https://www.reddit.com/r/SuperMegaBaseball/comments/gj3zem/project_randall_mlb_2020_teampack/

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/how-to-sit-with-2/register?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=profile_web&utm_campaign=profile

i am prefer-to-watch-a-ramen-making video versus eating it years old

knife sharpener

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dFFEBnY0Bo

https://www.totallyfurniture.com/engage-armchair-wood-set-of-2-in-laguna-east-end-imports-eei-1284-lag https://www.homedepot.com/p/MODWAY-Engage-Upholstered-Armchair-in-Expectation-Gray-EEI-1178-GRY/305553784

https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/13/21322730/animal-crossing-new-horizons-acnh-the-path-pattern-code-dirt-fairy-cobblestone-nintendo-switch

https://catapult.co/stories/the-fierce-triumph-of-loneliness

The night I moved into an apartment by myself for the first time, I unpacked boxes and ordered a pizza. When the pizza arrived, I was jolted back to a particular suburban memory. In middle school, my parents would go out for date night and leave me in the house by myself with instructions to order a pizza for dinner. The sound of the door closing when they left was a small and giddy freedom; I was entirely alone, rendered invisible, and belonging to no one but myself. My unmitigated joy at the simple fact of being left alone was perfect in a way that very few larger, adult joys have ever been able to recreate since. I never did anything transgressive or even interesting on those nights—I’d watch a movie and probably fall asleep on the couch. It was about the solitude: the lack of obligation to arrange my face in a way that someone else would understand. Even at age twelve, I understood the weight of that burden, and the relief of its absence. It was the banality of those nights I longed for, doing nothing, but doing it completely alone. I imagined adulthood would be a long night like this, ordering a pizza in an empty house—forever. I was an only child and a lonely kid, which meant I spent a lot of time alone reading books. Classical literature was full of heroes—the vast majority of them were men—who were heroic because they were alone. The quest narrative was one in which a man whittled away from himself all societal bonds and then, having perfected himself through loneliness, returned triumphant to society. Society was still there waiting for him because it had been tended by women, who were never alone. In popular culture we have “the bachelor pad,” and “the bachelor lifestyle,” but no such phrases for women. Women who live alone are objects of fear or pity, witches in the forest or Cathy comics. Even the current cultural popularity of female friendship still speaks to how unwilling we all are to accept women without a social framework; a woman who’s “alone” is a woman who’s having brunch with a bunch of other women. When a woman is truly alone, it is the result of a crisis—she is grieving, has lost something, is a problem to be fixed. The family, that fundamental social unit, dwells within the female body and emanates from it. Women are the anchors of social labor, the glue pulling the family, and then the community, together with small talk and good manners and social niceties. Living alone as a woman is not just a luxury but a refusal to bend into the shape of patriarchal assumption and expectation.

I took long walks around Barcelona, often leaving my phone in my apartment and getting lost on purpose, trying to find my way back to landmarks. I eavesdropped strenuously on conversations in bars and coffee shops, piecing together the gaps within a language I was still learning, trying to tune my ear to pronouns and verb tense. I listened to strangers flirting, their bodies moving in and out of each other’s space. I listened to drink orders and laughter spilling out of restaurants at the end of the night. I listened to everything but myself. I allowed myself to turn from participant to spectator. Like the hero in the stories I had read as a kid, I placed myself adjacent to but outside society, and began to understand its workings when I stopped trying to fit myself into it. I drifted invisibly into the background, making everyone else’s story more important than my own. I listened without wanting, learning that the world was larger, richer, and more detailed than the reactions I could generate from the people in it.

