How Mexicans feel about duendes too.
True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the 'fairies' be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.
And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.
Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.
At work me and a couple coworkers (black, white, and mexican) had a fun discussion on whether there are more ghosts at a hospital or a cemetery.
everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren't REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.
for the record my position was that there's probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that's where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they're crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she'll be spotted because that's where all the ghost hunters go to look.
this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that's why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.
we all liked this explanation a lot and explained it to everyone else all night. and of course, none of us believe in ghosts.
Disenchantment of the world is never complete, and never will be
Cool how someone can wax rhetoric about their incompetent partner being unpleasant but I'm suddenly the asshole for being like, idk sounds like you're with someone who sucks. "You don't know them like I do" okay!! Notice how there's no way I'd know that since you haven't shared anything positive!
The bulk of heterosexual humor appears to be "joking rant about real grievances" and the expectation is you join in with your own (gendered) horror stories and when you're like "I don't have this issue and maybe you shouldn't either," you've broken an unspoken rule about joint suffering
National Poetry Month - Day 3
The Thing Is
By Ellen Bass (1947- ), Published 2002
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
also the funniest part is that when people talk about "the devs" hating solas they just mean one guy . like it's literally just epler trying to balance out the vibes when the lead writer and director both hardcore shipped solavellan. you wouldn't survive 1 day in the shoes of an anders fan
About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like... Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say "alright then, I've failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?"
This makes people very angry and panicky.
My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure ... Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.
It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as "a stepping stone" to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure