ellenhope8

You’re beautiful because you just don’t give a damn. You don’t need everyone to like you, agree with you or approve of you to feel good about yourself. You know that “good enough” is subjective, and that more often than not the subject doesn’t really matter anyway. I know you’ll never wake up suddenly 45 and nowhere, half your time and potential wasted on following someone else’s idiot advice. That’s the kind of thing that gives me hope for myself.

You’re beautiful because you taught me something invaluable that I would never have come to know on my own. You taught me that there are some things love does not conquer — that you can love someone with all your heart and skin and organs and it will change completely nothing. You gave me a practical lesson: that a relationship cannot be carried by only one of its halves. You made me realize I am not special, and that’s important because I spent a good part of my life thinking I was. Assuming Keats was right and beauty is truth, you are beautiful.

So, we just got back from Malaysia and I left with a lot of memories and one extremely scarring moment. We were having the best beach day in Penang playing in the ocean and enjoying the sunshine when all of a sudden I felt like someone had sliced open my arm with a hot knife/ electrocuted me in the armpit. I jumped out of the water and ran to the beach .. we poured fresh water onto the mark and decided it had been a jellyfish sting (mistake no 1 – apparently this just spreads the venom all over the place). The pain was so intense that I could barely breathe, we rushed to the hotel and proceeded to put more fresh water on the sting (mistake n0 2). The pain grew in intensity and we decided it was time to visit the hospital. When we arrived to the clinic they knew immediately what had happened, slathered me in suspicious purple cream, shot me in the butt with a steroid and a pain killer, gave me a bag of fake pills and sent me on my way. Later, while I was confined to bed due to the extreme drowsiness I experience when taking antihistamines, I decided to research this jellyfish attack. After many hours of googling terryifying pictures and stories I solved the mystery. Turns out I was attacked not by this:

Oh no, it was something much, much worse. This:

A Portuguese Man Of War. That fucker. It’s not even a jellyfish at all. Reading blog after blog and story after story of people that had been stung, I felt like i was reading my own words. These people had experienced the exact pain/feelings as me and their marks after the fact were the same as mine.

In the end I was lucky that I was okay. However I am most likely going to be scarred forever with the mark of this godforsaken creature. Here are some pictures of my arm the 2nd day, today they are darker red but less raised.

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

In the mean time, here are some I enjoy….

“I think I have this thing where everybody has to think I’m the greatest, the quote unquote “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” And if they aren’t completely knocked out and dazzled and slightly intimidated by me, I don’t feel good about myself.”

Watching one of my favorites ^^

Some things we will be seeing in Malaysia .. starting TOMORROW!! woot woot

Photos by French photographer Théo Gosselin