February 2012
1 post
Thank-You Note
I owe so much to those I don’t love.
The relief as I agree that someone else needs them more.
The happiness that I’m not the wolf to their sheep.
The peace I feel with them, the freedom – love can neither give nor take that.
I don’t wait for them, as in window-to-door-and-back. Almost as patient as a sundial, I understand what love can’t. and forgive as love never would.
From a rendezvous to...
January 2012
6 posts
deep joy
- wonderful and sooner-than-expected news for dear friends of mine as they continue on the long journey toward legally making the two little boys they love their own
- in paris at the moment, not able to sleep, so i am up answering email. but the man i love is sleeping in the room just down the hall and this is the first time in my life i’ve ever felt this bone-deep happy. a little more...
these boots are made for walking
is it just me or are the lyrics to this song seriously underrated?
“you keep lyin’ when you oughta be truthin’”
“you keep a-samin’ when you oughta be a-changin’”
“I just found me a brand new box of matches/and what he knows you ain’t had time to learn”
so subtle. so funny.
(I’ve recently become insomniac)
December 2011
10 posts
in kentucky
we just drove past a subdivision called “rabbit run.”
locations from this week's missed connections, or,...
GNC
Jimmy John’s
Meijer
Catholic Social Services
Sprint
Dollar Tree
Anytime Fitness
Arby’s
Walmart
America’s Best Eyes Contacts and Eyeglasses
U of M Hospital Cafe
McDonalds
“a pound [of butter] is a way of saying “i have love for you.”
– with apologies
“To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal to them...”
– Jean Vanier (via azspot)
I like this notion of loving someone as revealing to them their value. This is valuable even when the love is imperfect, or even if the love must, by virtue of circumstance, be abandoned after a time (I am speaking in this latter instance primarily of romantic love, but we...
memory
2006. i live in grand rapids. i’m standing in the doorway of dominika’s apartment. she’s an international student in my graduate program (the first of two that i will drop out of) — from poland.
we met in the first class of that first semester. she had an asymmetrical haircut that i thought was badass, impossibly cool. she told me she assumed i was another...
November 2011
6 posts
celebrating one's 30th birthday: a primer
- travel to cuba with your childhood best friend. be enchanted.
- with another friend, throw yourselves a joint birthday party at the most gorgeous space imaginable. invite 135 people. experiment with a variety of signature cocktails. don’t worry when the caterer calls you the day before to inform you they cannot fulfill your order because their kitchen has burned down—there will be...
a chronicle of thanksgivings past
my birthday falls around, and occasionally on, thanksgiving, so it’s fairly easy to remember where i’ve spent the holiday since i moved away from home:
2000 - my brother flew to indiana where i was a freshman in college, we drove to pennsylvania where my sister was a senior in college. we all spend the holiday with the family of a friend of my sister’s
2001 - i flew to new york...
"di me"
sitting in what feels like the luxest of the lux, the cancun courtyard marriott on our way back from ten days in a caribbean country whose name rhymes with tuba.
in brief: time travel, exotic neurotic, a paranoid person’s nightmare, opulent decay, dining amidst ruins, campesinos, french bankers, fortune telling, fortunes told, my spanish returning to me like threads of a memory just out of...
October 2011
19 posts
“A pound is a way of saying “I have love for you.” And “having...”
– he always, always has the right words
Death Penalty Signature Gathering Begins →
Today a statewide coalition of law enforcement, murder victim family members, exonerees and community groups announced the launch of signature gathering for the SAFE California Act (the Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act), a ballot initiative that will replace the death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole. The SAFE California Act will save...
“The language is great,” Dove said of the Hold ’em... →
so do i.
“Good for you on [ ]. You’re not lacking in balls or adaptive...”
– an email from my best friend, proving again why she is my best friend: because sometimes what a girl needs to hear is that she’s not lacking in balls
deep dark secret
when i was four years old my mom went to work part-time and i spent that pre-K year going to a neighborhood daycare. every afternoon all the kids would gather in the living room to watch muppet babies and once it was over they’d disperse outside, to play.
not me.
while the other kids climbed the jungle gym i stayed inside, TV all to myself, watching what came on next: love boat.
All of her fears are in it, and so is the central... →
via
on (self) deception
listened to a TED talk on lying. takeaways:
- a lie is meaningless and has no power unless there is someone willing to believe it
- being lied to can reveal to you what you are hungry for
if you’ve never had someone lie to you consistently and for a long period of time, i highly recommend it. you will learn so much about yourself!
on domesticity
just up at 8:30am, making scones and listening to beyonce’s countdown. most people are reading this as an epic love song for jay-z, talking about how they’ll always be together and how she’s trying to have his baby.
an alternate reading, and the one that i’m endorsing, is that it’s definitely a song for jay-z, but what it is is an apologetic for opening up their...
the hardest thing to write about is gratitude
i cried in front of my colleagues tonight at a retirement party for my boss, while talking about what he’s meant to me. mostly the speech was funny, but when it came to the, “but seriously folks,” part, i just lost it. how do you express the feelings that overwhelm when you think of all a person has given to you?
my boss is 64 years old, changes his facial hair on a weekly basis, rides a...
notes on a peace activist hippie wedding
two of the women i lived with during the commune days got married last night.
takeaways:
if you want to have a cheap, stress-free, DIY wedding where other people do a shit-ton of work for you for no money at all, you should really get to know a bunch of un/under/creatively/marginally-employed folks who can spend the ten months preceding your 275-person wedding doing things like: brewing three...
a couple of nights ago jennifer egan lectured as part of the zell writer’s series at the university of michigan. the lecture was called, “character, from an array of angles,” and her central claim was that the received truths about characterization are false: consistency and likability are not essential, nor necessarily even helpful.
fine enough, but then she proceeded to...
"he breaks horses, he don't tend to them"
idea: a sped-up, doo-wop style cover of smog’s simultaneously self-pitying and defiant “i break horses,” sung by a girl band
September 2011
8 posts
“A strong majority of white Americans believed the government response [to...”
– Melissa Harris-Perry, The Epistemology of Race Talk, a clear and accessible piece discussing “common discursive strategies meant to discredit [black] perspectives”
thoughts on a wedding deejay
“he was like trying to be all cool, playing early madonna and mixing it with single ladies. i was like, ‘just play single ladies, asshole.’”
a reminder
on saturday i woke up early and lay in bed for a long time. things got sadder; by 10am i was checking facebook on my phone. a friend’s status update indicated that franz wright had been in town for a reading the night before. i quietly damned myself for not knowing about it, then idly googled to take stock of what i’d missed only to discover another event was scheduled—a...
I never would have admitted it at the time, but I... →
on recursion
in “fall again,” kath bloom sings, “the field is high/we called up howard, what a funny guy/to mow it down and give it one more try/cause it’s fall again”
in lydia davis’s the end of the story, the narrator staggers around town, rearranging the details, her memories, to find what will give its shape to—what will be the last word on—her failed love...
i shudder to think how i would score
She developed a test to measure grit, which she called the Grit Scale. It is a deceptively simple test, in that it requires you to rate yourself on just 12 questions, from “I finish whatever I begin” to “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” It takes about three minutes to complete, and it relies entirely on self-report — and yet when Duckworth took it out into the...
2 tags
aatombomb: Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed... →
derasso:
Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed next week in Georgia for a murder he has always said he didn’t commit. There are serious doubts about the evidence used to convict Davis, and today we’re calling on the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop the execution so the evidence of Davis’ innocence can be thoroughly reviewed.
Will you join us? Send a letter to Georgia officials...
apparently concept weddings are a thing.
here’s an idea: the concept funeral.