I Don't Think With My Brain I Think With My Heart And It's Disastrous

CALL ME L8R, I texted back. But there was no reply—and it would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt // The Goldfinch (2019) dir. John Crowley

Here is what they don’t tell you:

Icarus laughed as he fell. Threw his head back and yelled into the winds, arms spread wide, teeth bared to the world.

(There is a bitter triumph in crashing when you should be soaring.)

The wax scorched his skin, ran blazing trails down his back, his thighs, his ankles, his feet. Feathers floated like prayers past his fingers, close enough to snatch back. Death breathed burning kisses against his shoulders, where the wings joined the harness. The sun painted everything in shades of gold.

(There is a certain beauty in setting the world on fire and watching from the centre of the flames.)

you guys have no idea of how much I daydream about time travel

Guys, if you want to be a good artist and storyteller you need to absorb other media and influences beyond popular comics and movies and video games. Hell, even beyond visual art. Read novels, science articles, history books. Listen to podcasts, watch documentaries. Dip into different disciplines. Explore stuff outside your everyday. What you create and the pool of ideas you can pull out of is expanded by the knowledge you gain. Don’t do yourself a disservice by limiting your library. You never know when some weird shit you read about mushrooms could end up inspiring you or helping you solve a design/story problem.

wretch(affectionate), abhorred monster(affectionate, sexual)

Saying there are no aliens in the universe is like scooping a cup of water out of the ocean and saying there are no fish.

Someone today will read Shakespeare's hamlet and say omg he's just like me fr. Another person will read moby dick and proclaim Ishmael as an adhd king.

A person grieving for their recently deceased lover reads the iliad and they watch as Achilles rages and rages and god how righteous anger fueld by love is so devastating that it's ramifications still affect the world several thousand years later.

We might one day settle down and read the epic of gilgamesh and watch as a king has to accept the death of the person he loved the most. One of the very first stories ever written and it was about coping with death, and how to grieve.

We don't read classics because they're old, we read them because they remind us that we are never alone. That a character created over 500 years ago struggled with the exact same problems we all still have today. That even a king from centuries past had to deal with death just like me. That's what makes stories so powerful--they prove to us that we are never truly alone in what we are feeling.

Part of the New Internet Grammar: using question marks not to denote questions, but upturns in voice, so that a tentative statement gets a question mark but a flatly delivered question doesn’t.

Dumbass Academia: A Concept

Making snarky jokes when someone asks what you plan to do with your major

Ex: “My real life plan is to marry rich and become a wealthy widow at a young age. College is just a pickup scene.” 

Getting used to various mystery stains on all your books/essays/papers 

Is it food? Is it a water stain from reading in the bathtub? Is it tears? Were you annotating the book and some ink blotted up? Who knows? Certainly not you, better read around it. 

Speaking of annotating books: Underlining all the bad words 

This is especially fun if it’s something more “high brow” like a poetry book

Your glasses (if you wear them) are somehow always either dirty or scratched. You can’t see with them off, but you can’t see all that well with them on either. 

You have a book. You want to read the book. It is highly recommended. It’s supposed to be very good. It will allow your mind to grow. It may even have a deep meaning or important historical significance that you really care about absorbing. Alas, neither your brain nor your heart has room for new characters to love or new obsessions to fixate on. You read fanfiction instead. 

Finding a way to justify pretty much anything you like as part of your preferred aesthetics

Ex: “The show Rick and Morty totally counts as dark academia because it heavily involves science and education and also because gay stuff happens in it.”

Ex: “Wearing black lipstick is totally within the realm of cottagecore because there are black flowers and good rich dirt is often black and there are black nights with beautiful shining stars. 

Correcting people about small errors on an impulse and then realizing two days later that they were actually right. 

Writing things in code and posting them randomly online

(If I get to 150 followers on this blog I will be doing that btw)

Posting stuff or saying stuff and pretending that you don’t care about people’s opinions on what you say because you’re in this for you but secretly anytime you get a notification you almost cry because you’re so excited 

Using old beat up notebooks and any pens you can get your hands on because you don’t have the time or money for fancy stationary 

Being a little pretentious and doing things purely For The Aesthetic but then ten minutes later you’re eating mac and cheese and watching cartoons in the bathtub because being elitist is fun but it takes so much time and effort 

Having a lot of mottos but none of them actually really apply to you but you insist that they are in fact what you base your life on anyway. Sometimes they like, half apply? But never all the way

Ex: “Be gay do crime”

Were you a gifted kid who didn’t quite fit in with everyone else in the gifted program’s intellectual strong suits? Or a gifted kid who now feels like you’ve become completely mediocre/average? You fit in

Alternatively were you a student who wasn’t considered one of the “smart” kids and even may have been treated like you were dumb and/or less than other students because you didn’t connect to your schooling “the correct way”? You fit in too

Constantly changing your aesthetic because something else seems cool

You read those “tea or coffee?” things and scoff because who can decide? 

Going feral over abandoned buildings for no reason

Making bad jokes that most other people don’t get because they’re about really niche topics 

Whenever someone asks you about a book you’re reading or what you’re studying you panic and say something nonsensical 

Coming up with or researching conspiracy theories, but more about small local things like why there are never major storms in your town than big conspiracies like the moon landing 

Not that you can’t also be into the big conspiracy theories

Being either ridiculously emotional all the time or being completely devoid of emotions all the time. 

feeling cute today. might commit acts of hubris