I go to an awfully pretty school.
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- 17th September
2012 - 17
- 31st August
2012 - 31
The Millennium Falcon. Like, THE Millennium Falcon. (Star Wars Exhibit, Exploration Place, Wichita, KS.)
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- 28th August
2012 - 28
Republicans only bother to acknowledge women when they’re reasserting our status as second class citizens. Sure, they occasionally feign outrage over supposed attacks on stay-at-home moms (while nary a word of paid parental leave is spoken) and they trot out their wives to assure us how much their hubby respects women. But we know the truth - that this “respect” is conditional. It’s not based on a belief that women are deserving of human rights, but on a very specific set of rules and roles we are expected to adhere by.
Republicans can spin all they like, but what they don’t understand is that women can recognize dehumanization from a mile away. We live it every day. We know what it is to talk to a person and suddenly realize they believe us stupid because of our gender. We listen while people mansplain topics we’re experts in. We watch media that presents us as little more than masturbation fodder and walk down the street feeling lecherous stares on our back. We know what you mean when you say “legitimate” rape. We know exactly what you’re thinking when you pretend to give a shit.
My latest at The Nation, Fantasy Women of the GOP (via jessicavalenti)
- 27th August
2012 - 27
Thus the reading became the one place in the ceremony for a little customization and flair. My beloved also likes books, but I am bossier, and I took the reigns on this project. And since I find literature sufficient for expressing most of what there is to express about human life, the bar for this particular passage was very high.
As a bookish person, it felt like cheating to be searching for beautiful passages from the Internet. I preferred for it to happen more organically (so precious, so mistaken). I read books all the time, I thought to myself; surely I should have some interior commonplace book chock-full of beauty and inspiration to consult. But the only two poems I can recite in their entirety — Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” and “This be the Verse” — are so far from wedding-worthy it’s hard to imagine anything worse: “When I see a couple of kids/ And guess he’s fucking her and she’s/ Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,/ I know this is paradise.” (or “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” obviously.)
—Lydia Kiesling on her (hilarious) impossible search for the perfect wedding passage.
Relevant to my life.
(via millionsmillions)
- 23rd August
2012 - 23
GPOY new glasses
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- 30th July
2012 - 30
A Reason I Don’t Like Oklahoma: Wildfires. Like the one burning just east of town right now.
- 30th July
2012 - 30
What My Son’s Disabilities Taught Me About ‘Having It All’
While our friends worry about the quality of middle schools, our parental duties include bringing our son to the ER to get stitches after he puts his head through a window, then arranging for a window replacement and for a special treatment for all the glass in our house so it won’t shatter — at a pretty penny. Other friends declare, “I couldn’t do what you do.” If I am to conform to their expectations, I’m not sure what I am supposed to do: Beat my son? Kill myself? (Sadly, parents with kids like my son have done exactly that.)
Maybe it’s my Buddhist outlook, but I’m not consumed with worry and frenzy and despair like I’m “supposed” to be. I don’t enjoy that my 12-year-old son is still in diapers and sometimes purposely makes a mess in the bathroom. Or that he dumped his Thanksgiving dinner on my sister-in-law’s pregnant belly. Or that he screams in the parking lot of Whole Foods until people call the cops on us. On the other hand, he is my son, and he is what I have. And he has a nice smile.
When I look at friends and acquaintances, many with perfectly beautiful children and wonderful lives, and see how desperately unhappy or stressed they are about balancing work and family, I think to myself that the solution to many problems is deceptively obvious. We are chasing the wrong things, asking ourselves the wrong questions. It is not, “Can we have it all?” — with “all” being some kind of undefined marker that shall forever be moved upwards out of reach just a little bit with each new blessing. We should ask instead, “Do we have enough?”
Read more. [Image: The author on a walk with her son. Credit: Karl H. Jacoby]
(via theatlantic)
- 30th July
2012 - 30
How to Escape From a Leper Colonyby Tiphanie Yanique
I heard Tiphanie Yanique read from this collection a couple years ago at the AWP conference in Denver. She was on the Graywolf Press panel, and I pretty much love all things Graywolf.
Most of the stories in this collection are short, almost monologues. And good God, does she love to break the rules. In one of the stories–a close third person–we end up switching points of view multiple times and completely leaving the other characters behind.What? My writing prof said we couldn’t do that!Well, Yanique did it. And she did it well. This is a book one of my fiction professsors would hate because of all the rule-breaking, but in the end, who cares.
- 28th July
2012 - 28
Something Changed.: questions for poets (2)
how does one take care of the women who are transcendent.
how does one take care of the girls in your dresses.
how does one take care of the great poet(s) who is a woman who is a girl who is a mother who is not a mother who has never had a child who has had many children who…
- 27th July
2012 - 27
Gary Oldman, Christian Bale, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt at the 2012 MTV Movie Awards, June 2nd
Way to dress up, Bale.
No kissing for you!Not really though. NANANANANANANANA KISS HIM! KISS HIM! KISS HIM!
I have such a ridiculous crush on JGL.
(via bohemea)