Notre Dame Is Burning.

notre dame is burning.

this is ok.

it has happened before. it will happen again. it has been lost before. it will be lost again. and again. and again. and again. art and architecture are transient, and temporary, and 850 years may seem like a lot to the individual, who will live maybe 100 if they are very lucky and very healthy, but even the pyramids at saqqara have only existed for about 6000 years and that’s still not all that much, if you consider the grand scheme of things.

yes, this is terrible. as someone who is deeply religious and literally a professional historian with a focus on art and architecture, this is terrible. im mourning. im gutted. im horrified and upset and miserable. but.

it’s not over.

victor hugo wrote hunchback because notre dame du paris was in the process of collapsing and falling apart, and revitalized the entire world’s focus and love for this church, and that was not even 200 years ago. it led to it being renovated.

the roof has fallen in. the scars of fires are on its buttresses. the rose window has fallen out. the beams and piers have collapsed. the spire has toppled. the stones have suffered, and will suffer again, but it is not gone.

renovation work is essential. sometimes things collapse and burn and break and have to come back. it’s not a terrorist attack, it’s renovation, an accident, but we have so much evidence, history, carefully documented everything on one of the most studied places in the world.

it’s not the end.

Also on the night he died, James was making pretty-colored lights for Harry. That was October 31st. In 1981, Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, started on October 27th. It lasts five days.

Well, now I’m crying.

Can you explain why many people think Harry Potter is desi? Not hating just curious! That's so lovely!!

Tbh because there’s no good reason not to.

All the blood status in the hp universe is a metaphor for racism but you know what’s boring? Metaphors for racism that only involve white people. Harry is often described as “dark” and like if James Potter’s family was desi and Lily Evans’s was white, that would enhance Harry’s feelings of otherness while growing up with the Dursleys because lbr Vernon was probs a flaming racist.

“Potter” could easily be an anglicized version of a south Asian last name like Potdar or Potluri, and you could make an argument for a pure blood family like the Potters engaging in and profiting from cultural exchange through the British colonization of India so there was an opportunity to establish generational wealth there.

Also on the night he died, James was making pretty-colored lights for Harry. That was October 31st. In 1981, Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, started on October 27th. It lasts five days.

Oh my God, why have I never connected the Industrial Revolution’s terrible impact on farmers to settler colonialism?? Must investigate further, but seems fittingly full-circle...

As my Rainbow Fish post pushes towards 16K notes, the thing that always breaks my heart is the tag-cloud stories and sometimes replies. 

Some of them are clearly from childhoods that would have been abusive no matter what - the person’s giftedness happened to be one of the tools, one of the things about them that abusive parents or teachers or peers turned into a club to hit them with - and those are fucking tragic and I’m so sorry. And it’s not your fault: when all a parent can say they like about you is “you had so much potential” it is not your fault, that is them being horrible. Every fucking child is lovable, likeable. For a parent to say that says there’s something wrong with them, not you. 

And then the other ones that break my heart so bad are the ones where … the parent meant well. Or the teacher. Or whoever. Or where it was kids being horrible little shits but the actual problem was (and always is) the adults who didn’t intervene because seven year olds are always little shits, they’re seven, they literally did not come with kind generous ethical behaviour installed. We have to teach them that. We have to teach them what’s good and what’s bad and that means you don’t sit there and enable them harassing their classmate because a) it is hideously horrible for the poor target and you have a responsibility to protect them but also b) you are doing the bully NO DAMN FAVOURS. 

But also: do not tell your eight year old it’s up to them to save the world. Especially don’t tell your fucking hypersensitive hyper-intellectual eight year old it’s up to them. Do not tell a child who’s just been hit by the overwhelming weight of the chaotic difficulty that is decency and humanity in the world that it’s their job, their responsibility, to “use their talents” to fix things. 

They’re eight fucking years old. Their job is to learn how to be kind and learn how to tie their own shoes, to learn how to regulate their emotions and behaviours, to let their brains expand, to learn how to think, to do all the things eight year olds need to do in a safe space so they can be best prepared to join the huge overwhelming effort of making the world better, with the rest of us, when they’re grown up. 

Nobody can save the world by themselves. It’s possible we’re not even up to it en masse and there’s seven billion of us and counting and it’ll probably still take another hundred years or so before we get our shit together enough that we can save ourselves. One eight year old sure as fuck can’t, and the best that any one of us can really hope to do is figure out how not to make it worse. 

Which is a much harder proposition when you’re exhausted, anxious and miserable from the three mental health disorders that you developed because when you were eight and your ability to cognitively grasp the vastness of human suffering massively exceeded your emotional ability to process and deal with it AND your critical thinking skills to take that apart and grasp the impossibility of it, someone loaded you down like Atlas. 

Do not tell your eight year old that they owe their soul to the world. Or that they’re letting people down by not “living up to potential”. Your eight year old as a human owes other people basic decency and human consideration, and their best “potential” is a life wherein they have found themselves a space to be content and sturdy and solid in the world so that they can best act out that decency and human consideration. 

That is the only “potential” anyone needs to worry about. 

This has been your intermittent Feelings-Dump by Feather about Kids and that post and how she just wants to go back in time, find all of you when you were six, tell you you’re good enough, and take you to play in the playground. Or read a book. Or get ice-cream. Or whatever. 

Holy fucking shit, Bad Bob too.

If ur feeling it .... I don’t believe each person has just one true love, but sometimes we don’t have enough time to find another. (That’s the way it crumbles. Cookie-wise.)

Oh buddy, am I ever feeling it :^)Warnings: Unhelpful advice from grownups, bitter hyperbolic, fatalistic feelings about love and death, the fucking canon overdose fuck this fandom

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Oh wow!

Anybody know if there is a link between ADHD and absolute pitch? I know there’s lots of sensory processing stuff. I thought I’d seen a reference to autism and absolute pitch once in an article, but I’ve lost that.

was trying to sleep but then my third eye snapped open involuntarily so I had to make this

“Killed 99 bears”

a fact that if actually accomplished, should be put on a tombstone.