alistair pomegranate 'lappy' percival

and also 'maybe i was already wracked with anxiety and couldn't sleep without exhausting myself in high school'

i swear some parts of my brain want to sleep the others just won't let me and keep giving me endless thoughts anywhere between 'here is another way to look at how you wronged your ex' and 'can we say wrt the law and gospel distinction that one is ephemeral while the other is eternal'

just read a cowboy AU story where you have to suspend your disbelief and allow lebanon county pennsylvania to have a southern accent and cowboy rodeos

the chicken breast is always the least favoured piece in vietnam bc it is relatively dry and lacking in fat but i like it tbh. but crucially in vietnam it is boiled or cooked in soup or stir fried which leaves it a lot more moist!

like sorry to discord but i am not remembering a separate password for you. i'm having google handle generating and storing that.

not directly the same thing but i don't know how other people live without entrusting all their passwords to one trusted third party already lol

my friend is moldovan and afaik orthodox 🤷‍♂️

americans really cannot be trusted with cooking white chicken. it's always bone dry and then people try to put some moisture back into it with a sauce.

likewise my dad describes my financial aid at princeton as an investment princeton makes in me that i have to strive to make sufficient return on. he also describes my parents' own contribution as an investment. so we have some time to go before i generate that sufficient return.

also like i do appreciate that vietnamese society set aside resources for people like me so i have to provide some kind of return to them and i have yet to provide enough of that so i continue to be indebted to my homeland.

otoh i was given like $300 for winning a silver medal at the IMO and in a different province that number could be anywhere between $50 and $17000 so

gifted kid discourse has entered the second (?) day. at least at home it was publicly acknowledged that we were admitted into gifted high schools so that we could compete and win prizes for the city. like there was an explicit quid pro quo there.

yes a lot of gay men are lonely but it's because of other people so it doesn't count as an 'epidemic' whereas straight men are lonely also because of other people but those other people are also straight men so it does count (?)

this is in contention for the funniest motte and bailey i've ever seen in my life

otoh this is why i am still on tumblr

did i ever tell you lot the original reason why i made a tumblr (to see posts about uk politics rpf) (yes it was already 2016 so i was a few years late to the clameron content i wanted to see)

they're posting yukio mishima thirst traps on tumblr

i think i am very vietnamese-textbook-pilled in that the first thing we do when we learn a text is learn about the historical context and life of the author and then the publication background and intended audience of the text. and when we write essays we are expected to start with that.

i always understood the point of that language is as an indictment of white society ('you treat us/them as just bodies to use and abuse') it's a bit weird to see it lose that edge in some contexts

i mean what i'm distilling from this is like 'i realised other people have lives and stories too' but longer. i guess it's an aesthetic preference to prefer the imagery used in this paragraph, but it doesn't feel particularly illuminating to me. but i am not the intended audience at publication.

i think poetry in the eastern context at least historically is so much about demonstrating the skill of doing a lot within the very tight constraints of poetry rules (often by relying on conventional references) that i have a hard time not scoffing at free verse poetry western or eastern

see i get poetry as rhythm and rhyme and i understand the whole 'these are the devices used to evoke certain things' thing (our textbooks make a huge deal out of us being able to identify when devices like synecdoche, hyperbole, wordplay, etc. are used) or like what genre convention defiance evokes

i feel like i'm regressing to my middle school attitude of 'clearly i will never understand literature/poetry' after a few years' interlude of having some amount of faith that i know how to read literature bc i thought i mostly understood how my history and classics professors explain texts

i googled the title, is it this poem

worksheets.edhelper.com/poetry/Betwe...

maybe it's a cultural thing or sth but i've just never spent that much time thinking about the mind-body distinction or things like that. though i assume that james baldwin (by analogy with what i know of other black writers, i know little of him) is just using it as synecdoche for the person anyhow

elaborate

sometimes a piece of writing is interesting to me not bc of the writing itself but bc i am utterly fascinated by the idea that anyone anywhere might find it interesting

do you think 'femininity' or 'gender' or 'socialism' or 'liberalism' or 'labour' or 'generosity' or 'love' or 'hope' or whatever tiny percent of the human experience you've decided isn't regressive aren't also constantly in crisis somewhere for some people

saw this tweet on my discover feed and had a very long sigh and then accidentally refreshed the page and had to look it up to make this screenshot to say 'no it cannot be *the* defining characteristic bc most human things are 'in crisis' all the time'.