Moonstruck

Unha manchea de bicos

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

It's hard to know when you are in the right direction, things are only really obvious in retrospect; but there are plenty of signs that you are not in the right direction:

1) You spend more time talking about the past than living a present that will lead to a better future

2) You look around, and you see people, but no one you feel intimately connected with, no one you are proud to call "family"

3) You easily get irritated and offended by trivial things that shouldn't matter at all

4) You scroll instead of creating; you make excuses instead of keeping up your efforts; you feel envy instead of being focused on your own life

5) You struggle to build long-lasting friendships because you haven't developed enough of a healthy emotional connection with yourself to be able to do the same with others

6) You don't feel like you are really in control of your life, just busier and more and more overwhelmed with unexpected problems as you get older, because you never took the time to understand how society worked and how you should have invested accordingly

7) You still care about what the whole world thinks about you and as a result of walking a path that someone else chose for you, you still feel a certain emptiness regardless of all the wealth and status you accumulated

8) You don't think the younger and childlike version of yourself would be proud of meeting you today

9) You still think the world is out there to get you, still don't believe in genuine love, still don't understand how your parents felt about you

10) You feel the need to constantly be distracted, you travel all the time, you build your whole identity around "working hard," you try to "fix people," because it's easier than to look inward and figure out how to be a better person and feel happy in your own company instead.

[Moonstruck @Moonster04]

@AltRightEspan @PaulSkallas what are your thoughts on this?

[Moonstruck @Moonster04]

@telegram 668

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I asked a mechanic in a grease-stained shirt how he was doing at 6:30 AM on a freezing Monday.

He was kneeling on the cold concrete, holding a heavy wrench, covered in dark oil.

He didn't complain. He didn’t sigh. He looked up, adjusted his cap, and said, "Living the dream, brother."

I spent three days contemplating his words. In my language, such a phrase spoken in such hardship would be deep, bitter irony.

Then I watched him finish replacing an alternator, wipe his hands on a rag, and look at the running engine with a quiet, fierce pride.

He was not being sarcastic. He was stating a fact. He had a job, a set of tools, and a machine that obeyed his hands.

Yesterday, a man asked me how my morning was going while I was shoveling snow in the freezing wind.

I stopped, looked at my shovel, and said, "Living the dream, man."

The man smiled, gave me a thumb up, and kept walking.

America does not wait for a perfect life to be happy. It looks at a hard morning's work and calls it a dream.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

My father died in Japan in February and I could not get back.

I told exactly one American, and only because he asked a direct question at a bad moment and I have never been able to lie fast enough.

He did not say he was sorry.

He said, "You busy Saturday?"

I was not busy Saturday. I have not been busy on a Saturday since I arrived in this country.

He wanted help moving a riding mower to the other side of his garage. The mower runs. He drove it out himself. I want to be accurate here, because I have thought about it a great deal since: the mower ended that day about two feet from where it started.

We were in the garage five hours.

There was a small refrigerator out there with beer in it and one orange drink belonging to his grandson, and neither of us touched the orange drink at any point.

We discussed a shelf. We discussed a bolt for some time. Around one o'clock we spent close to forty minutes on the correct way to coil a hose, and he was wrong, and I told him he was wrong, and he told me to prove it, and I proved it, and he said "huh," and that was the end of it.

He did not mention my father once.

I had prepared for it. In my country a man in mourning is approached with fixed phrases that have been in service four hundred years, which is the entire purpose of them, and I had built mine in English over three nights. They were not good. They were ready.

I never used them. I still have them written down.

At six he said, "Same time next week?"

We did that for five Saturdays. We moved a workbench. We rewired a light that already worked. One Saturday we sorted screws by length, which is not a job. That is somewhere to put a man.

In April a neighbor three doors down lost his mother.

I do not own a mower. I own a boat trailer that does not need to be moved.

He came at eight. He is coming again this Saturday.

I have not said one word to him about his mother and I am not going to.

He knows what time.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In Japan, if you use a word wrong, someone will quietly teach you the correct one.

In Texas, I thanked a mechanic by saying "you are a good man of the trucks."

He did not correct me. He put it on his voicemail.

"You've reached Ray. Good man of the trucks."

His son answers the phone that way now.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I needed my lawn mowed. I asked an American for the name of a company.

He said, "Get a kid."

A kid. Not a service. A child.

I asked which kid.

"Any of 'em."

I asked where one obtains a kid. There is no directory. There is no listing.

He said, "Ask around."

I asked around. Two days later a fourteen year old named Cody was standing on my porch.

He did not bring a mower. Nobody told me this part. The kid uses your mower and your gas. He brings arms.

I asked his rate.

He said, "Whatever."

Whatever. A negotiation had opened and the other party declined to attend.

A blade drawn against no opponent must be returned to the sheath in silence.

I put my wallet away.

So I conducted research. I asked four adults what the correct amount was.

Four numbers. Twenty. Forty. Twenty five. One man said he gave a kid fifty once and could not remember why.

There is no rate. There has never been a rate. An entire national labor market runs with no published price and every participant is somehow satisfied.

