#grouchy.

lately when i peruse my internetian wares i see ppl going all "why dig", "that's not meant to be dug up", "you're enjoying your digging wrong", "you're working so hard to achieve nothing" and yeah i could bitch at them directly.

...

so anyways

my entertainment is not nothing???? rude????

genuinely and with sympathy, if your life has ruined imagination or asking questions of something or your efforts for you, or told you there's a 'wrong' and a 'right' way to do those things to the degree that there's a concrete, absolute, definitive way to fail at reading a story, i'm sorry, because that was not kind. listening to your personal integrity and considering feedback is one thing, like, "If I say this, will it do more harm than good", but that's a conversation. "Don't dig" is, IME that's someone telling you to shut up. That's not a conversation.

because it's not just a fandom thing.

nature is a story teller. it's not even just human nature, it's nature, which we are a part of. it's how we teach, it's how we explain, it's how we innovate, it's how we understand and make sense of things, it's how we grow.

2+2=4, right? That's just the way it is. When I was learning math and I asked, "but why", that's what I was told. "That's just the way it is" with the implication, "don't ask, don't dig, because no. Stop spending your time here, you're wasting it by thinking about it. Accept it. Move on." And it makes sense, right? Obviously 2+2=4.

Except when it doesn't. Except it took a lot of history and a lot of big brains reading into things and imagining shit to decide that, usually, 2+2=4. Except when it doesn't.

So. I 'hate' math now. If I see a string of numbers my eyes glaze over and my brain coughs out a puff of air like an empty wallet in a cartoon. The story I was told in response to my poor aptitude was that it was okay. I'm a 'girl'. "Girls are bad at math anyway." Also, "people who are bad at math are naturally more talented in art and language."

I know I have some mathematical aptitude. The clincher is that I wasn't allowed to ask questions. I wasn't allowed to use my imagination. I wasn't allowed to ask "but why does the apple fall on my head" and intuit and test answers over time with the brain eons of fine-tuning resulted in. And now I 'hate' math.

TLDR I wasn't allowed to dig there, but I was allowed to dig elsewhere. Encouraged, even. Something something, Emily Dickens was a lesbian, five points, something something that punchy witticism encapsulates that idea better than anything I could come up with and I'm mad about that something. Anyways, guess what two of my reasons to live are, now?

My curtains are blue. Literally. They're blue. Probably. Depending on who's looking. So the new memes add an extra layer of hilarity to this. Why are they blue? There's reasons, I'm sure. Maybe many and myriad, with and without the dimensions my presence (empty wallet) adds to the equation.

Are they relevant? Well, I look at them every day. I've got a blue house and a blue window. Blue is the colour of all that I wear. So why shouldn't they be? Can they simply be blue? Sure. But there's reasons why they're blue.

Are the reasons why they're blue relevant? That's a decision to make. Decisions are not meaningless. Time, and consideration, and effort, if they give you a tomato when your assignment was to bear fruit, you bore fruit. Unless you're in school, in which case you might get failed because the teacher thinks a tomato is a vegetable ergo your tomato is wrong, valueless, etc, and that's bullshit.

Some will say it lays in the boundary between reasonable interpretation and overinterpretation. I don't exactly care where that boundary lies. I'm enjoying myself by asking my questions and working out my imagination and taking things as far as they'll go until they snap. Ever tried to huck something just to see how far it'd go? There's very few windows here to break, you better goddamn believe I'm gonna huck that bitch and see if I can make a shiny star on the horizon that does a 'ting' noise. I don't fully understand why some folks are trying to erect a glass house in an open field but I guess if that's what works for them... It's just not what does it for me.

Bury your seeds in damp blue curtains. Make a grow bag. If you want to. If you can. Why should you? Why shouldn't you. Want food for thought?

Start digging.

Why dig?