No Regrets

ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet. 

1. The universe is indifferent. We ought not be.

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

Speaking as someone who works in the concrete forming industry: the easiest way to severely fuck up any large concrete pour is to delay it at the wrong moment.

You’re healing every time you

If it’s any consolation, I get it. I’m a trans guy who wears a packer. One day I was in the restroom and pulled my pants down. I really had to go so I did it fast and the magnet clip came undone and my dick flopped out of my boxers and bounced into the stall next to me.

So I was talking about Jekyll & Hyde (the book) at a writer’s museum while we were looking at an Robert Louis Stevenson exhibit. I was giving my take on Jekyll, and my brother tried to counter it. I countered back easily, and then he said “well I’ve never read the book”

my ex, whose baking experience was pretty much limited to frying premade biscuit dough in boy scouts to make ‘donuts’, would constantly try to correct me or give me advice on baking

met a dude at a party who was talking about physics and asked if i’d ever listened to any online physics lectures bc he listened to all of this one series and they were so helpful and maybe i could learn some physics too

I once had a guy at the gym try to show me correct punching form while I was wrapping my hands to go at a punching bag. He mentioned something about how he took a karate class once and learned a bunch of stuff.

I went on a date with a guy once that was telling me all about how he played football in high school— you know, a tough, contact sport. Super tough. Very manly and impressive. Then he asked what sport I did in high school.

“I also think it’s weird in movies, when someone has amnesia, and they wake up in the hospital, a lot of times surrounded by friends and family, but when they open their eyes they go ‘WHO ARE YOU?!’ because that’s not how you act when you don’t recognize somebody. That’s very rude. It would be chaos out there if every time you saw someone you didn’t recognize you went ‘WHO ARE YOU?!’. I always try to be really polite in life, so if I had amnesia, you’d never know it! I’d wake up and they’d be like ‘Hi John, we’re so happy you’re awake’ and I’d just be like, ‘Oh, hey man… How’s it going? Oh hey dude, nice to see you again’ because that’s how you act when you can tell that someone recognizes you and you have no fucking clue who they are.”