I looked up the state minimum wage. I timed the work. I arrived at a defensible figure and I paid it.

My neighbor watched this from his driveway.

Later he came over and told me, kindly, that I had underpaid.

I said the amount exceeded the legal minimum.

He said, "Yeah, but he's a kid."

THE PRICE IS NOT THE PRICE. THE PRICE IS THE PRICE PLUS SOMETHING NO MAN ON THIS STREET WILL SAY OUT LOUD.

So I corrected. I overcorrected. Sixty dollars for forty minutes.

The same neighbor came back over.

"Alright. Don't ruin him."

There is a floor and there is a ceiling. Neither is written anywhere. Both are enforced by men standing in driveways with their arms folded.

The samurai who cannot read the room dies in the room.

I have been dying in this room since June.

Cody was thirsty. I did not offer him water, because he had not asked, and a warrior does not name another warrior's weakness.

My wife told me he is fourteen and it is ninety one degrees. I now leave a bottle on the step where he can take it without being seen taking it.

I asked my neighbor why the whole street does this. Why grown men pay a boy more than the work is worth and then pretend not to have noticed.

He said, "You're not buying a lawn."

Then he went inside, because apparently that was a complete explanation.

Cody has cut my grass eleven times. He is saving for a truck. I know the exact figure because he told me, unprompted, in August, sweating, holding my own mower.

Last week a family moved in three houses down. The man came over and asked if I knew anybody who cuts grass.

I said, "I got a kid."

I heard what that sounded like. I did not correct it.

He is nine hundred dollars from the truck.

A mountain is not asked to be smaller. A mountain is walked around, at night, quietly, by a man with a truck payment he intends to make on someone else's behalf.

I have started mentioning him to people.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

If I hear another Boomer conservative bitching about Gen Z ordering DoorDash I’m going to become a communist. It’s true their grandparents always cooked homemade meals. But that’s because grandma stayed at home and grandpa had a union job and nobody could reach him after 5. They had a house with a full kitchen and 3 kids by 25. Meanwhile half of Gen Z men are forced to compete with the entire population of South America for some 12 hour long shift HVAC job that barely pays the rent. They’re 30 and nobody cooks for them because they can’t find any women who’ll marry them when they can’t even afford a starter home in the ghetto. The other half of Gen Z men are busting their ass competing with the entire populations of India and China for some 70 hour a week powerpoint job that asks them for updates on the slides at 3AM. They can’t find anyone to cook for them either, because every women around them is convinced that being a mother and cooking for a man is beneath them because they’re gonna save the world when they become VP of Marketing at MegaCorp in 20 years.

[宮本寛太 @miya_pastel1]

光と芝生

[宮本寛太 @miya_pastel1]

最近の作品は全てメルボルンの風景です。
ダイナミックな空がつづきます。

[Promakos @PROMAKOS_]

Durante varios siglos dos familias nobles griegas embarcaron cada año a dos de sus hijas para enviarlas a Troya, donde los troyanos tenían derecho a matarlas si las atrapaban antes de alcanzar el templo de Atenea, y a las que entraban con vida les rapaban la cabeza y las condenaban a fregar el santuario descalzas hasta la vejez, sin matrimonio y sin otra opción, todo por la violación de Casandra sobre el altar de la diosa durante la guerra de Troya.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

"Compatibility" is a shibboleth of postmodern mind sickness.

The post-ww2 generations, from Boomers on forward, schooled in postmodern nihilism, prize freedom from responsibility above all things, and despise the very idea of any unchosen obligation.

So they seek "compatible" mates.

But what compatible means is, to them, is "my natural, uninfluenced, behavior fulfills my mate's needs". Sometimes they express this as "he accepts me the way that I am".

Which is, of course, a palatable way of saying "I don't want to have to change or do work".

This falls into the gap between a friend and a pet.

A pet is a companion animal who lives with you because its natural behavior pleases you. A cat is naturally cute, quiet, clean, and low-maintenance. A dog is naturally boisterous, affectionate, and loyal. A bird is naturally loud, destructive, and shits all over everything.

You don't get a cat so you can teach it to fetch a stick. You get a cat because you like the amusing way is already inclined to chase a piece of string.

A friend, unlike a pet, can understand your state of mind and react to your needs by changing his behavior.

If you desire a husband who places no obligations on you, who doesn't want you to work or change, who places no demands upon you, but is "compatible" with who you already are, then you do not want to be a wife, you want to be a pet.

In truth, sex roles are hardwired into human beings, and we are born into the unchosen obligation to fulfill those roles.

Relationships, before postmodern nihilism, worked because people understood that "husband" and "wife" are jobs, with defined roles and responsibilities. Do the proper thing, act the proper way, and your spouse will love you.

The Boomer divorce rate was 50% precisely because they rejected sex roles and sought "compatibility" instead.

If you are trying to date by seeking "compatibility", looking for a girl who shares your love of video games instead of one who is feminine and kind and keeps her apartment clean, then dating is not a progressive process that leads towards marriage.

