This nice little bat reminds me of this other nice little bat who was drawn in the 1200s:

I got a phone call from the police station about my teenage llama this week, telling me some tourists had called them upon seeing a llama crossing the road, who “stopped when she saw us” and “refused to give way” (their complaint in French sounded amazingly traffic-related, “elle n’a pas cédé le passage”…) The policeman told them yeah that’s our Pampe! don’t worry about it she’s living her life, you can try to pet her but she’s shy with strangers… Imagine calling the police about a llama refusing to abide by basic road rules and being told haha that’s our girl! Give her a pat for me! Pampérigouste, you are very annoying and very loved.

“I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table. Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. Lean people have a kind of rawboned, unfinished look about them that is very appealing. But they don’t have plump round breasts and plump round asses. You have plump round breasts and a plump round ass, you have a plump round belly and plump round thighs as well. That’s how it works. And that’s very appealing too. Woman have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. Men have silly buttocks. Well, if most of your clients are women, anyway. You come to male buttocks and you say – what, this is it? They’re kind of scrawny and the tissue is jumpy because it’s unpadded; you have to dial back the pressure, or they’ll yelp. Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more. All of the tissue hangs a little looser. They wrinkle, too. I don’t know who put about the rumor that just old people wrinkle. You start wrinkling when you start sagging, as soon as you’re all grown up, and the process goes its merry way as long as you live. Which is hopefully a long, long time, right? Everybody on a massage table is beautiful. There are really no exceptions to this rule. At that first long sigh, at that first thought that “I can stop hanging on now, I’m safe” – a luminosity, a glow, begins. Within a few minutes the whole body is radiant with it. It suffuses the room: it suffuses the massage therapist too. People talk about massage therapists being caretakers, and I suppose we are: we like to look after people, and we’re easily moved to tenderness. But to let you in on a secret: I’m in it for the glow. I’ll tell you what people look like, really: they look like flames. Or like the stars, on a clear night in the wilderness.”

The ghosts who live there:

My professor talked about how women aren’t used to asking for things in the work place, such as raises, because we’re conditioned to downplay our achievements and hold off on asserting our value. She discussed how, even now at this stage in her career (a published doctrate), she shakes when she askes to be considered for a raise and about the first time she was really successful at getting one. After class I asked her what she asked her boss and she winked at me, took me to her office, and asked me to take notes.

Aging gracefully is overrated, age like one of these motherfuckers: