List Of Interesting Latin Phrases

I was talking to a coworker recently and offhandedly said I wasn’t exactly competent at a lot of things. He reared back in obvious visceral disagreement that made me stop midsentence.

“What do you mean you’re not competent?”

“I guess I mean compared to the people I’m surrounded by? I’m not very handy, I guess.”

He looked baffled.

I tried to illuminate with a story. So at the sex shop we needed to vacuum every night, right? But one time after my days off I could tell the carpets hadn’t been vacuumed since I last saw them. I asked the other girls why not. It turned out that the screw that held the handle on the vacuum had been stripped and it wouldn’t stay in. Why was that down to a single screw? Bad design.

So any attempt to vacuum meant the handle just popped off when the screw jumped ship. I looked over the vacuum. I found a junk drawer. I found the biggest screw I could that still fit in the hole wrapped it in tape to bulk it out. Then I shoved/screwed it in place. Then I duct taped the opening so that fucker couldn’t pop out. Voila, a working handle.

The other girls were utterly delighted that I’d fixed the vacuum but I was painfully aware that my solution was neither elegant nor long term.

My coworker listened. Finally he said, “I think being competent just means you have the ability to learn a skill you lack, and you can do that. Your solution worked, and you were the one that tried to fix the problem.”

I digested that and agreed, but admitted any new skill learned would prompt me to be a huge baby about it.

The emotion expressed...

Like it captured the hope and nostalgia I feel every new years. Even when I pretend it's just another day

Franz Theodor Aerni - Fireworks on Castel Sant'Angelo (1875-80)

"ohh my god you can't just-"

Am I yours to command? Does the collar 'round my neck have your name on it? I kneel to no king nor god, and I see no crown on you.

The people who say shit like "I don't dream about labour" when asked about their dream job make me sad. It's not their fault and it's an obvious conclusion to come to in the environment that we live in, but they really do seem to make no difference between work, and being exploited. You do want to work, it is inherent human nature to want to do things, you just don't want to slave for shit wages while making profit for someone else.

If art wasn't an option and I didn't have to worry about being profitable, I know what I would be doing: Keep a little shop selling secondhand-thirdhand buttons and buckles.

Thrift shops and secondhand stores could dump (or sell, whatever) their unsold and unwanted goods to me, and I could spend all day going through the heaps and picking them apart, plucking the still-perfectly-good buttons, zippers and buckles out of discarded things with threadbare fabrics and sell them.

Probably also making those little trinket storage boxes out of hollowed-out books. By hollowing out books that nobody wanted or read.

To live life that softly. Ans to create that beautifully

Salvatore Postiglione (1861–1906), Dante and Beatrice (detail)

All the torso animated studies.

— Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

(via the author, at the Ex Bird place)