Back in New York, I was forced to do the slow, small, and unglamorous work of living better. I cleaned my apartment when no one was coming over, and cooked elaborate meals with no guests in mind but myself. I began to learn to say “no” to things, to define space for myself. I considered decisions longer, and hurt people less. With no one else’s needs into which to escape, it becomes much more difficult to skid through life on self-delusion and comfortable ignorance. Living alone is a confrontation with the mirror, a removal, if only for certain hours of the day, from the social contract, outside the systems of manners that grow up around women like strangling vines. It is becoming the witch in the forest, powerful and watchful and silent, setting visitors on edge. I had been living alone in Brooklyn for a year and a half when my boyfriend, Thomas, and I decided to move in together. We started dating long-distance at almost the exact same time that I’d finally gotten my apartment. Yet right from the first day, as I moved furniture up my stairs and ignored text messages from him, I knew that this relationship was probably the one. There was a tumbling sense of inevitability, a dread of permanence, at the bottom of my stomach. He didn’t live in New York at the time, and I was glad this was the case. When I looked directly at our relationship, I had to admit that I wanted to come home to this person every day. But I also wanted to come home to myself. The idea that we progress in a clear trajectory from single unit to couple form, and achieve a sort of emotional success by doing so, seems wrong to me. Love is about what we give up when choosing to knit our life against someone else’s—to make a home in the shared bed, and enjoy the small talk between bodies within the inhabited space. A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice. With Thomas, the world seems less relentless, more forgiving, with fewer trapdoors and teeth. We thread ourselves through the other’s difficulties, offering the answers we can’t get to on our own, making the jagged edges of each day cohere. Living with a partner, when it’s truly good, is easier in almost every aspect, from the lessons in forgiveness, to the heap of congratulations society offers traditional couples, to the very literal benefit of combining resources and splitting bills. Love, in its closed circuit, can be as antisocial as staying home alone and not talking out loud for days. At its best, love turns its face away from good manners, proves itself the opposite of small talk. I have often told Thomas that I love spending time with him in the same way I love being alone. I have been surprised by how many of the lessons are transferrable, how partnership demands the same confrontation with the mirror. I once thought people entered into relationships to hide from themselves, to burrow into an obsession with another person’s regard, and escape the facts of their shortcomings. Loving someone else, and joining our life with theirs, asks us to sit down with the brutal facts of ourselves, to sift finely between what is true and what we wish were true, in order to understand what we need and what we can offer. Love is a stark accounting of oneself and one’s partner, wiping away excuses and avoidances, insisting on responsibility. But there are so many things I miss. I never get to the middle of the night in the home that I share, those empty hours when I wasn’t worried about keeping anyone else awake. Now I eat three meals a day and I hate it. I drink less coffee. My own simple, boring health, my obvious contentment, frequently disgusts me. While I am happy with my choices, I know at once that they follow a narrative approved by forces larger and less benevolent than myself, a narrative I am not happy to know I perpetuate. The things I miss could be seen as childish, a state of being in which I was never obligated to consider anyone’s needs other than my own. Women are pushed out of childhood so quickly, shoved without ceremony into the heavy social obligations of adulthood. Living alone is a reminder that we can make our bodies antisocial, hoarding our selfishness and our silence. Loneliness and solitude are privileges of thoughtless and full-throated adulthood traditionally handed to men and kept from women. They are the strange and rich pleasures of the world beyond the social, beyond the structures of home and family. Choosing the domestic actively, out of love, is a sacrifice worth making, whether this is to make a family involving children or simply with a partner, but it is still a sacrifice. Living alone as a woman takes on outsize significance because it offers the right to a full self obligated neither to family nor to love. Because we are often denied this fully formed and selfish reckoning, it is difficult to give it up after finding a way into it. There is a mourning in that letting-go, as though I am not passing naturally from one stage of maturation to the next, but coming back from something rarer and more precious, something that should be guarded closely. No matter how committed I am to the life I’m building with the person I love, some part of me reaches back to the fierce triumph of loneliness.

https://catapult.co/stories/driving-to-nowhere

In the rental car, we’re driving back from Thomas’s parents’ house to a hotel in an adjacent city, and on the way back the light sinks over the roads, the river coming right up to the highway, mapping out the green country. Thomas tells me stories about his adolescence and what came after it and all the stories have to do with cars. It’s easy to fall into this if one is lucky enough to be offered it, easy to let someone do the hard things when they offer to do them. Long-term love is to at least some degree always an agreement to depend on someone, to build them into the structure that keeps the house standing. We lean into the people we choose to love, we allow them to fill our lacks, to make up for the things we can’t do. We lattice together a shared capability where one does not work without the other. It’s a kind of tenderness, but it carries with it defeat, a nervous sense of disarming. The trust I place in another person erodes my ability to survive on nothing but myself. When I imagined having a car of my own, the attraction was that I would be able to take care of myself fully, that nothing would depend on anyone else’s presence. I was a good driver when no one else was in the car; I was a bad driver as soon as someone else was there. When other people were in the car I became nervous; all at once the consequences mattered, and all my swagger evaporated. If I endangered my passengers’ lives it would actually matter. My fear of endangering them caused me to endanger them in exactly the way I feared. I don’t ever miss driving with other people in the car. When I miss driving, it’s the same thing I miss about being alone. Driving to nowhere, obligated to nothing, free of a destination and of the promise to return home to anyone.

