Something else about so much (for) stardust is that it’s full of grief.
Grief for who you used to be. Grief for who you should have been – who you could have been had things gone differently. Grief for the friendships and opportunities lost. Grief for the future you won’t get to have.
But then its also full of what comes after grief.
Yes, we loved and we lost and we grieved. But even through our grief, life kept going. Life kept living.
Something made you smile again. Something made you laugh again. Something made you dance again.
And the grief will never go away, not fully. But the things that make you smile and laugh and dance will never stop, either. They’ll keep happening. You’ll keep getting the chance to smile, to laugh, to dance, to love, to live. It’s going to make me fucking cry, typing this out, but fuck, we really do get to keep on living. Even despite the grief. How fucking amazing is that.
i think the reason i love studio ghibli as much as i do is because it encompasses everything i love about life. wearing clothes that make you feel young and free that you can run and jump and climb trees in. the sense of peace that only comes from sitting on a train watching scenes move by the in windows, walking through the city at night, reading on a bench. the way there is so much grief and pain and hardship in each movie, and the world being torn apart but in spite of that, there is wholesomeness and warmth in bowls of noodles and dinner with your family and singing loudly without worrying about what your voice sounds like, and if you love someone enough it doesn’t matter that the world is falling apart around you. it’s about romanticising the little things in life, the hot mug of tea, that moment in the streetlight in the rain, the sunrise looking pretty through your little window; and it’s about the quiet, soft, warm moments you share with other people through those. those the things i cling onto in life, the small moments of joy that make life worth living.
i am so serious when i say we as young adults are so starved and deprived of community
like we as a generation - i’m talking especially young adults who are just entering the workforce - are so so lonely! i think about it all the time. between the incoming recession and cost of living crisis + the rise of wfh + processing pandemic trauma so many of us live deeply isolated lives and i think we deserve better…i’m working fully remote and i consider myself lucky because i do have friends that i see regularly but there’s a hunger for that place you can go to to be around people in an organic but meaningful way to you that is not being addressed rn! we now more than ever need communities!
the “humans are inherently selfish” fanclub can genuinely and in all honesty go to hell. i once came back from a school yard where the kids had
heaped
piles of leaves and cut wildflowers on a narrow strip of grass bc a bee had
died. i actually want to cry.
i really can’t stress enough how much i recommend regularly engaging with older art– movies, books, whatever. like, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” and all that, but also, there’s just something really fascinating and kind of beautiful about reading something written by someone who lived so long ago and really connecting with it, recognizing the humanity of people who once seemed like abstract concepts to you
I started reading The Tale of Genji during the pandemic, figuring I might as well improve my mind during lockdown. It’s considered the oldest novel on record, possibly the first one ever written. Early in the book, there’s an incident where the main character has a crush on a girl, so he tries to sneak into her family’s property to get close to her, and along the way he runs into this ancient old grandma who can’t half see and who mistakes him for one of her grandkids. So she’s standing there going on and on about her digestive difficulties and whatever, and he can’t speak up because if she hears his voice she’ll know he’s not who she thinks he is, so he’s just having to stand there and nod and hope she’ll go away soon. And I’m reading all this and thinking that with a couple of adjustments this could be a modern day sitcom, and it made me happy to think that a thousand years ago someone was laughing at the same sort of stuff we laugh at today.
i read dickens’ great expectations in little fifteen minute installments on my breaks at work, sitting there dirty and tired and sweaty in a hot factory, and it made me think about how a hundred and sixty years ago there were probably tired guys in hot factories reading the story the exact same way, bit by bit, at their stupid jobs they couldn’t afford to quit and were damn lucky even to have, and they too were glad to read the next chapter of mr dicken’s latest weird little story about weird little people
in reading War and Peace I’ve discovered that “doing math homework at the dining room table with your angry dad” has been a common terror since the 1800s
i remember reading tom sawyer, specially the part where he gets chastized erroneusly for dropping the sugar and he just spends minutes sitting in silence sulking and fantasizing about how sad everyone would be if he died and reveling in the self pity of how lonely and misunderstood he is and as a teenager who did exactly that with my 14 years of age i was shocked that an adult in the 1800’s had managed to capture that so well
just another name writ in water
