School starts on Monday and I gotta leave myself some time to get back into productive mode :) I hope all of you have a good year!
Again, I’m locking this blog down, because I don’t want people irl possibly finding it and going through it when i use the kiteinase alias irl. I’m starting a new art blog at kiteinase.tumblr.com, but I don’t think I’ll have much time to do art until the summer or something anyway.
I wanna leave yall with two things, especially my younger followers and friends:
It’s emotionally healthy to have a private social space where you can say whatever you want and let yourself be problematic and stuff, away from the public gaze. Keep that in mind as you navigate your social relationships.
And: Social criticism is a means to an end, it’s a tool to reach the goal of love and compassion for those around us. Social criticism isn’t the goal itself. If your tools aren’t working out for you, it’s okay to put them down for a bit.
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it." - Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Today I asked my grandpa how his family celebrated new year. It would’ve been lunar new year for them of course. He said that his his dad and mom would sit in chairs while he and all his 6 siblings came and kowtowed to them one by one, and his dad wouldn’t say anything and his mom would say “all’s well, all’s well”. They would have a big dinner and his dad sat at the head of the table with his mom beside him, and he as the oldest son sat at the other head of the table. My parents asked him if they got money on new years like is the custom now and he laughed and said they didn’t do that back then. My grandma lived in a poor village and she said every new years families who could afford it killed one of their pigs and the young men in the village would come help you. Poorer families will probably keep their pigs so they can sell them. My grandpa’s family fled inland as refugees when the Japanese invaded in the 1940s. His dad worked in the city as a watchmaker, and the rest of them had to live in a temple like a commonhouse out in the country because they didn’t have a place of their own.