It is a series of random dice rolls, wherein you pull a random person off the stack, chosen because she likes video games or something, then see if it works out. If not, try again at random.

The generations who shunned any and all obligations ended up the unhappiest of all, because they did not understand that happiness does not come from idleness and the absence of obligations.

It comes from the pride and satisfaction of fulfilling them.

[hiroyuki @hiroyuki_life]

35歳。
実績は何もないけど、
パステルを描くことだけは続けられてる。

[Ipe Utrera-Molina 🇪🇸 @ipeutrera]

A las 21.13 horas del 22 de julio de 1950, mi padre estrelló su reloj contra la pared, tras aceptar mi madre ser su novia. El tiempo se detuvo y la esfera marca la hora exacta del inicio de una historia de amor que sólo la muerte, 67 años después, pudo interrumpir.

[Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove]

If you're thinking it's a much better bargain to be a whore than a housewife, then I'll tell you this—at some point, being a whore becomes really fucking boring. The excitement of a city with a million doors, cigarette ash on your thigh glittering in your virgin eye like moonbeams, all those possibilities, soon gives way to despair when you realize every door leads to the same place. Ooh, this bar serves their drinks in coconuts, and this one makes spicy margaritas, but it's all tequila, and this man who offers you cocaine wants you to look at you from behind while you bend over and snort has blonde hair, and the next one still wants to bend you over, but this time he's a brunette. This party is in a warehouse, and this one is a loft, and this one is in a private house in the country with a swimming pool, and all the drugs look so enticing, but they still make your head swim so that you stop caring where you are at all.

All of the men have different faces, but eventually you'll figure out it's the same man, a copy repeated over and over, and they all want you to listen to their inane philosophies about why it's okay to be Peter Pan forever and why their compliments should matter even though they've been hollowed of love. They'll offer to take you shopping, to take you on vacation, to give you everything, and you'll realize you'd rather sit alone in a dark room than be in paradise with someone you can't stand to hear talking.

It all just starts to feel a little pointless, because it is. If you're like me, you'll start to rage and cry because you start to crave seeing a real emotion cross their stupid faces. You'll drop men for the most insignificant of flaws because you want them to know what it feels like to lose. You'll open the drawer in the hotel room and throw the Gideon bible at the wall, laughing, hysterical, because you're mad at the God you don't believe in for the path you set yourself on.

And you do have only yourself to blame, you know. You decided to play a game and decided it would be fun if you never allowed yourself to win. You thought you could have everything without giving something in return, so you got nothing.

You wanted to feel without ever falling. And to win the game, you have to fall.

These days I no longer open a thousand doors. I don't often go to parties. I have spent days in the same small room, playing with the child with the face of the one man I could listen to forever, and in the laughter and the sunshine and the diaper changes and cleaning toys off the floor a thousand times, I am finally no longer terrified of eternity.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

I just cloned myself...as a newborn

With this clone, I can:

+ become my own blood boy
+ test therapies on the clone
+ grow organs for transplantation
+ develop new treatments
+ inject young cells

This baby-bryan lives in a petri dish for now.

This may be scary to some people…a dystopian future. But, for others, they will see it as the inevitable future of health.

Clinical trials are already using this technology to restore dopamine neurons for Parkinson's, heart health and eyesight.

The process
> blood draw
> my cells were extracted
> yamanaka factors applied
> reset epigenetic age
> restoring them to an embryonic-like state

Why?
> these cells are now pluripotent
> can be differentiated into hundreds of cell types
> i.e. neurons, cardiomyocytes, retinal cells, etc
> allowing me to rebuild my body
> organ by organ
> repairing lost eyesight or hearing
> restoring kidney, liver or lung function
> repairing skin damage
> there’s no real limitation in imagining
> my body will accept them bc they’re my cells
> foreign cells are at risk of being rejected

As cells age, they accumulate epigenetic errors compounding into dysfunction and disease.

This technology gives us a path to reverse aging.

I mentioned getting diagnosed with an incurable disease is one of the best things that has happened to me in a long time. It’s opened up a frontier of new paths to repair and strengthen the body. This is the first example.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet

[Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove]

Just don't have sex with a man you can't imagine having children with, bringing him soup when he's sick, scheduling his dentist appointments because he refuses to go otherwise, washing his clothes, having uncomfortable conversations about an uncertain future, discovering that one intractable flaw in his personality that everyone has and wanting to stay with him anyway, reminding him to take out the trash, crying with him when the dog you adopted together dies, never saying anything bad about his mother even though she is kind of annoying, letting him hug you even when you're furious, waking up in the middle of the night and finding him sitting out in the dark lawn with the dogs and saying nothing, looking into his eyes for years and still finding something so intense that makes your chest hurt, watching him die, having to explain to your children that Daddy's dead, bringing flowers to his grave, sitting alone with his memory and the crushing silence in the garden you spent your entire lives building together.

[Hebrew by Inbal @hebrewbyinbal]

Want to go to a show in Tel Aviv? Here’s how to ask what kind of an event it is in Hebrew.

#LearnHebrew #LanguageLearning #TelAviv #Performances #HebrewByInbal