This Guy Wont Stop Photoshopping Himself Into Kendall Jenners Photos And It Makes Them 10 Times Better

This Guy Won’t Stop Photoshopping Himself Into Kendall Jenner’s Photos And It Makes Them 10 Times Better

Credit: Kirby Jenner / IG

via: boredpanda.com

Also very Beauty and the Beast. (So far as I know, no one has ever painted the Beast as a snake. But they should.)

Aziraphale der Bücherwurm

This is one of my favorite Paintings called Der Bücherwurm by Carl Spitzweg and I couldn’t stop thinking how beautifully Aziraphale Crowley would fit into that scene

This is the most beautiful way to describe fic, transformative storytelling and collective mythmaking. He gets it.

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. 

L’Chaim: A Childless Holocaust Survivor Discovers He Has a Namesake

by Rabbi Levi Welton

An inspiring true story about two Chaims and the miracle of life.

My wife Chavi and I were visiting my folks in California. We picked a random Shabbat to go out there and went to the local Chabad for services. A family from out of town was also there that Shabbat celebrating their daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. We stayed for the Kiddush and the dynamic Rabbi Mendy Cohen led the entire community in singing, inspiring Torah learning and some hearty l'chaims. The party continued until late in the afternoon.

At some point, I asked the father of the Bat Mitzvah where they originally came from and he told me he was from Mexico City and had converted to Judaism many years ago before he had his kids.

Rabbi Welton with Holocaust survivor Chaim Grossman while wearing suit hand-tailored by Holocaust survivor Martin Greenfield.

“So why’d you pick your Hebrew name of Chaim?”

He told me that he had once spent a Friday night Shabbat service at a synagogue in Westchester, NY back when he was just starting out on his spiritual journey. One of his Rabbis had told him that if he ever met a Holocaust survivor, he should remember these words:

“A Holocaust survivor who doesn’t believe in God….is a normal person. A Holocaust survivor who does…is an angel.”

During that Friday night service, as they were dancing around welcoming the holiness of the Shabbat Queen, he looked down at the arm of the person he was holding hands with and saw numbers. He felt overwhelmed that he was dancing with an angel and couldn’t control the urge to ask the man his name.

The old man smiled and said, “Chaim.” At that moment, this man from Mexico City decided that when it came the time to pick his Hebrew name, he would name himself after the angel he was lucky to dance with. Years passed and he never saw the man again.

I asked this father, “Is the survivor’s name Chaim Grossman?”

His mouth dropped open. “How do you know that?”

I told him I’m the Rabbi of a synagogue in Westchester. One of my congregants survived Buchenwald, went on to become a pilot in the Israeli Defense Forces, and then immigrated to America. His name is Chaim.

This father began to cry. He didn’t even known that Chaim Grossman was still alive. I leaned in close to him and told him that Chaim Grossman was very much alive and that I would be seeing him the following Shabbat. After Shabbat , we took this photo as this father wanted to send his love to his “Godfather.”

The author with Chaim Valencia.

The next Shabbat, I asked Chaim Grossman to sit in the center of the synagogue as I began my sermon. I told him that 3,000 miles away there lived a man that carried his name and who was raising his family in a traditional, observant home.

“This is incredible,” I said. “What is the probability that on the exact Shabbat, the only Shabbat in the entire year that we would fly out to California, it would be the same Shabbat of his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah? What are the chances that after hours of celebrating, we would have that conversation about the origin of his name? And what are the chances that the Shabbat for which I would return to New York City to tell this story to his namesake would be the same Shabbat on which we read the Torah portion of Shemot. (Exodus) which literally means “Names,” as our Sages teach that the way our ancestors broke free of their slavery was by keeping their Jewish names!“

I then pulled out the photo, printed and framed, and looked Chaim in the eye. As he raised his numbered arm to receive the photo of his “Godson,” everyone began to cry. You see, Chaim had never been blessed with any children. And yet now he had a proud Jew halfway around the world who was carrying his name and who would pass it on to his children’s children’s children.

I will never forget the moment when Chaim stood up and blessed God.

I will never forget the deafening applause that followed.

And I will never forget the image of this holy Holocaust survivor hobbling out of the synagogue holding tightly onto the framed photo of a miracle.

As my father, Rabbi Benzion Welton, taught me, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” I had thought I was going to California on vacation but I was really being sent to bear witness to a profound lesson about “Chaim” which means “Life.” As the Talmud says, “If our descendants are alive, then our patriarchs are alive” (Taanit 5b).

“Killed 99 bears”

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