Asaden In A Nutshell

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

— What People Really Look Like

people change you and sometimes that is the worst thing in the entire world because you used to like yourself a little more but now you hate the flinch that lives in your shoulderblades and you overthink every moment and you never set a boundary without feeling internally destroyed and it fucking sucks because they shouldn't get to do that, they already ruined your life the once, it shouldn't echo into the future

but also people change you and sometimes that is the softest morning and the best surprise. realizing that you can divide things into perfect thirds without trying because you were a sibling in a group of 3 and always needed to measure out things. you learned to skip rope and step around cracks from the kid down the street. you love the way your favorite english teacher influenced your writing.

you're old enough these days to know your mother was right and you should take a coat just in case it gets cold but you are still too young to have outrun the thunderstorm of your childhood. you arrange your spoons the way you learned growing up but you've since reorganized the rest of your kitchen to make sense to you and the way that you like working. you fold your clothes actually still based on the marie kondo method (you just like the habit of it) but you allow yourself to just-loosely-chuck-some-of-it-in because really who has the fuckin' time for it.

you still can't be in the room while people look at your art (some kind of weird mix of guilt, shame, and embarrassment) but you picked up certain words and phrases from friends that help you slow down and treat yourself a little bit gentle with it. you always take other people's crafts with a reverence like praying, but you can't help that when you see your own work from a few years ago, you mirror someone else's snort of disdain. you saw other people's bodies and freckles and stretch marks and scars and you realized they are all still fucking beautiful to you, almost obscenely so, because they belong to someone you care for so deeply that it blocks out the sun - but you can't help the little flash of self-judgement whenever you pass a mirror; the voice from too-many years of 90's and 00's skinny-means-you've-won.

and it's kind of funny because you meet someone new and while they're making friends with you, you get to see these little stories playing out of them. you meet your mom and you think oh that's where they get the accent and you meet their college roommate and you think that's the same joke you both make and you meet their friend and you think ah so this is explains the oddly vast knowledge of freshwater lakes

and then one day in the mirror you reach your hand up to push back your hair and you think - oh shit, that was them. or you make a comment and you think ah, stole that from someone else. or you stand in the store and get that random flash of they would totally tell me to buy this. and it is like a little strange river to bind you to them - that over all this time and space, their hands guide your hands and your heart in silence. it is good and it is bad and is so precious and so horrible. it is both proof of love on this earth and it is also the thing that is keeping you hurt.

a little promise that is probably true: somewhere out there, your hands are ever-so-often guiding them too.

i really can't stand this anymore oh my god

so i have made a few posts talking about this, but my mom is Making Ultimatiums that are going to fuck me over financially just for the hell of it. i am currently unemployed, receiving no more benefits, and i have absolutely no savings. at this point i have a negative balance on my bank account and i have nothing much i can do about it. i am a trans man with adhd, ptsd, and severe depression so it has become inhospitable in my current living environment, and i need to move, except i currently live in one of the most expensive places in the US and i don't know how to drive. basically, i need to buy a bike, get a plane ticket, and find a job. so this is a mutual aid request but also like. if any of you know of any trans people who know of any trans safe living areas that are not wildly expensive, please message me!

anyway i have talked for too long, here is my info

cash.app: $luvlandfrog

paypal.me: /ezrabanksy

Hands in Denis Sarazhin’s art

L was so loopy off light matching his intelligence. he was like i just... im just gonna drag this out. what a fun little game. heehee hoohoo! nobody has ever told me to fuck off this eloquently before. i think i will allow the war crimes to continue for a bit.

also somwtimes when you dont understand a piece of art it's not bc ur dumb it's bc you havent had the very particular emotional experience that it's trying to invoke in you and you just cant relate. which is also why sometimes you will hear a mountain goats song and say Meh and then you go through some shit and you listen to it again and lose your fucking mind at how real and raw it is. art is how we communicate with each other about experiences that cannot be adequately represented straightforwardly with language. sometimes you have to abstract your representation of the experience in order to truly communicate how big and insane it felt

some helpful links for quarantine

For taking care of your health

How to fix your sleep schedule

The mandatory midday break

How to deal with study burnout

For when you can’t seem to get anything done

Staying focused: tips for maintaining focus while studying

Getting stuff done: how to deal with lack of motivation

How to beat procrastination

For organizing all the stuff you have to do

Energy management: a human-based organization method

Flexible time-blocking: a more breathable way to get things done

The ABCDE method: accomplish tasks more efficiently

Get organized with Notion: the all-encompassing productivity app

i hate the idea of a True Self that you Never Show To Anyone like the me by myself isn’t me partly because humans are defined imo by their social interactions as we are social creatures but mostly because that guy is a gremlin. the disgusting idiot who crawls out of my bed at 1pm and eats peanut butter from the jar isn’t me he’s the manifestation of a collection of weird impulses that all give way at once. saying that dude is Truly Me In An Objective Way, as if that exists, is such bullshit like [holds up a creature that is on the cusp of going insane because its species literally cannot be alone for any significant amount of time] behold, a True Self! give me a break

Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"