Misery Guts

roach-works:

zonaisona:

zonaisona:

zonaisona:

as a kid i had one of those “there’s a monster under my bed” moments except real.

every night i would cry about a ghost or something trying to scare me by knocking on my bedroom windows and walls. like, really loudly, every hour or so, every night. only at night. so my dad was like “heh okay kiddo let’s check it out :) ah see? there’s nothing here :)” and left.

until years later he admitted to me that he did in fact hear the unexplainable knocking when he slept in that room one night, and it kept him awake with fear. and suddenly felt awful for not believing little kid me.

imagine your kid being like “daddy there’s a demon in my closet” and you being like ok son lemme just check that for you :). and you open the door and there’s a demon in the closet

WHAT

as a very young teenager i was about 2/3 sure that the mysterious galloping noises i heard at night (in the middle of san diego, mind you) were NOT the wild hunt but i had no idea what they could be. i started keeping track of it in my dream journal. it happened for years but only in summer. i eventually concluded that it was possibly fairies and possibly something weird about traffic from down the road that just got bounced over to our house funny.

anyway i found out recently that my mom had warned our gay neighbors that my bedroom was closest to their patio so they might want to be discrete about where and when exactly they were conducting their business. but also they had their hot tub right on the other side of the fence.

so it was fairies.

:

I never really thought about this before but “suffer in silence” is a Christian thing? It’s supposed to be a virtue and you’re generally criticized for complaining. Even the Pope called complainers “whiners,” and said we should suffer in silent endurance (in a homily on May 7th, 2013).

I grew up soaking in that attitude, and I know I’ve internalized it a great deal. I’m working on recognizing it, but I still catch myself thinking that way all too often.

I’m reading Why Be Jewish? by Edgar Bronfman, and he takes a different view. Complaint is a Jewish pastime, he says, with biblical roots, and he points out that it’s both natural and necessary: “…complaint arises from a sense of deep dissatisfaction. Without complaint, there is no criticism, there is no vision of the way things can be. Complaint is the beginning of the vision of a better world. It rejects complacency and it rejects the status quo.”

It occurs to me that the social enforcement of “suffering in silence” serves the ends of capitalism quite effectively. I’m going to make a point to complain a little more and a little louder in the service of change.

(via roach-works)

mossworm:

I don’t like feeling intimidated anymore. I heard from someone I trust that G B Edwards the famous jumping spider taxonomist is creepy towards young women - staring at their behinds and things like that. He also is honestly a really terrible curator and has loans sitting all over the place rotting.

NO ONE was allowed to touch the spiders after he retired, so the other staff and I had to carefully leave the whole space alone even though they obviously needed care too. My boss Felipe Soto-Adames (who has G B’s job now) refused to stand up to him despite knowing things were bad. I don’t know why.

If the National Museum of Kenya is wondering where all of their specimens have gone, FSCA has a special cabinet just for G B’s abandoned loans. I had to dig through it looking for the Causey millipede holotypes he lost. My job was curating non-insects and my boss, the head non-insect curator, had to tell me and my coworkers not to touch the spiders ever or the PREVIOUS curator would get mad at him. It was lunacy.

People are contacting me with stories of collections neglect, territorial behavior, misogyny, and everything in between from all over the world, and it’s making me so furious. Conservation is already miserably hard right now and I’m sick of horrible people making it worse. No more of this! Name them!

(via roach-works)

humblegrub:

brand new and extremely cursed ways to show approval

(via roach-works)

cryptotheism:

jame7t:

I’m afraid with the recent death, it’s without a doubt that one of our guests here is a vampire. I’ve narrowed it down between Stacy, who was drinking “red wine” when we got here- Michael, who is goth, or Daniel, who I don’t like.

Professor Acula, hand me that notepad

“I also think it’s Daniel. Fvack you Daniel.”

(via vermilionvermeer)

lamp2003:

oh okay. heart steps right out of my chest and falls down the stairs

(via vermilionvermeer)

cloudbustng:

muppet profiles

the muppets trading cards (1992), pt. 3

(via vermilionvermeer)

softdaisie:

maybe mediocrity isn’t wrong. maybe you don’t need to be the best at everything you do. maybe you don’t need to be the best at anything you do. it’s ok to simply do things because you enjoy doing them. its ok to not want to advance in your job. nothing has to be a competition. you don’t need to be better than anyone. you can do things just because they’re fun. you don’t need to read up on the history, and know everything about it. its ok to just exist. its ok.

(via lowrescryptid)

cutie-melon:

(via roach-works)