cheesy but

http://leadingtoexcellence.com/blog/reason-season-lifetime-people-always-come-into-your-life-for-a-reason-a-season-or-a-lifetime-poem/

https://www.liquor.com/rethinking-tiki-4799033

https://catapult.co/stories/the-families-we-choose https://catapult.co/stories/stranger-than-friendship

Lately, I catch myself stopping and looking too long at old couples I see on the street; it hurts my heart but I can’t look away when I notice two people in their eighties helping each other board the bus or carry groceries home. Sometimes these couples seem hardly to be in the world outside their unit of two. Their love has gone on long enough to create a sufficiency entirely on its own. I can understand wanting to refer to this kind of love as friendship—these are people whose love has survived past their bodies’ ability to act on desire. But whatever illuminates these fierce, shut-down universes of two is decidedly not friendship; that living memory, that present, hungry thing that survives into any old age is what I imagine when I imagine my own relationship forward.

We have the idea that, as our bodies decay, our love decays, too, out of the body and into repeated words, that what is at the bottom of love, when you remove all the decorations, the paint on the walls and the furniture in the room, is something soft and asexual, something sleepy and unconcerned with the body. But the text of romance, the material out of which the experience is built, is the body, its shape and movement, its resignations and betrayals. Friendship comforts us that we can love people without our bodies being at the center of that experience; romance allows us to resolve the way in which our bodies define our experience of the world.

A long partnership accumulates a private world in which one gets to be less presentable, less recognizably human, two people who have witnessed the grotesque expressions of one another’s bodies. One function of calling a marriage a friendship is to make it translatable to an outside observer, to reassure that this is something familiar. But when I imagine spending my life with my partner, the joy is of imagining years of accumulating a secret language, carrying around an experience built between us and offered to no one else.

https://catapult.co/stories/first-best-friend

I was a slow, dumb thing, a single syllable noun to her bright adjectives, and we stayed there all afternoon, talking about boys and about the future, coming up with something to talk about just so we could keep talking to each other. It is one of the first times I ever remember being happy, where happiness meant enough that I could notice it and name it, distinguishing a single day from all the others. People talk about first love and the transformative experience of initial romance. Love is how we climb out of the window of the family house and discover a world other than the one into which we were born. The shock of loving someone without being related to them jolts us into participation in the larger world. But my first experience of romance, the first love that propelled me into a world beyond the familiar, was this friendship. The kind of wild closeness I had with my first best friend still seems to be like the thing toward which romance strives and of which it often falls short.

The people we love in childhood sometimes come to stand in for the whole of childhood. They come to represent the entirety of what it felt like to live in future-tense verbs, when all we could do was draw up big, grand, architecturally impossible blueprints for what was to come, when doing so had no sadness to it, only hope—like something on which to bite down and grit your teeth, rushing into the violence of the waiting world with both hands open.

The early heyday of AOL coincided with the early heyday of our friendship. My parents had put parental controls on my computer, but hers hadn’t, and we would stay up in her house after they’d gone to bed, talking to strangers with screen names that more often than not referenced fictional vampires, telling them fake ages and names and stories, and shrieking behind our hands as they told us what they wanted to do to the bodies of these imaginary characters. We dissected what we’d typed, separating out disgust from interest. Even now, almost two decades later, every time I go to bed with my partner of three years, her ghost is there—the story of how I want anyone is still about her. People, like hometowns, become who we are, inescapable as the bends in our fingers and the way we pronounce words, our past built into the clumsiness and the grace that we carry into the world. The people we loved and to whom we no longer speak become the way we place the question mark in a sentence, the musical phrasing of our words, the pitch and octave of our laughter. The people we loved first are often people we end up hating, but they are as much who we are as ourselves. They remain in place underneath the noise, like the final sound of someone else breathing when the whole city goes to sleep. We wear our ghosts in our skin. It was a love so big it obliterated any kindness within it. We carried resentments from childhood into adulthood. Our friendship seemed to matter more than anything and at the same time to be based on nothing. We were unable to treat each other well as we got older, and we began a long process of breakups and reunions and betrayals. We no longer made sense to each other, but to give up this friendship was to give up a link to history, to surrender a coherent connection back to a starting point. When I was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven, we stopped speaking to each other, probably long after we should have done so, long after our insistence on continuing to love each other had done damage in the other’s life. It was ugly, but I did not know, with her, how to get out of the smallness I had felt in adolescence, how to apply any knowledge I had gained since then. This is one danger of first loving someone before loss and consequence teach us compassion. We have to start somewhere and often we are not ready for other people, for the shock at what they call up in us, for the want in our stomach that scratches its claws in the dirt. People talk a lot about whether men and women can be friends, as though the difficulty of friendship stopped there, as though the same question shouldn’t be asked about all friendship—can two women be friends, can two people be friends, can two teenage kids be friends right at the gateway to an adult kind of want, when unspecified, un-activated sex is shimmering around them like a heat haze in the air? Is there any love possible in which one person doesn’t want something from the other that isn’t quite the same thing that the other person wants from them? I don’t know, really, but I know I’ve never had a friendship with a man that was as difficult, or mattered as much, as this one did. Another friend once taught a college course called “Strange Friendship.” She explained that the course examined texts depicting “uncategorizable intimate relationships.” I had never felt so seen by a single phrase, or wanted so much to fold myself inside a pair of words. Here I had a term for this relationship that had mattered so much more to me than any boyfriend ever had, which had taught me the patterns of romance, but which was bigger than all the words that tried to contain it.

