older generations expecting us to just keep living as they have always lived despite the fact it’s unsustainable and literally catching on fire and crumbling in front of them… no girl im not getting a job im just trying to enjoy the few years of liveable climate this planet has left thanks to ur generational grift !
You know what? Dating is a numbers game. Not being rude, being well-groomed and dressed up nicely and being considerate of people is one thing, but you’re just wasting your time if you go on dates trying to act normal. What you should be doing is going on 1000 dates with different people, put all your weird shit on display, and then pick the one who isn’t repulsed by it. If they’re repulsed by what you’re into from the start, you’re never going to be able to truly be comfortably yourself around them.
Don’t stress about being ‘too weird’. If you’re genuinely just being yourself, that’s just the limit of how much Your Particular Sort Of Weird Shit someone that’s going to be a potential life partner will just need to tolerate, or even embrace. That might sound like some dumbass toxic entitled dramaqueen shit but trust me: You’re absolutely 100% better off alone than with someone who’s uncomfortable with the way you are when you’re comfortable. And so are they. Like yeah, relationships require work and compromises and meeting someone halfway, but you shouldn’t have to compromise who you are in order to be with someone.
Your personality is there to keep the kind of people that you don’t want in your house, out of your house. Go out with seven different girls and send all of them some weird fucking meme of two humanoid ghouls eating a dead deer with some text like “this could be us but you won’t go to the carcass with me :(” and pick the one who still wants to talk with you after that. And perhaps even inquires whether there actually is a deer carcass. Does it still have all the teeth. Because if there’s actually a carcass and it still has all the teeth, she wants them. She has plans that need deer teeth.
Maybe the deer teeth are for the wedding dress.
Photo by CT on Flickr. “It’s a Crow wedding dress covered in elk teeth – I think that the eye teeth of the elk are used, so there are not too many in any one animal. The groom gives them to his bride to make her dress, and their number shows his prowess as a hunter.”
Okay I love how this changes the whole thing into a whole new context. “The woman I like isn’t sure if I like her. I am constructing her wedding dress.” is 100% something I could see lesbians being up to.
In traditional Irish folktales, the elves only understand/respect Gaelic: the English language revolts them, so don’t expect to be winning any of those famous riddle contests or song tournaments in English.
I’ve idly considered making one of those memes where it’s like [THE IRISH] *brofist* [THE JEWS] and the point of agreement is “our language is magic,” but the joke would take too much explaining to be funny.
A lot of Irish Gaelic is structured around speech and the power of language. There isn’t, for example, a word for “yes” or “no.” In order to answer a direct yes/no question, you have to use a form of the verb that was used to ask the question. So basically, if the question is–say–”did you murder your wife” then there is no way to simply say “Yes, Your Honor” or “No, Your Honor.” Your minimum required effort involves using the verb that was invoked in the question: “I murdered,” or “I didn’t murder.”
Of course you can just as easily, in just as few syllables and maybe fewer, change the verb. “I was framed,” maybe. Which is to say that the most basic speech acts in Irish involve constructing a narrative, assenting to others’ narratives or challenging them, and most crucially elaborating on the narratives that have already been established.
(I chose murder just to be a colorful example, but actually I need to go back to my language reference books and check because I bet this interacts interestingly with the tendency in Irish for the narrator never to be the subject of her own story. You’re always the object, in Irish: you can’t drop a plate, for instance, the plate drops itself at you. You’re not thirsty but a powerful thirst is on you. You didn’t murder that woman but she very well might have gotten murdered in your general vicinity.)
You see this lots of other places in the language too. For instance there’s also no word for “hello” or “goodbye.” If you want to greet somebody your required minimum is to cough up a formulaic blessing: Dia duit, God be with you.
Here’s the thing. The second person can’t just be like “yup, uh huh. dia duit.” No. The stakes have been raised. The second person’s required minimum answer is now Dia’s muire duit, God and Mary be with you. If a third person joins they have to invoke St. Patrick on top of the two already mentioned. I’m not kidding. At four people you do hit a limit where you’re allowed to just say “God be with all here,” but in the very traditional country pubs it’s an insult to cross the threshold without saying at least that to cover everyone inside. Actually worse than an insult; basically a curse. That’s the burden you bear when you start speaking a magic language.
That puts a lot of conversations I’ve had with rural Irish people into a far better context. Because even when speaking English they will speak in this structure, knowing that context makes so much more sense now.
The way Irish structures the speaker as *positional* is also deeply insightful. Not just because the speaker is the object of a narrative- though that is unique and fascinating too- but also because that narrative happens in a conceptual *space* around speaker and subjects. Tá brón orm, sorrow is on me. If I’m missing my coat it’s apart from me; my accomplishments are beneath me; my careers and skills are in me; if I’m to do something, it’s on me to do that. If I welcome you to my home, I’m putting the welcome in front of you.
We distinguish between temporary and permanent and habitual forms of being, even in English. The only other place I know that does this is AAVE. Marcus be playing the drums; aye lads, he surely does be playing them.
You can’t say please or thank you or I love you; those are powerful ideas, and you must put a little effort into articulating them. Le do thoil, with you will. Go raibh maith agat; very roughly “a good is at you.” (Good on you, mate; good going!) I love you, Christ if there’s not dozens of ways to say it, but none simple. The simplest I know translates most closely to “my heart is at you.”
Great addition!
A lot of people are also chiming in to say that the Irish language is called Gaeilge, not Gaelic. I am 43 and American, and when I studied Irish in school the class was literally called “Irish Gaelic” (though the teacher just called it Irish and that’s usually how I think of it too). So like, I hear you all that “Irish Gaelic” is wrong, but it is the way I was taught twenty-five years ago. Aithním go raibh dearmad orm, I find that a mistake was on me.
Please to me is “Má’s é do thoil é” it’s what I got taught as a kid and it’s the one I use more often than Le do thoill. It literally means “if it is your will” too.
“Please” also comes from “if it pleases you”, and goodbye from “god be with ye”, and so on! But it’s definitely interesting which languages abbreviated and which didn’t
if only everyone could know that zuko is a prodigy like his sister, unfortunately his special talent is called “breaking and entering” and he can’t tell anyone about that
Anyway here is your reminder that poor effeminate men existed in the 18th century and any reading of class that acts as tho every poor man was a hyper masculine rugged labourer and every rich man was a effeminate fop is an inherently flawed reading of class 🙃
extremely fun fact: the first recorded drag queen, William Dorsey Swann, known to his friends as The Queen, was a former slave! also “the earliest recorded American to take specific legal and political steps to defend the queer community’s right to gather without the threat of criminalization, suppression, or police violence.” just an absolute badass with great taste.
I think an underrated horror trope is “insular christian cult worshipping something that slowly reveals itself to be Very Much Not God”.
I think it speaks something to the bastardized nature of american christian sects like southern baptist
and others. I think in a lot of ways the way colonialism pairs with christianity in the americas really makes it demonic in ways that horror makes powerful statements about.
“There is no god in this church. Nothing but an empty box built on
atrocities. You think the christian God watches over America?
God did not come with us to this land.”
I like the idea of a horror story set in a world built around Discworld/ American Gods rules, where belief literally makes gods real, and one of those sects accidentally creates the God that they’re *actually* worshipping, rather than the one that they *think* that they’re worshipping; and He’s callous and cruel and petty and bloodthirsty because His followers are callous and cruel and petty and bloodthirsty, and they’ve basically been worshipping themselves all along.
