“A very old man came in to my Starbucks. Halfway through struggling to understand his order through his thick accent, he noticed my necklace. He stopped and said “Your star is beautiful.”, and I thanked him. There was a long pause before he spoke again. When he did, he said “It is beautiful, but I am having a hard time looking at it. The last time I wore one, it was mandatory.” We then spoke to each other in Hebrew for a bit. But soon enough he stopped again, and looked back to my star. With one hand he held mine, and used his other hand to shakily touch the sapphires on my necklace. His lip shook, and tears rolled down his cheeks. In a shaky, heavily German-accented whisper, he said “I am so happy you are here. Your generation is here. We won.” and kissed my hand.✡”
Collection of lachrymatorys (or lachrymosas), these tear catchers or tear vials – sometimes worn on a necklace, sometimes merely held – were used to gather the tears wept by mourners at funerals, to hold the tears of people mourning the passing of loved ones. One type of lachrymosa had a special top which allowed the tears to evaporate (signifying the time to stop mourning), others had a sealed top to allow the tears to last for a year, at which point they would be poured on the grave of the person whom the tears were wept for, Victorian era, 19th Century.
On one hand these are beautiful and this is a really interesting and unique form of death ritual. On the other hand Victorians are sooooo fucking extra. Like wow could you make things any more dramatic if you tried.
someone: haha you just want to know when you’re off the hook
me: hah
me: (actually i just need to allocate the right expectations and backlog of energy and make sure the rest of my day falls in good accordance with it so that i don’t feel time-crunched and propel myself into a hysteria because if i don’t know how long this thing lasts or when it ends i can’t possibly know when literally anything else starts and my entire life becomes an unraveled realm of anarchy with no rhyme or reason and how is that not terrifying to you)
me: hey how long will this take
someone: oh like twenty minutes
me: ok
*an hour later*
me: *clinging to every learned social skill i can think of with the desperate hope my distress and exhaustion doesn’t show*
someone: hey we’re almost done don’t be so crabby
me: *smiling* *internally screaming at this SENSELESS CHAOS*
someone: hey do you want to do [involving time-consuming thing]
me: hey that sounds fun! when were you thinking?
someone: oh we’re doing it right now
me: oh. like. now-now? like right now. like you want me to stop what i’m doing and get up and do this thing with you, suddenly, with thirty seconds of warning. now. like this second. immediately. now?
Greater Glider (Petauroides volans) – This possum lives in a variety of eucalypt forests and woodlands in eastern Australia and has a diet of gum or eucalypt leaves as specialised as that of the koala. It can glide up to 100m and depends on tree hollows for nesting and thus is sensitive to disturbances which remove these, such as logging. There are two colour forms, black and grey.
dinosaurs didn’t all go extinct. some of them survived and evolved into that group of jerks who hog the whole sidewalk and won’t adjust formation for other pedestrians
at first I was like “wow thats a lot of birds” AND THEN THEY TURNED AROUND