Much later, after she and I had stopped speaking, after I had stopped admitting her into the story of my own becoming, I ran into an awful ex-boyfriend of hers who had always hit on me when she was in the other room at parties; I dated him for a while. It was horrible and he was horrible, but what I wanted from him was merely the ability to get back to her. He had dated her at the time when her and my friendship had been running high and reckless and giddy, and we had learned the same languages from loving her, the same incessant pop culture references and turns of phrase, the same vitriol at the same small things and the same reflexive inside jokes, like old musicians playing scales before they’re awake. I stayed with her ex for a few months, both of us saturating in the memory of something we’d lost, allowing one another to believe what was gone could be called back. The people I love now and the way I love them feel smaller and less consequential than what I had with her, which is to say that I am better at loving them, capable of being careful with their hearts and able to tell when they are careful with mine. Maintaining boundaries no longer feels like a betrayal, and the lack of those boundaries no longer feels like proof of love. But nothing else is that friendship, a love that encompassed the whole swinging and unknowable bigness of that word. I have learned how to do things more conscientiously, how to weave compassion into the village-burning selfishness that desire seems to permit when we first encounter it. That’s a part of first love, too, what we learn and unlearn, the tenderness in other people, and also their trapdoors. My understanding of romance started with friendship, and always returns to it, this insistent strangeness, this country beyond the edge of the map where no one can find us.

https://thenewinquiry.com/a-heaven-of-hell/

Too often, stories about youth told by people who are not young focus, incorrectly, on romantic love. But traditional, romantic love is not what defines our formative years. As we emerge into, out of, and back and forth from adolescence, what defines these years of self-formation are the friendships.

People would mistake Hell and Verlaine for brothers, Hell recounts. The mistake is exciting because they aren’t. Their sameness is trained, chosen, rather than ordained from birth. This kind of love is a rebellion, a freedom from the strictures of home and family. Punk is friendship, not love. It is the friend with whom we are literally or figuratively cutting class and hiding behind the gym, smoking and making plans to run away. In counter-cultures that refuse and reject patterns of domesticity, tradition, and adulthood, we define ourselves far more by strange friendships, by relationships that mimic not the love our parents were (or were supposed to be) in, but the camaraderie we had with our childhood best friends. These are the people with whom we first discovered connections outside of the familial, ties outside of those dictated by blood and DNA. Hell describes staying up all night talking with Verlaine in the early days of their friendship. “There’s an eternal, godlike feeling to sitting with a good friend in the middle of the night, speaking low and laughing, lazily ricocheting around in each other’s minds,” he writes, then calls those nights, those endless conversations “the strongest dose yet of my favorite feeling: of leaving myself behind for another world.” He goes on to compare this feeling to the one he got from sex or drugs, but more so. The friendship with Verlaine is the strongest thing in an arsenal of rebellious behaviors by which Hell is defining himself and mapping out his own world. If punk is making up life for yourself, Verlaine and Hell make up life for each other, and make up the other for themselves. Relationships like these are always about self-definition. They teeter on the border between family love and romantic love, and come to define a time when everything is liminal, when everything is a negotiation of borders and boundary-spaces.

In the epilogue, Hell describes himself and Verlaine as “two monsters confiding.”

love you little one. it'll be okay

"often the issue is what they say they're good at" oof

https://www.xonecole.com/things-to-expect-from-friendships/

please be reminded of how well we loved each other

https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/california/shealor-lake-trail--2?fbclid=IwAR0uNf3ot9QZ0weC5V5gmlnlTGlGjV_RrQyCJiHC34AwRwHAE_izlHpL7HQ

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window shade chain connector

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