still my favorite part.

some amazing ones this month

(via Newspaper Blackout Horoscopes for November 2011 by Austin Kleon)

swagger smells like too much high school :(

i’ve been listening to this album a lot lately. sadly, it’s not on spotify, but i can share it.

i’m loving the accidental swirly pink

sometimes it’s a shit quality picture that captures the moment you needed.

a little grasshopper came and hung out next to me while i was waiting for you, but hopped away before i could take a picture..

Ayers Rock

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In the past few weeks, I’ve redeveloped a fear of the dark. I don’t understand it. It’s not constant, but catches me off-guard from night to night. It’s not a grown-up feeling, not the anxiety that keeps me awake when i have a lot on my mind. It’s the same dull terror i felt as a child in bed at night, the feeling that something is there, stalking me, waiting for me to make one false move, leave one appendage vulnerable. I tuck my feet and hands tightly under the covers. I force myself to stay awake so that i don’t slip into a nightmare. I lie still. The only difference today is that when it catches me in the hall i have the self control to compel myself not to run to my room, dive into bed, and hide completely. Barely.

As a child i went through phases around what was chasing me: alligators under my bed, wolves in the hall, psychopathic men after watching scary movies. I developed elaborate rules to ensure my safety. They couldn’t find me if i did X, Y and Z. I found it immensely reassuring when Jurassic Park taught me that the T. Rex’s vision was based on movement; it wasn’t that my fears took the form of dinosaurs, it simply gave me another plausible safety mechanism. I survived.

I’ve had the sense that i’m more prone to nightmares and anxiety dreams than average, but i could be wrong. My earliest memory is a night terror i had as a baby, that i described to my mom as a teenager, much to her surprise. You told me that when you were two years old, she said. You couldn’t stop screaming in your sleep. 

I’m curious about what other people have nightmares about, and what it felt like to them to be afraid of the dark. Or if they still are. (Am i crazy?) Can you be afraid of the dark itself, or is it the things in the dark that get to them? Where does that come from? (Am i normal?) It makes me think about our lizard brains and instincts, and how they can cripple even the most rational people in the safest places. How these two competing feelings can both be so valid: that to flee is both terrifyingly necessary and entirely foolish.

Don’t run. Just don’t run.