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There's Always A Lot Of Joking Around About How Coke Used To Have Actual Cocaine In It But I Don't Feel
There's always a lot of joking around about how Coke used to have actual cocaine in it but I don't feel like anyone pays enough attention to the fact that 7-Up had lithium in it until 1948 and honestly I think we'd do better to put that back.
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flail
Maybe getting off work and sitting in front of a different computer and scrolling mindlessly is the same as when our parents (mine, anyway) came home from work and sat and stared mindlessly at a bunch of nothing and empty noise on the TV. But if it isn't it worries me and makes me think my brain has broken and I can't pay attention to anything any more, and so I decided to start crocheting and to make myself learn to knit.
I don't enjoy either one of these things. I think I particularly don't like crochet, for a number of reasons, but I am sure I can learn to particularly not like knitting, too, if I ever get started with it.
A few years ago I did some needlefelting for somewhat different reasons and quickly discovered that the problem with making things is that you end up with piles of things taking up space unless you can find a way to get rid of them, and not that many people really need cute little needlefelted owls or frogs and I maybe can't bear to let them go very much. (Add making a needlefelted frog to the list of things I want to do to prove I can still *do* something, but that has to come after finishing the needlefelted comics character that I started and left to sit when I didn't know what I would do with it).
I had hoped I would find these things meditative and that they would quiet me and help me sleep at night, but they just bore me. I have found them all much less appealing than sitting in front of the computer scrolling mindlessly.
And it's worse when I have a few days off in a row and start to feel human again and think of things I can do and want to do and maybe even start planning, and then I go back to work and in 24 to 36 hours I am back to a mindless scrolling blob of tired.
I am now about halfway through crocheting a very vivid ugly hat.
Being on tumblr is like being a raccoon. I dig through the garbage for shiny things I like. Sometimes I find good things to share with my friends. Sometimes I find something horrifying, and also share it with my friends.
Pennies
So for some reason that I never asked about after I was grown, my parents did not want me to have Barbie dolls when I was a kid. There are so many good ideological reasons they might not have but it could also just have been the money. Anyway, my mother gave me an old doll that she had when she was a kid and told me she was called Penny. Penny had originally had clothes and maybe other things but no longer did and was, to my tiny advertising-addled mind, entirely unsatisfactory.
As an adult, I got curious about Penny and looked stuff up online and discovered that this was her.
So apparently, age-appropriate dolls did still provide opportunities to buy and buy and buy things and present a life that is about having things. But for some reason, Barbie, who now seems entirely inappropriate for little kids, took off, probably *because* of seeming so adult.
Eventually my parents were no match for the aggressive constant marketing and I begged and begged and my father's mother, naturally, bought me Barbies so I could get properly started with decades of body issues and consumerism and try to fit in with my friends and what I believed we were supposed to be. I didn't even really understand how the hell to play with dolls and they didn't interest me that much but I *had* them and eventually had a fair number. And I feel weirdly sad and guilty about rejecting Penny (although in fact I do still have her and all my childhood dolls).