is the world really such a terrible place? yesterday i asked if oat milk was extra and the barista said yes so i said ok just regular milk then and when she gave me my chai latte she whispered “i used oat milk ;)” doesnt that make u want to live another day?
here is my life philosophy: next week there might be someone ahead of you in line at the store who’s short a quarter and you have a quarter and you can give it to them. if you weren’t there, they’d have to put something back. the week after that you could be getting lunch and the waiter might ask if you want some pancakes someone else ordered and never picked up. you could find someone’s lost cat. you could watch someone’s bag while they go to the restroom. there are so many ways you are going to touch other people’s lives and they are going to touch yours and there’s no way to know when it’s going to happen. so you have to keep living!!! i wouldn’t want to die knowing that tomorrow the barista will give me free oat milk just to be nice.
When I was 11 years old - we went to Sea World for my birthday. This was to avoid the realization I had no friends, and no one to come to a birthday party and probably because someone gave my mother free tickets at work. It was kinda a shitty day despite being at a theme park full of cute animals. There was a new roller coaster there that had just opened so we decided to go on. I was nervous. I’d never been on a roller coaster.
A group of 6 college kids were ahead of us in line and started chatting with me. Full on just having a fun conversation with someone literally going through the beginning of a very awkward middle school period. I was so shocked they wanted to talk to me. I think my mom mentioned it was my birthday. They were very nice about it. When we got on the ride they told us to go ahead of them so we could sit at the front of the car since it held 8 people.
Now the ride (called Journey to Atlantis - I believe it is sadly no longer there) started with a slow ride of beautiful visuals of dolphins and oceans and computerized images of this imaginary Atlantis before going up the hill to the beginning of the coaster, where it paused for about 30 seconds, and then the ride started. The college kids must have known there would be a pause. Maybe they’d ridden it before I’m not sure.
But as we sat there on that peak, 6 people I’ve never known, and will never know again, sang a very very lonely 11 year old happy birthday. Loudly. And with gusto. They were happy and laughing and joyful. And it made me feel less alone in the world.
I am 29 years old this year, and I still remember them. I still remember that kindness. It is so important. It doesn’t go into a vacuum. It exists beside me in my daily life. And I love the idea that I have been that person to someone else too.
It’s stunningly lovely to be human when we’re kind to each other.
another thing i’ve been thinking about re: wuthering heights vs jane eyre is relationships towards childhood and “the past” and how they’re kind of opposite in some ways:
in wuthering heights, childhood (for cathy and heathcliff) is mostly this kind of paradise where the rules of society don’t apply and you’re free to run wild with no boundaries and have an almost spiritual communion with nature and the Other, etc. like basically all of heathcliff’s actions once he grows up have the ultimate goal of or drive towards an attempt to reunite with that mythical childhood that was forever lost once the influence of adult society starts to rear its head. there’s a sense of wanting to return to the past and stay there forever (which, of course, is a state that both heathcliff and cathy do attain in the end as ghosts haunting the moors together.)
jane eyre is almost the exact opposite, since it’s a story that is in many ways about jane desperately trying to escape her childhood and finding freedom in adulthood (and adult society.) like, whereas cathy and heathcliff are off running around on the moors as kids, jane is cooped up behind the curtain in the house of an aunt and cousins who hate her and who won’t even let her read books to mentally escape. and when she leaves her aunt’s house to go to lowood school, she is still confined, humiliated, and miserable, though ultimately she finds solace in her work and in her independence which ultimately leads her to leave the scene of childhood again to go to thornfield. and then, when the past (though not necessarily jane’s specifically) rears its head in the form of bertha mason, she leaves once again, abandoning her entire identity (for a time) and relying on her own independence and adult professional skills.
i think what’s notable here is that, for jane, the past and childhood are usually things that she is trying to escape (which, granted, is something she usually is not entirely capable of doing) but they are also things that she actively does not want to really ever define her.
in contrast, heathcliff and cathy (and most of the other characters of wuthering heights tbh) are caught in this kind of eternal recursion, always trying to grasp that mythical past that is constantly out of reach, except in death.
i guess, to conclude, i’ll leave you with these two quotes:
“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.”
–Catherine Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights, Chapter 12
“I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.”
this post means absolutely nothing but i need a space to vent
WHY does jack always wear shoes on the bed? in all but three episodes (1. dying, 2. napping, 3. rowena prolly told him to take them off) where his feets are on the (absurdly perfectly made) bed he’s wearing SHOES
if sam can take him to american eagle to buy all those jackets and teach him how to make a bed that would pass military inspection, can he not also teach him to not put shoes on the bed?
anyway, like i said. this post means nothing. it’s television.
because he was raised by two basically-homeless guys who pour vodka on their bleeding wounds and an eldritch horror with an optional physical body who all collectively lack the concept of house manners
but whyy of all things this? his room is SPOTLESS and you could bounce a damn quarter off those sheets they are perfectly tucked but his lil sneakers are ALWAYS ON THE BED
you make an excellent point but my skin is still crawling
cas should have stayed as terrifying as he was in lazarus rising when he started doing normal person things. literally imagine this guy in a really old dirty trench coat walking into a flower shop and all the lights explode. everyone runs away in terror. he comes up to the cashier and asks for help buying flowers for his boyfriend. he shows a picture. it’s that guy who was wanted for murder in twenty states and presumed dead. he buys a bouquet of roses. when he leaves the glass door shatters.
another opinion — kelly’s storyline was kind of fucked up, no? maybe it’s because I studied a bit of birth work theory in college but it really bothered me how they just slung this pregnant woman around and then she gave birth alone while dying. people tried to be there but had to run out of the room to deal with Apocalypse World and kelly just had to like… explode by herself
maybe that’s the tragic part but it bothers me that she was really just a vessel that got used up and thrown away. women as vessels for childbirthing was a big part of my undergrad thesis so I’m just heated.
at least jack cared about what happened to her.
TO ADD: the whole “you’re gonna die it’s inevitable” makes sense for the story and the lore and kelly’s sacrifice, but for a lonnnnggg time that was the prevailing ideology of childbirth, at least in western culture. women’s role in society was to incubate a new person at great personal peril and then statistically probably die doing it and that was it.
could kelly kline not have gotten more? could someone besides jack and cas have honored her?
another opinion — kelly’s storyline was kind of fucked up, no? maybe it’s because I studied a bit of birth work theory in college but it really bothered me how they just slung this pregnant woman around and then she gave birth alone while dying. people tried to be there but had to run out of the room to deal with Apocalypse World and kelly just had to like… explode by herself
maybe that’s the tragic part but it bothers me that she was really just a vessel that got used up and thrown away. women as vessels for childbirthing was a big part of my undergrad thesis so I’m just heated.
