happy lunar new year!! 🎉
i meant to write this up in november but so many things have happened in between… i just wanted to express my gratitude and highlight some wonderful praise that If You'll Have Me has received. i still can't believe it's actually a book! a physical thing i can hold! thank you everyone who has reviewed IYHM or left me kind words upon reading. it means so much, more than i can even say.
thank you especially to the librarians and independent booksellers who champion these stories! i'm overcome with joy every time i see IYHM pictured in a library, and i'm so honored to have it featured on the Kids' Indie Next list as well as BCCB's Blue Ribbon Books for 2023.
it can be difficult to make art these days, and i sometimes question the point of creating at all. but the response to IYHM has been a great source of encouragement, and i hope to keep drawing and writing stories no matter what. thank you so much!
wishing you all health, happiness, and community ❤️
i. angels must think that love is one sided. angels do not understand love like we do, their languages are too dissimilar from our own. how can something with so many eyes only see forward. i think they like that we try, though. i mean, we do send them little gifts. poems and prayers and lonely mornings. they send us back coffee and cupcakes and a little hope under our tongue. in this way, we are both parts of the universe, trying to care for each other.
ii. i tell my dad i think angels are probably made from flowers. there's an angel in charge of every petal. angels are in toast. angels are in gasoline; it's why they burn with holy fire and why motor oil smells so good.
iii. to my dog i am an angel. he tells me he loves me in the language we have both decided is our code - he presses his head against mine, and we both sigh. i cannot love like an animal, which would be better for me - the unname love, without speech.
iv. i think my angel is plucking her feathers from stress. it must be very hard, to love something that is intent on destroying itself.
v. sometimes it is enough to love something, i mean. pressing our fingers to the mirror and breathing our little lives into the fog. today is a hard one, though. maybe tomorrow you and i can be an angel for the bird outside, and watch it take flight. we'll both know we love it, in our own private language - and give our heart into it. i'll be the angel of daybreak. you can be the angel of dawn. we can both collect the spray of the world and spin it into yarn.
is peanut butter a liquid or solid
saving eye contact for marriage
In case the term is unfamiliar to anyone, your Golden birthday is when the age you're turning coincides with the date you were born. Say if I was born on March 18th, my golden birthday would be when I turned 18 :)
No you don't get it, I'm a Good Person. You don't understand. I'm a Good Person which makes it okay for me to think violently about the Enemy, who is Bad Person. I'm commenting "you should be violently murdered" because I'm Good Person and you're Bad Person. You think saying that to someone is fucked up?? You should be violently murdered, you're probably Bad Person anyway
concept building on Impel Down where the marines have to just make the executive decision to stop putting Luffy in prison altogether because no matter where they put him he just breaks out and frees all the other prisoners while he's at it so it's just a net loss every single time
new recruit being like "we've captured the pirate king!! surely a criminal of this caliber should be put in [whatever the WG's latest high security hell prison is]" and his older captain is like "AHAHAH no we will nOT put Prison Breaks Georg in the place we need to be mOST CERTAIN IS NEVER COMPROMISED"
his bounty no longer says dead or alive anymore like nah just KILL that sucker
oh to have nothing to your name but a rented apartment, and still be happy because you're with the one you love and you get to build a life with them.
[ID: two gifs of Mustafa and Sharjeena sitting in their new apartment. Mustafa is sitting against the wall with his knees pulled up, elbows resting on them as his hands clasp together loosely in the front. Sharjeena is sitting next to him, her cheek pillowed on Mustafa's arm as he watches her with a fond gaze. /end ID]
You might not want to hear this but people with anger issues and/or violent impulses need social accommodations. And no by accommodation I don't mean walking on eggshells around them, actual accommodations for people with these issues comes down to giving them a space away from what's triggering them to process their emotions and calm themselves down same as what kind of accommodations people who get sensory overload or just any kind of overwhelmed. There is no moral value to having anger issues or violent impulses, people with them are deserving of accommodation the same as everyone else.