i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)
Sometimes, people are really great.
This is also an example of picking One Thing and putting most of your Better The World efforts there. We have so many different important issues to care about and act toward, and it’s tempting to try and do a Little for Many Things - and I’m not saying that little bits of effort don’t add up! They do. But often you’ll make a bigger impact (and possibly have less compassion/activist fatigue) if you direct the majority of your efforts toward one or two things.
Sir Ian McKellen urges gay people to be better allies to the transgender community.
The legendary actor and Stonewall co-founder joined It’s a Sin star Olly Alexander for a special LGBT+ History Month talk on TikTok on February 25, Pink News reports.
Sir Ian said:
“I do hear people – gay people – talk about transgender people in very much the same terms as people used to talk about your common or garden gay.
“The connection between us all is we come under the queer umbrella – we are queer. I quite like being queer actually.
“The problems that transgender people have with the law are not dissimilar from what used to be the case for us, so I think we should all be allies really.“
This is not the first time the actor has stood up to transphobes.
Speaking to lifestyle magazine Attitude, the veteran star talked about how happy he was about Elliot Page coming out as transgender.
He felt “so disappointed” with himself for not recognizing the struggles that the then-teenage actor could have been facing when they worked together.
The actor talked about why it is important to be honest with oneself.
Writing poetry is honestly one of the best things I’ve started doing recently. It isn’t even a conscious choice; whenever one of those moments comes along where I’m feeling a profound mood or I just love how the sky looks and I want to memorize every detail of the scene, or when I pause on the hill on my way to the water and close my eyes and silently list all of the things I can smell or hear or feel – instead of letting the moment slip away, I open up a word document and start taking notes. Paragraph style, or just one long run-on sentence, not caring about whether any of it makes sense, just stringing together adjectives and colors and whatever feels right, to describe that moment, to describe the curve of the trees or the taste of the wind.
And when it’s a song that strikes that mood, I put it on repeat and just sink back and try to feel whatever image it’s conjuring up. Sometimes it’s just a color, or a memory, something that feels like it might just be the corner of a larger cloth, like I’m reaching into the water and tugging and seeing what all comes up. And when I’ve exhausted one description, another comes up; and soon, I’ll find myself repeating ideas or twisting them into something new, applying them to another situation that I didn’t realize was connected but now makes perfect sense.
And I think that’s my favorite part: realizing midway through the poem (or towards the end, more like) what my body was trying to say, what emotion it had to get out but had no way of communicating other than through a couple of feelings and pictures. It can be exciting, when I understand what my subconscious was trying to tell me. Like it was tapping into the patterns of the universe, and it found something it really liked, and now that connection will help me understand life a little more clearly. Other times, it can be surprisingly intimate… when I’m listening to a song in the library, and wondering why it makes me feel so pensive, and then by the time I finish tugging everything up I realize something about my childhood, and my nostalgia, and that great feeling of indescribable passion and fear and disillusionment and everything that I feel towards the world. It chokes up my throat and I have to stop there because I don’t want to cry, at least not here, not now. Maybe one day I’ll have the courage to keep tugging, after I’ve let myself crumble into a sobbing, vulnerable mess; maybe after I’ve pulled myself through that storm, and emerged with damp eyes and a feeling of calm, I’ll be able to tug that all up into words too.
Anyway, writing poetry is one of those things that I thought was cliche but never imagined would be so cathartic, so meditative, so freeing. You should try it too. And don’t overthink it – I barely realized that was what I was doing, until I stared down at the block of text and realized that yeah, those run-on sentences are kind of like stanzas, and yeah, those rich descriptions and those moods that I was just trying to convey are kind of poetic in their form. So just pick a feeling and go with it.
i really do enjoy stories and character arcs that explore anger as a positive or at least curative force. that can allow room to say that, yes, too much anger and anger without direction can be hurtful and exhausting while still acknowledging that anger can be an important motivator.
there can be anger in justice. anger in healing. anger in grieving and bonding and forming a movement.
less stories with guilt surrounding anger and more stories asking “why shouldn’t i be angry?”
use anger as a point of clarity and focus not irrationality
if a hand kiss isn’t done with either reverent trembling and closed eyes or with a certain slow sensuality and direct ‘fuck me’ eye contact, you are wasting my time and everyone else’s
While I am a fan of both of these kinds, I feel like limiting all available variety of hand kisses to only these two is missing quite a lot.
For instance:
- “I was just holding your hand to convey sincerity and you said something I don’t have an immediate answer to, so I’m going to kiss your hand instead.”
- “you’re only semi-lucid and are sort of reaching for my face and for various reasons I shouldn’t kiss YOUR face, but your hand is right here and I still need to convey affection”
- “your hand is the only part of you with only minor injuries and the doctor [healer, whatever] is right there and will get mad at me if I move you”
- “you were going to play-hit me but I’m actually much faster in the reflexes than you and also my catching your hand and kissing it is part of our game”
- “you just touched my face so your palm is right there”
- “I’m extremely happy about something and this felt like the best spontaneous action, what am I, an expert on motivations?”
- “this is YOUR hand, so it is particularly delightful to me”
- “we were cuddling and holding hands and I felt like it”
- “I was just struck by the overwhelming delight I feel at your existence and your hand was the most conveniently positioned thing to kiss in response to this thought process”
Tumblr is that barren pasture in Costa Rica that was purposely filled with 12,000 metric tons of orange peels by conservation researchers. Initially, the orange peels decomposed into “sludgy stuff filled with fly larvae.” This led to accusations that the juice company providing the peels were “defiling the land,” and thus, the site was ultimately abandoned. But when researchers went back about 15 years later, they discovered “the arid landscape had been unrecognisably transformed into a dense, vine-filled jungle… as for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody’s entirely sure.”
