“Making films has never just been a job to me, it is my life. I have some interests outside of acting…but acting is what keeps me going, it’s what I do, it gives life purpose.” —Christopher Lee, 1922-2015
The Life-Altering Decisions We Let 17-Year-Olds Make About Loans:
I was 17 years old as I sat at my parent’s kitchen table in somewhat rural Oregon with a pile of FAFSA paperwork in front of my bewildered parents, neither of whom had gone to university, who were trying their best to help me muddle through it.
“Sallie Mae can take care of it,” my high school guidance counselor told me. “Or the bank. You’ll just get the loans you need and then you’ll pay them back. It’s not a big deal. Everyone does it.” …
The year was 2005. I was a teenager who wanted to be a teacher. The economy had not yet crashed. I was not being greedy, I wasn’t reaching beyond my means. I was trying to do the thing that everyone said I needed to do to not live right on the edge of poverty like my parents.
Now, I’m still kind of there.
I really want to thank you for all the supportive comments you left on the link roundup a couple of days ago. I expected nothing less than total support from Toast folks — your all-around awesomeness never surprises me — but it still meant a lot to read so many kind and encouraging comments about my name change. It’s going to be a long process to make it all official-like, and I’m planning to go back and read your notes when I start to feel down or impatient about how many hoops I have to jump through along the way. You guys are the best and I truly appreciate you.
Let’s talk about the X-Files reboot now that the first little teaser photo has been released! I thought I was going to be cool about this, because I have grown and loved many a show since then, but nope, apparently I’m not.
A Warrior Woman’s Work, by Jess Zimmerman, really knocked me back yesterday:
“The problem isn’t just that we’re shuttled into one of two locked rooms at birth, left to find our own way out if we don’t belong. The problem is also that the rooms have been stocked arbitrarily with clothes and books and props and posters of unattainable ideals. The fixtures have changed a bit over the centuries, but inhabiting your assigned gender can mean accepting a host of assumptions and stereotypes about what qualifies as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’
“Warrior women, like Furiosa and Britomart and many others, explode those assumptions. They offer one model (among many possible ones) for a form of womanhood that’s not dictated by courting expectations of femininity, or conspicuously flouting them, but simply by setting them aside. The message of the martial maid is not that women have to fight. It’s that fighting does not belong to men. Heroism does not belong to men. Being central to the story, acting instead of being acted upon, being something other than ‘beautiful enough’ or ‘insufficiently beautiful’: these are not privileges accorded to men alone. A sword in the hands of a woman doesn’t transform into a symbol of love.
“I never doubted being a girl, but I thought I was missing the mark, because I thought there was a mark to miss. But there are so, so many more ways of being a woman than I realized, so many more ways than I saw reflected in the stories that spoke to me. As it turned out, one of them was mine, and I was doing it exactly right.”
“15 years after that astounding 1999 match, women’s soccer is still making slow progress toward being fully supported by FIFA, advertisers, and media outlets.
Media coverage of women’s soccer leaves a lot to be desired, too. First of all, there’s a lack of coverage of women’s sports, including soccer: an analysis found that out of an entire year of broadcasting, SportsCenter devoted just two percent of its airtime to women’s sports. Astoundingly popular EA Sports video game series FIFA is just now getting around to adding female players, just in time to capitalize on the 2015 World Cup. Even though the mainstream media has generally moved away from overtly cringe-inducing reporting on the women’s game, there’s still missteps like Fox Soccer, the broadcaster of the World Cup, comparing Louisa Necib to J. Lo in a list of 10 players to watch.”
PSA: The U.S. plays Sweden tonight at 8pm EST. Former USWNT coach Pia Sundhage is now coaching her native Sweden, and she had some things to say about her former players (“I told [Abby Wambach]: ‘If I stayed, you would be a sub. The best sub ever. But a sub.'” WAY HARSH, PIA). My love for the USWNT knows no bounds and I’m super pumped for this game and you should be, too. CANCEL YOUR EVENING PLANS AND WATCH IT WITH ME.
Pretty good casting: Chris Hemsworth will play the receptionist in the all-female Ghostbusters film
“When a child with disabilities is kept out of an activity, not only will it hurt them (and their families), but the typical children internalize this segregation as necessary. They will carry that lesson forward.” <–I don’t write a ton here about family stuff — Twitter sees a bit more of it — but this essay was a gut-punch for me and took a couple of sittings to get through. It’s important, though, and I think everyone should read it.
Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings
by Juan Felipe Herrera (our new U.S. Poet Laureate!)
for Charles Fishman
Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip—the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.
