simple loving things we could find.

science exists because people can love

[ladysarashina]

Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra

[ladysarashina]

Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”, Glass, Irony, and God

[ladysarashina]

— Franz Kafka, from Letters To Milena