sammy431

[sammy431]

do you not ever get tired of pessimism? of hating hope? of being miserable? like yeah life is full of horrors and terrors. but it’s also full of strangers who hold the door open for for you. the color green. stained glass windows. bluegrass music. cats who butt their heads against your leg. dancing and laughing and crying.

none of that cures the agonies, but they are small acts of resistance to it. things may be shit, but life can still be good. and i know that because good things still exist. simple and small and full of hope.

#hope is a skill #it gets stronger with practice

[sammy431]

Eliza Dushku as Jessie Burlingame Wrong Turn (2003) dir. Rob Schmidt

#don’t think I ever watched this movie but #eliza dushku #was a key part of my early gay awakening and I will always reblog her

[sammy431]

why small kittens are always either the most pathetic or the most evil creature you've ever seen

[sammy431]

[sammy431]

[sammy431]

See if I can send a message to Keyleth. We're back. We're at the surface of the Malleus Key. Just trying to find a way to get back to you.

#queen of my heart #just the absolute best #critical role #keyleth #cr spoilers

[sammy431]

I recently had surgery, and at the time I came home, I had both my cat and one of my grandma's cats staying with me.

- Within hours of surgery, I wake up from a nap to my cat gently sniffing at my incisions with great alarm.

- I was not allowed to shower the first day after surgery, and the cats, seeing that The Large Cat is not observing its cleaning ritual, decided I must be gravely disabled and compensated by licking all the exposed skin on my arms, face, and legs.

- I currently have to sleep with a pillow over my abdomen because my cat insists on climbing on top of me and covering my incisions with her body while I sleep (which is very sweet but not exactly comfortable without the pillow). She also lays across me facing my bedroom door, presumably on guard for attackers who may try to harm me while I'm sleeping and injured.

That's love. 🐈‍⬛🐈❤️

#firstly I love cats #secondly that cats eyes are absolutely stunning

[sammy431]

i’m working on a play about 65-year-old lesbians, and my dramaturg is an older gay man who has been helping me with historical context and research, and also just in general giving me advice based on his own personal experiences.

fav thing he told me so far, said with a lot of love: “dyke drama was specific. it was always so specific. it was precise and narrowed and pointed. and also so dumb.”

[sammy431]

I had a Terry’s Chocolate Orange once in an airport 10 years ago (they’re very hard to come by in the US, I’ve never seen them sold anywhere else) and I think about it everyday.

[sammy431]

[sammy431]

this is the type of work they’re gonna make high school art students study in ten years

[sammy431]

having my evening cucumber

I offered a portion to this large and mannerly horse

#bugs

[sammy431]

leitmotifs never get old to me like holy shit dude there’s this melody that corresponds to this one guy and if you hear the melody it means the guy is there. holy shit. and sometimes it refers to ideas too not just guys. has anyone heard about this

[sammy431]

grog/keyleth is one of those ships where you don’t even think about it at all, and then you think about it exactly Once as a joke and then your brain just goes “…….huh.”

and then it isn’t a joke anymore.

#because I talked about it yesterday #and it is still #so very very true #Grogleth #critical role

[sammy431]

now investigating grogleth tysm for the inspiration 👀👀👀

Yesssss welcome to the party, we are a small number but we have ✨fun✨

#critical role #Grogleth

[sammy431]

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.

#humans are good

[sammy431]

i HAVE to stop looking at shelter cats until i'm moved but BUNNY