Assume you have not forgotten all descriptive words in your moment of need, and that you can speak this language. Regrettably, circumstances do not permit you to spend more than a paragraph scrupulously describing the effect of highlights, and the audience is not necessarily interested in the tiny specific variations of hair color in white people. WHAT COLOR. PICK ONE. GO.
I cannot get sidetracked in this my quest, but this almost got me. IS THAT TRUE
Maybe put in the tags which denomination you are and why you have that opinion please? ☺️ Oh! Can’t believe I forgot! And whether or not you’re a convert (that’s the whole reason I made this poll 🤦)
watching “tao of rodney” and it’s genuinely criminal that they wrote a backslide of his character after this (especially after “mckay and mrs miller” earlier in the season) like!!! this man has fundamentally changed!!!! he has had the most genuine respectful kind moments with all the people he cares about! the fences are mended!!! he has shared love and been loved in return! and learned not to be a dick!!! don’t forget that lesson rodney!!!!!
so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.
and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.
…which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.
see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.
while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.
especially if the president of the united states is on board.
yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.
and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like “move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you.”
but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.
…and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.
not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.
yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.
but yeah, so thats my new measure for “how much did i really fuck up?” and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire
i haven’t been in a sga head space for a while, so “a blouse” it is
bar none, the hardest and most upsetting chapter to write. not like can’t-see-the-keyboard-through-the-tears upset, more like i-don’t-even-want-to-think-about-this upset. it was so hard to concentrate. i’d write a little, like a few sentences maximum, and then tab away almost involuntarily to give my mind a break
when i was getting ready for my move to idaho i was having to be very stern with myself about what i was going to take with me and what i was going to finally throw out/give away, bc i’d held on to a Lot of things for years for reasons i need therapy for probably, heh. amongst other things was… i think it was a trash bag, actually, with some of my mom’s clothes in it. i pulled out a sweater she’d gotten on a little trip the two of us had gone on and just sat on the edge of my bed holding it to my chest, letting myself feel. i suppose it was grief, but i just felt heavy and tired. another thing of hers i brought with me was a bottle of perfume she used to wear that’s not tied to one memory in particular, just the general idea of my mom getting dressed up to go somewhere special
so basically i combined those two experiences (perfume = mom going out + holding a shirt and unable to put a name to the feeling, just knowing it’s heavy) and put lockwood through it! only i gave him some friends to help 🧡
the thing about skirts- especially long skirts -being portrayed as inherently impractical is that it completely ignores context.
I wear long skirts a lot in my everyday life. would I hike the Rockies in them? no- although technically one can, because women in particular did for many years. but I’m not hiking the Rockies every day. I’m a museum worker living in a large city. as long as I can walk without treading on my skirt’s hem, and avoid getting it too dirty in a way I can’t clean, I’m fine.
if I were going to hike the Rockies, I would wear something different. just like I don’t wear my Natural Form evening gown with a train to trek to the subway in a rainstorm
situational clothing has existed for a long time, in many cultures the world over. in my specific era/area of focus (Europe and colonized North America during the 19th-early 20th centuries) you get ground-clearing skirts intended for long periods of walking, or even shorter ones worn by women doing serious physical labor. some occupational outfits, like those of Victorian England’s famous female coal-pit workers, even involve a hiked skirt and trousers. but you can find photos of the same women in more conventional attire for the era, because what they wore to church was not what they wore to work was not what they wore to run errands for their families in their free time
so when movies are like “oh my god Female Lead can’t FUNCTION in these skirts!!!” (painted not as a personal preference for the character, but as a Universal Shortcoming of Skirts) and all she’s doing is walking around town in skirts of a reasonable length…head meet desk
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abbie: Bible-believing Christian. 30+ only through God's grace. pro life. a nice person under the depression, anger, and trauma [citation needed]. tired™️
ALT
