task force

drinkyourjuice:

“We love to name things, because a name tells us where the thing belongs: sub-species Brookesia, micra to indicate insular dwarfism. Giving a set of traits a name also helps us figure out how to treat an animal: spiders bite, dogs can be tamed, elephants mourn. It seems odd, however, that we love so dearly to categorize and classify each other, when each of us individually is in such a constant state of flux. How many times throughout your life will you lurk over at WebMD because your kid can’t — won’t! — tie her shoes, or because you have recently started to acquire a big stack of magazines you are almost biologically reluctant to throw away, or because your hormones start to look like Satan’s parabolic graph? It feels safer to know who you are, right up until the point where you start to wonder if you were wrong all along. Maybe humans are unique in their ability to match their interiors to external situations, to change their colors when necessary — you cope with chaos as a child by believing that you’re capable of a kind of superstitious magic, never stepping on cracks, but later shed that because you’ve seen As Good as It Gets; you accumulate too much crap in your living room until you see too many episodes of Hoarders, you think you’re varsity at dieting until you start to fear butter as if it were a wild dog. We forget how fluid the experience of being human can be, and maybe we frighten ourselves away from exploring our dark parts because we don’t want to be defined by our “symptoms” — and, obviously, we never should be. When we recognize our own traits as being somehow dysfunctional, we attempt to correct them.”

—

Tess Lynch

 

joshishollywood:

My dad and I like to take single cheerios and pretend we’re giants eating donuts

vondell-swain:

taking a page from monica’s blog and making a rolling list of the things that make me happy, to be bookmarked and added to as I think of things

• the way it feels when you put your hand inside a container full of small, smooth, evenly-sized objects, like ball bearings
• aziz ansari
• fancy public bathrooms with motion sensors that let me pretend i’m a bathroom wizard with the power to make things work by waving my hands dramatically at them
• that rare kind of weather where it’s raining pretty hard but the sun is also shining brightly
• the peak hours of the day, around sunset, when shadows are really long and the sunlight is orange and yellow
• working at the ice rink i work at
• ‘Bust a Move’ by Young MC
• kittens
• cats
• kissing cats on the nose
• gaining a cat’s trust so that it’s comfortable enough with you that you can hug it without it feeling too anxious
• petting a cat until it falls asleep
• kissing
• putting my music library on shuffle and singing along loudly but with the volume turned up so it sounds like I don’t sing all that badly
• Matt & Kim
• riding the bus home after a long day of work
• riding my bike downtown in the evening when it’s empty and quiet and the city lights are all orange and yellow and soft and the air is crisp and i can breathe in and get lost in the experience
• riding my bike downhill
• doing that thing I do when I arrive somewhere on my bike where I shift myself up and over onto one pedal and coast to a stop and hop off the bike in one smooth motion
• hanging out with my friends
• walking around with my friends with no real goal in mind, just starting to walk in one direction and creating the whole day from scratch, as we go through it
• seeing friends I haven’t seen since graduation
• my high school and most of the teachers there
• making art
• stephen fry
• showing my art to people
• the vlogbrothers
• extra cheddar flavor blasted goldfish
• the feeling I get when people who have no idea who I am like my art, because that way I know for sure that they’re not just being nice
• cute girls
• sketching
• brett domino
• chicken strips
• doodling
• interpreting fictional characters into my own art style
• interpreting fictional characters into alternate settings/universes/etc
• anish kapoor
• station wagons
• boobs
• evolutionary biology
• speculative biology
• looking at pretty pictures of the world and planning trips to all those places in my mind
• looking at pretty houses and planning to live in them all
• BadLipReading
• ellen page
• looking out airplane windows for the entire duration of the flight
• airplanes
• trains
• pretty places
• my friends
• knowing that my friends are my friends, that all those cool people are constantly making the conscious decision to keep being my friends
• pomplamoose
• roxy lalonde
• a brand new pack of pencils
• a brand new anything
• having things that I ordered online get to me
• tracking packages online
• the fact that the vast majority of my tumblr followers aren’t dumb rude idiots and are in fact very genuinely nice people
• cats again
• the fact that people like my blog enough to spend time reading the dumb stuff I post
• when I make a post that I think is hilarious and that everybody else also thinks is hilarious
• oliver (youngstero)
• hot air balloons
• the fact that I know I’m gonna skydive one day and that it’s gonna be fucking terrifying but that I am also going to enjoy it because I will only do it if I’m with someone who I know that I would enjoy going skydiving with
• ian (everets)
• the trip to portland i’m taking with my friends this summer
• remembering Vidcon 2011
• thinking about Vidcon 2012
• making my friends laugh
• seeing people I care about smile real, genuine smiles
• buying things from ice cream trucks even though i am an adult
• choco tacos
• cardigan sweaters
• people dressed in really heartwarming animal costumes for the purpose of making kids happy
• specifically a fellow that comes to the ice rink on particular days dressed as Parker the Penguin, a large, happy, blue penguin mascot that comes out onto the ice and dances around and holds hands with the kids and literally is the most genuinely heartwarming thing I have ever seen
• amusement parks on days that there’s almost nobody in them
• that gif of Fred Armisen imitating a decomposing fox
• big roller coasters
• that feeling you get when you’re strapped into a roller coaster car and it takes off and you’re like “well now I can’t leave, I’m gonna be on this roller coaster whether I like it or not, I better just deal with it”
• cresting a lift hill on a roller coaster
• going down the first drop on a roller coaster
• i really like roller coasters !!!
• birds
• homestuck
• watching sparrows hop around and be sparrows
• that video of a guy’s pet zebra finch bothering him while he’s typing
• big rivers
• big forests
• when cute girls wear cute tights, but not when they wear them as pants, because that’s just a little bit weird and not very flattering, only when they are wearing them actually as tights
• also long rainbow socks
• @horse_ebooks
• heavy rainstorms
• going outside in storms and just standing there outside in the rain
• the spring
• the smell of spring rain on fresh grass
• the smell of vulcanized rubber
• brand new sneakers
• Scrubs
• stretching and popping the joints in my back
• pretty much everything about Adventure Time
• subways/undergrounds
• London
• those pictures of cats with their faces stuck in the middle of slices of bread
• maru the cat
• mimo the cat (mimolechat)
• cats again
• knowing that I am going to be able to live a pretty good and hopefully pretty long life in which I do some of the things I want to do
• when people I like but who intimidate me make very small mistakes, so that I know that they’re also regular people
• my bike
• looking in the mirror and watching the way my skin and muscles and bones move when I move in different ways
• bubble baths
• finding praying mantises
• walking along trails and dry riverbeds with my friends (which is actually something I have done probably more times than most people? I don’t know why I end up in situations where I’m walking along dry riverbeds with my friends but it’s happened so far with like three separate friends. anyway it’s awesome)
• getting lost with my friends
• making lists that are meant to be never quite fini