kroot

Sometimes the Almighty creates difficult weirdos for a purpose. That’s...all I got.

Remember those few glorious weeks when twitter decided to show us the posts of people we voluntarily chose to follow because they're our friends and we wanted to hear from them? Great times 🕯️

“The world will not treat you better just because you are a good person.” Experience enough of this and you'll finally understand that being good isn't for the world.

I've noticed that people have remarkably high standards for how other people should behave when they're suffering, particularly when they're observing that suffering from the comfort of their own homes. Apparently, even dying is something we're expected to do to everyone else's satisfaction. We know how we'd behave, of course. We'd be calm, rational, courageous, and composed. We'd make all the right decisions, say all the right things, and conduct ourselves with the dignity appropriate to the occasion. It's quite easy to be heroic when absolutely nothing is happening to you. There's something fascinating about our inability to imagine ourselves in circumstances we've never experienced, particularly when we're so confident in our assessment of the people experiencing them. We've watched a thousand disasters on our phones and somehow confused familiarity with the footage for familiarity with the experience. To stare earthly end in the face is to confront the very limits of human experience. I wonder how many of us can even begin to comprehend the magnitude of that moment. We see a cop running toward an active shooter, doing everything he's trained to do, and then screaming when a bullet is flying straight at his face. Not when he breaks a window and climbs in. Not when he sees the gun. Not when he hears the first shot. When he realizes that in another fraction of a second, his life is over. Are we really so confident in our own courage that we'd sit comfortably at home criticizing the sound that comes out of his mouth? None of this is new. The Romans had amphitheaters, crowds gathered for public executions, newspapers sensationalized murders, and television made catastrophe a spectator sport. The internet just gave everyone a printing press and an opportunity to be the dancing monkey. Now someone else's worst day can become our fifteen minutes of fame. And I don't think all of this is necessarily bad. Public arguments can be illuminating, even when the participants are behaving like idiots. Sometimes the spectators learn more than the people arguing. I enjoy a good internet brawl myself, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't times when the fight was more entertaining than whatever ridiculous thing we were fighting about in the first place. So I'm hardly in a position to lecture anyone about the irresistible appeal of a good spectacle. But there's a difference between examining a tragedy and turning it into entertainment, between understanding someone's actions and appointing ourselves judges of their humanity. Somewhere along the way, we've managed to turn other people's most horrifying experiences into opportunities to demonstrate our own imagined superiority. I don't think we need to become less opinionated or even particularly nice. We could probably just stand to be a little more conscious of the fact that there are actual human beings behind these stories, with families, fears, and experiences we know absolutely nothing about. And perhaps wait until we know what happened before explaining how much better we would have handled it.

Didn't remove my makeup two nights in a row and now I got a pimple on my cheek that has its own heartbeat.

I had to put myself in a several-day timeout because I kept seeing grown men complain that a young woman didn’t see the ground rushing toward her at 600 mph and get obliterated in a fireball in a way that pleased them. The evil was visceral.