Build-a-Bruh

who’s ready for pride month? 🏳️‍🌈🪼🫧

and yeah in the history of humanity we still can't seem to talk about it enough. because i can tell you about it - about her - and it won't surround the experience. it can never be big enough.

i am feeling something people have maybe always-felt. who knows when the first person fell in love. i am also feeling something that feels new and silly and extreme. like maybe we're the first people to really understand it, truly.

i know the science of it; why her smell is so good to me (something about our compatible genes). oxytocin and whatever hormones. and still it is incredible - i didn't think my body did this kind of thing. i thought it was an invention of romance-book marketing.

things make sense that didn't make sense before. songs about how love is an addiction or possession or insanity. orpheus had to turn around, of course he did, i would turn for her too, just to see. my mom and i watch a rerun of a murder mystery; for the first time i understand the line he did it for love - instead of being trite, it feels like a genuine tragedy.

and of course i am feeling the same way millions of people have maybe felt and know i cannot write enough about it, that it won't quite surrender to poetry. why do i think i'm gonna be the one who can finally communicate this thing that resists definition so ardently. this girl in my kitchen, humming. who walked so casually into my life. this girl pulls the rain down from even a cloudless sky.

what i can say is that i feel something impossible, and stupid. what i can say is that nothing about this is unusual, and yet i am so caught in it that i keep waiting for some terrible evil - something so good surely must come with some kind of retribution.

we get high and watch zombies 4 (it's terrible). the main characters sing a song about love; how theirs feels wild and impossible. the kind of thing i used to think was insipid, bad writing. baby that's us, she says into my ear.

I've got a crush on you 💘

Cultural Fashion: Earth Avatar Mural Woman

Let me just say that this is my favorite piece of in-universe art in Avatar. I love everything about it: The color palette, the symbolism of Kyoshi standing on two pillars of earth, the two earth avatars in the background doing their best JoJo poses, and the mystique of it all. Kyoshi is an Avatar who literally split open the earth beneath her to create an island named after her and lived to be over 200 years old, but somehow she's not the star of this mural? Just what the heck did the center lady do to be depicted as being akin to the sun itself?

Anyways, she looks to be wearing Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) lamellar armor. Lamellar armor is armor that's composed of overlapping plates of metal, leather, or bone that give the wearer a "scaly" look. The spaulders resembling a little shawl or capelet reminds me most of Qin armor, the dynasty that gave us the terracotta warrior statues. Qin Dynasty warriors also wore dress-like robes and a tucked-in scarf around the neck under their armor. Finally, she's wearing a little topknot crown, known in Chinese as a guan (冠) or xiaoguan (小冠). Pretty much the only aspect of her design that strays from the terracotta warrior inspiration is her lack of boots, as she opts to go barefoot to better earthbend.

The Qin Dynasty was China's first imperial dynasty. Perhaps the center lady is the first ever earth avatar? It would explain why she looks to be shining rays of light on all her "successors". Plus, there's sort of a running theme in ATLA of revolutionary earthbenders tending being women: Oma, Kyoshi, and Toph.

I guess you could call them all... Mother Earth.