shmrie

[shmrie]

when i started my last director job at a university, they told me one of my duties would be to write all the chancellor’s letters. me: “cool. but why though?” them: “English isn’t the chancellor’s first language.” me: “I’m aware of that.” them: “the chancellor likes the suggestions that autocorrect gives him if he misspells something.” me: “Ah.” them: hands me a copy of a letter the chancellor sent to a donor who had just given a million-dollar gift to the university, which includes the following: ‘The profundity of your gift fills us with the greatest horror. In recognition we have prepared a special plague to compromise you and your family’. 

Which is why to this day when I’m struggling to communicate in a different language, i remember the chancellor, who was Doing His Best, and i try to give myself a break.

[shmrie]

[shmrie]

Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

[shmrie]

On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers, Minda Honey

[shmrie]

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

#Lotr

[shmrie]

[shmrie]

Are you an advocate for censorship?

is this because i said not to use the r slur

[shmrie]

[shmrie]

dont forget to do your daily clicks at arab.org, please!!

link for clicks

[shmrie]

How do I be cool like Jesus Christ

Be kind

#Religion #xtianity

[shmrie]

guy sitting in front of me in class was vandalizing wikipedia and i kept reverting his edits as soon as he made them and he couldn't figure out why it was happening

[shmrie]

Taking Jean Baudrillard to Outback Steakhouse, the Australian-themed restaurant which does not carry Australian food, was not founded in Australia, and was created with zero involvement by Australians

[shmrie]

実光院・夏の花々// Jikkoin Temple

[shmrie]

“[I]n spite of appearances, God and the world belong together. There is no place where the love of God can’t go. And that is unbearably hard to believe.”

— Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in “A Ray of Darkness”

#TalK resource #Religion

[shmrie]

how to make movies good again:

put some fucking puppets in that thang!!!

.

[shmrie]

Messages of support and strength from Rafah, Palestine to the US student movement.

[shmrie]

This is yuri.