Mandee Middleton > Recent Status Updates

“I’m surprised you weren’t familiar with crown shyness, you’re so knowledgeable about plants .”
“I know herbs and ornamentals, I don’t really know trees, just some of their names.”
“Well, that’s the nice thing about trees. They’re not going anywhere. You can take all the time you need to get to know them.”

I love the description of the first interaction between Mosscap and the printer Leroy

“I LOVE how different the pictures are from what I see, you can really tell that my optical lenses and the lean in the computer’s camera aren’t the same at all. Make’s you think, doesn’t it?”
“Makes you think what?”
“Of how any sighted individuals perception of the work is entirely based on the way the structure in their eyes receives light. I wish I could borrow YOUR eyes for a day…”

“Nobody should be barred from necessities OR comforts just because they don’t have the right number next to their name.” As they said this, they thought of their unease back at the hot spring — the feeling that had arisen at the thought that they hadn’t earned this. The mismatch between these sentiments itched at them.

Still not liking it. Literary horror is not my thing.

Already unsure about this book. The blurb about it seems interesting, but it already feels like it’s glorifying pain, not in a consensual way but in a giving power to an abuser kind of way? So don’t love that.

Honestly so far I’ve been kinda sad about the book. I was so excited for a post-apocalyptic, queer, anti-using-religion-in-a-hypocritical-hurting-others-way. I feel like a lot of the characters are flat, and they are queer just to be queer, which like, I still love seeing the representation, but I just want to see them exist, and not their main point be that they’re queer.

I’m LOVING the book

There was nothing I could do but stare and stare at the whelks. Whelks are strange and comforting. They have no notion of community life and they breed very quietly. But they have a strong sense of personal dignity. Even lying facedown in a tray of vinegar, there is something noble about a whelk.

“Round and round he walked, and so learned a valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.”

The memory of a kiss is never enough, like an image you put through the photocopier twenty times until it is blurry and indistinct.

Sex for me has always been so tied up in power &control & respect & shame. It is as much emotional as it is physical. I can’t separate the two.

I read somewhere that, in Greek, nostos means return and algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

“You know what’s going on down there, don’t you?”
“Ah…” I paused, confused.
“It’s a gay thing.” He said in a conspiratorial whisper, raising his eyebrows in dramatic fashion. The message was clear - I didn’t belong down there.
“Gays? Oh, thank god, I thought you were going to tell there were straight people down there!”

My experiences over the previous 4 years had begun to teach me the lessons that people are either into you or they are not. There’s nothing that you can do about it and trying to force it through some kind of manipulation of yourself - your looks, your attitude, your personality - or through manipulation of them, never works out in the end.

But if drinking was a major, we were all studying for a Bachelor of Boozing with a minor in unforeseen consequences.

Good so far but having trouble getting into the vernacular used. Definitely slows down my reading lol