A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.
this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now
I love this
This
I’ve always said this. Love is deliberate. Love is a conscious decision.
And when he chose to walk away while I was desperately choosing to love him, it was the hardest thing in the world.
the thing I really like about The Good Place is that it thematically revolves around ethics and what makes a person good or bad (both in the sense of– how do we define good and bad, and in the sense of–what aspects of someone’s formative environment and social group influence how they will treat other people).
and the conclusion that the show comes to over and over is both that it is possible to become a better person, and because it’s possible we owe it to each other to keep trying to be better– for all eternity if we must.
there’s no end to it, and (should I make a prediction) no real “good place” where you’ve gotten to the finish line and “won” at being a good person. it’s an eternal commitment to other people.
you create your own good place, because whether you’re in a good place or a bad place is defined by how people treat each other. when your community has collectively learned to respect, value, and help each other, you experience the peace and support that you might have once imagined in the abstract being awarded to the truly “good”
Sartre famously said that the Bad Place is other people. The Good Place argues that the Good Place is, too.
That’s because Mike Schur is Jewish.
The underlying theme of all of his shows is essentially chesed (חֶסֶד), which basically translates to loving-kindness. But not just like, loving kindness? But a DUTY to loving-kindness, a duty to tikkun olam, or repairing the world through acts of genuine chesed.
Tahani was committed to good works, but not out of a commitment to loving-kindness. Not for others and, tbh, not for herself, since she spent her whole life feeling “less” than Kamilah. To love others as yourself, you have to love yourself.
Similarly, Chidi was desperately unkind and unloving to himself, and thus denied the *whole world* loving-kindness. TGP shows this in the way Chidi’s thought- and behavior patterns that hurt him throughout his life were also inherently harming the people around him who loved him.
Eleanor purposely acted against loving-kindness, to the point where seeing others engaged in it made her angry.
Jason, honestly, had a very kind and loving soul, but his actions caused harm to others (whether that was his intention or not, and honestly it seems like he mostly just didn’t understand the impact of his choices a lot of the time… but harm is harm).
“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” “learn to do good,” etc. I’m not saying that TGP ~is Jewish, because it’s not, but I AM saying that you can see Schur’s ethical framework in his art, and trying to look at any of his shows through a Christian lens is going to skew them.
Also the whole thing where there’s not really a heaven nor a hell, and that it seems like in The Good Place’s eschatology, actions are ultimately judged solely by the impact they have on others – which I feel like was also one of the main themes of Parks & Rec, and is wrestled with in B99. The highest ethical order is chesed.
Ok now I’m struck by the fact that there’s 4 main humans in this show and for some reason my brain immediately went to the 4 children from the Passover Seder and it fits so well?
Like obvs Chidi seems the choice for the wise and Eleanor fits the wicked, and it’s tempting to say Jason is the ignorant child, but then I realized he spent much of S1 in silence and is the child who cannot ask. Which leaves Tahani as the ignorant child which imo fits as well.
As a piano nerd, allow me to reassure you that the reason that many Classical keyboard compositions sound terrible to you isn’t because you lack the background to properly appreciate them. I mean, you do lack the background to properly appreciate them, but they’re also objectively terrible, and the fact that you need the proper background to understand them is big part of why they’re terrible. They’re so preoccupied with demonstrating the technical skill of the performer that they totally forgot about actually sounding good, producing pieces that are comprehensible only to other keyboardists. And even we don’t really enjoy them – we just play them to torture ourselves, because all serious keyboardists are also masochists.
all I’m hearing is that rolling dexterity for perform (piano) checks is valid.
Associated ability scores for Perform (piano) checks by era:
taako with the flaming raging poisoning sword of doom
So, please correct me if I'm out of line. But I was reading one of your posts and you mentioned that Jews don't have a concept of Hell. And I was wondering what kind of afterlife that the Jewish religion believes in.
