a place of bells & trees

one time I went over to a friend's house and their housemate was making paper in the living room, and we saw this big tub full of water they were using to dissolve old scrap paper into a slurry, and everyone was immediately like "oh, you need scrap paper?" and started turning out their jacket pockets and producing expired coupons and bus tickets and crumpled receipts and old shopping lists and whatever else they'd been carrying round with them for no good reason, and passing it all to the paper-making housemate to make sure it was suitable before it got torn up and dropped into the tub, while people took turns stirring the slurry with a big wooden stick. it was strangely ritualistic, like presenting an offering to some kind of temple elder for inspection before placing it in a watery shrine to be devoured and reformed. pulp for the pulp god.

i love lowland streaked tenrecs because they’re like if a mammal was a caterpillar

If I keep practicing I might even be a person soon

my dad's wildlife photography would do numbers on here

i can’t wait to be saved miraculously and get out of all of my predicaments

Y'all - the Catholic Church is not only a conservative institution, it is a strong contender for the most conservative institution in the world. I don't say that (here) in a disparaging way, I mean it in a neutral, literal sense. The Church's entire modus operandi is that it seeks to conserve what it believes to be apostolic teaching - disciplines, practices, and prudential judgements vary across place and time, but the teachings themselves never ever change. Hailing the Pope or a bishop as some kind of progressive icon is nonsensical, and is hard for me to see as anything other than a very worrying sign of the reactionary period we're living in.

The President of the United States is to the right of the head of the most conservative institution in the world (the Pope) and instead of viewing that as an extremely worrying sign of the reactionary period we're in, people have decided the Pope and the Church are progressive