so I watched one too many videos of people making fancy Victorian lampshades and said “well I already have all the supplies I need for that, including hubris” and now here we are.

as it turns out, I was right and it’s not actually that hard, but the one thing none of the tutorials have explained is how to avoid sticking yourself with pins every two minutes. and also how to keep from bleeding on your lampshade.

so last night it finally hit me that in 6 months I am going to be moving halfway across the country on not quite a whim but definitely a hope, a prayer and also a dream to go a grad program and then try to finagle my way into a weird and highly specific career. and no you will not be getting any further details on it because I do not want to dox myself. this is also, for once, not the problem

the problem is! that I have to condense my entire apartment down into three suitcases and one vera bradley bag of shit to trek with me across the country (am I driving? flying? who the fuck knows, definitely not me), shove the rest of it in my childhood bedroom at the cost of my parents and hopefully not have to get a storage locker because, one way or another, I will be (unfortunately) moving back into a college dorm. something that I, a 26 year old, really do not want to do. but alas. I am.

so tonight I embark upon the quest of My Clothes.

"saph," you might be saying. "it is January. you have six months."

yes. six months to figure out where to put All Of My Shit. and I do not want to leave it until the last minute. I do not want it to be July and suddenly I realize I have too many clothes. which I know I do on account of the fact that I have worked retail for the last five years and have, thus, accumulated far too many clothes.

so. this fine evening. I will be attempting to fit My Entire Closet into one (1) very average sized suitcase. I expect this will be go horribly. but it is 7:25pm and I have hot chocolate and unfortunately nothing to lose.

if you’re reading this, i’m wishing for the universe to be kind to you

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

if i had three wishes they would all be to make web 2.0 utterly illegal and go back to normal html

"I know chatgpt is bad but you just don't really have any choice" you literally do. Don't use it. Have some moral backbone.

to my student who emailed me today asking if she should title her essay “what does grendel eat for breakfast? danish” or “no arm, no foul,” thank you. you don’t know that i was in the middle of hashing out how i’m handling your classmate’s intentional plagiarism, but receiving that email reminded me that some of you take your teenage rebellions in the right direction, and i love u for that.

Catherine Schell as Maya - Space: 1999 (1976)

kill me once, shame on you. kill me twice how did you do that