But there is no universally agreed upon concept of an afterlife, as My Jewish Learning (.com) puts it:
Though some Jewish scholars have tried to clarify these ideas, it would be impossible to reconcile all the Jewish texts and sources that discuss the afterlife.
also please note no one needs to be jewish for this stuff to apply it’s like…universal in terms of good people are good people regardless of their jewishness.
anyways there is Gehinnom which some people think of as “bad” and where you might be “punished”, and other people think of as…more like a necessary part of the process of the afterlife. The Chabad website likens it to a soul-washing machine. Their metaphor for explaining it is roughly: “if you were a sock, you might be worried about all that boiling water and soap and vigorous spinning around in a cycle, but the purpose is to clean it, not cause it eternal pain and suffering. Eventually you leave the washing machine, hit the dryer, and come out smelling nice and fresh. But instead of being a sock, you are a soul, and instead of a washing machine you have gehinnom and also you still rest on shabbat.”***
the timeline of being here is one year maximum. if you are a really bad egg and a year can’t cleanse your soul, you cease to exist probably. i mean i don’t know, but this is a theory. most people go to gehinnom because well, we all have grass stains and dirt nothing to be ashamed of, you just wanna get that scrubbed off before you hit the sock drawer. Sheol might be another word for this place, or it might be a word for like “oblivion” of the spirit or might just be a place of like…rest of the soul.
*** side note: a good jewish story about gehinnom/gehenna says that if a jewish person was in the habit of visiting their rabbi for dinner on shabbat but is in gehenna and their rabbi is in Gan Eden already (the clean laundry, basically) your soul is allowed to continue to see your Rabbi for shabbat dinner, and most rabbis smuggle their congregants into Gan Eden and don’t give them back. they hide you after you come over for shabbat dinner. but this is a story i mean who knows.
there is gan eden which is the “nice place” probably. This is closer to what you might think of as heaven, because it is wonderful and feels great and is like experiencing shabbat x 30985734985723089. presuming it is a real place, only the very righteous go there directly after death.
then there is also olam haba, or “the world to come” which is maybe the same thing as gan eden, or maybe an era of the world that could in theory exist, here on earth, where everything is great and wonderful, and we are obligated to make it happen here on earth by being good people right now and fixing/repairing the world (tikkun olam).
so ultimate the answer is: well uh, we have some theories about this maybe but the issue is being a good human while you are alive, because living as a human right now is not a speculative exercise, but actual reality.
anyways i stress again i’m not dead so i don’t really have any firm answer to that.
I stg “Your rabbi might smuggle you into the good afterlife early” is the most Jewish thing…
there is also a thing where sometimes u drag ur feet doing the end-of-shabbat services, to let the ghosts who are on vacation from gehenna, have a lil extra time out in the real world before they have to go back
Or maybe if for whatever reason you really really really aren’t looking forward to the afterlife your spirit attempts to possess someone who has done similar shenanigans to yours in their life, and then the rabbis have to coax you out with candles and prayers and probably a light supper idk. Anyway point is you have options.
God yeah thank u for reminding me about jewish exorcisms
If you don’t want to go to the afterlife you can also hang around in a well for awhile before possessing someone
I figure that HaShem knows that life is hard enough, so They’re pretty chill about what happens after.
People have all these Headcanons about which Jon Jon is but have you considered…
…actual, I-swear-I-am-not-making-this-up, childhood character CONVINCING JON from Fraggle Rock.
The evidence: Convincing Jon was a motivational speaker who could convince anyone to do anything: his first appearance involved him convincing people to stop doing things they enjoyed, even when the result almost destroyed their home. He is ultimately unable to undo the negative consequences of the disaster he has created.
Sound Familiar?
I rest my case.
Imagining a fraggle with cracks of black opal showing through its skin is going to ruin my ability to sleep more than the large spider hovering over by the fridge in here.
If you didn’t know, a bunch of my best pals are kickstarting a visual novel called Hustle Cat! If the kickstarter gets to $30K, everyone who backs at $60 or above will receive a copy of this print! But act fast, there’s less than three days left!!
The game is super cute and there’s a buncha playable demos that you can play RIGHT NOW IN YOUR BROWSER! I’m utterly smitten with the main character Avery and how customizable they are. ♥︎
[Drawing of a yellow cat saying “You have stories worth writing and you have the talent to write them. You can do this.” in a purple speech bubble on a green background.]
A collection of reports on what I've learned about friendship! Or, you know, in college.
I go by Fedora Mask (no affiliation with MRAs). I'm a graduated English Major (and Math minor, because it intimidates people), an aspiring animation writer, and a fan of (among other things) cartoon ponies, giant robots, and performing analysis on kid's television from a craft and literary perspective.
![positivedoodles:
“[Drawing of a yellow cat saying “You have stories worth writing and you have the talent to write them. You can do this.” in a purple speech bubble on a green background.]
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