You know you want to be in my bed. I do not mean that in a sexual sense, though I am VERY ALLURING (also I am sick, which drives lovers WILD.)
It’s around 10 a.m. in Ridley, Pennsylvania, at the local Wawa. The morning coffee rush has just ended at the convenience store, leaving only a handful of customers lingering during the calm before the storm of lunchtime hoagies.
“Are you interviewing people about Wawa?” a customer named Ferrenc Rozsa approaches me. “You know, I wrote a song about Wawa.” He quickly retreats to his car and then back into the store with a country tune blasting through the speakers of his iPhone.
anyone want to walk a turtle?
TNC is getting us all amped-up for Black Panther:
Despite the difference in style and practice of storytelling, my approach to comic books ultimately differs little from my approach to journalism. In both forms, I am trying to answer a question. In my work for The Atlantic I have, for some time, been asking a particular question: Can a society part with, and triumph over, the very plunder that made it possible? In Black Panther there is a simpler question: Can a good man be a king, and would an advanced society tolerate a monarch? Research is crucial in both cases. The Black Panther I offer pulls from the archives of Marvel and the character’s own long history. But it also pulls from the very real history of society—from the pre-colonial era of Africa, the peasant rebellions that wracked Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages, the American Civil War, the Arab Spring, and the rise of isis.
This is an old Captain Awkward piece on managing your depression at work, but I’ve recommended it to people a bunch:
Depression is a big fat jerk. It lies to you all the time. Here are some of the lies it has told me:
Jerkbrain Lie: Organized people keep their shit together (house clean, wardrobe looking sharp, desk immaculate, bills paid on time, go to the gym regularly, floss) without expending a lot of effort. It’s only hard for you to do these things because you are lazy and stupid.
Truth: Organized people are good at taking a little time each day to put their lives in order. It only looks effortless to you – they actually put time and effort into breaking these tasks down into small, manageable routines instead of letting them pile up to the point that they actually are difficult.
Jerkbrain Lie: Mistakes are real and count in a way that your successes aren’t real and don’t count.
This dragon is really hard for me to slay, personally. I suffer from a lot of perfectionism, black & white thinking, and it’s really hard for me to recover from a mistake. Since my brain is a jerk, almost anything can be a mistake for purposes of this exercise. “Ran out of laundry quarters without realizing, now bank is closed” = “CAN’T YOU EVEN HANDLE THE SIMPLEST TAKS, JENNIFER?” Depression interferes with self-respect by making all mistakes appear equal and irrevocable, part of the neverending and totally boring and self-centered story of how terrible I am.
Truth: Everyone messes up. A mistake does not have to derail your whole life or your whole day. When you make an honest mistake (i.e., something that is not a deliberate attempt to harm or a careless disregard for the safety and well-being of others that causes harm), stop and sit with it for a few minutes. Was there something you could have done differently? Can you promise to try harder to do that next time? Does some amends or apology need to be made? Own up, do your best to amend/correct, resolve to do better, and then let it go.
Jerkbrain Lie: Feeling depressed (lazy, horrible, avoidant) means that you can’t (get to work on time, complete work tasks, do writing that you need or want to do, do housework).
Jerkbrain Closely Related Lie: You will do all of that routine boring plant maintenance work when your mood improves! But now, when you are feeling so bad, time to go back to sleep or hit “Play next episode….”
Although doctors had supported better sanitation to improve public health and curb major epidemics, companies now exploited this authority, using it to vilify normal bodily functions, like sweating. Early in the 20th century, a Cincinnati surgeon wanted his hands sweat-free while operating, so he invented an antiperspirant called Odo-Ro-No. In 1912, his daughter Edna Murphey hired an ad agency to boost the company’s sales, and their first successful ad positioned excessive sweating as a medical disorder with a doctor’s endorsement of Odo-Ro-No. A few years later, the company tried a new tack: Convincing self-conscious women that their body odor (which it dubbed “B.O.” for short) was a problem nobody would directly tell them about.
Odo-Ro-No helped launch a trend of advertising-by-fear, sometimes known as “whisper copy,” which focused on gossip around topics considered impolite to address in public. Similar campaigns were soon waged against every imaginable imperfection, whether it was flawed makeup, gray hair, torn stockings, acne, underarm hair, bad breath (strictly using the clinical-sounding term “halitosis,” so as not to offend), or the ultimate—bad “feminine hygiene.” To describe the “life-destroying” impact of bad breath, an oral antiseptic brand called Listerine (after Dr. Lister) coined the ubiquitous phrase, “Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride.”
Any Toastie translators looking for a cool opportunity?
ALTA is delighted to announce the establishment of the annual Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellowship, beginning with the 2016 ALTA Travel Fellowship year. The Jansen Fellowship will be preferentially awarded to an emerging translator of color or a translator working from an underrepresented diaspora or stateless language.
The $1,000 fellowship will help cover the costs of airfare, hotel, and travel to the 2016 ALTA conference, ALTA39: Translation & Crossings.
Deadline for applications is April 8, 2016.
FKA twigs doesn’t think people have any clue what she’s doing, and she may be right:
In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, FKA twigs expressed a frustration with critics’ tendency at the time to sort her music along with artists like Kelela and Miguel in the vague genre known as “alt-R&B.” She says when she first released music and nobody knew what she looked like, they considered her genre-less. When her pictures came out, suddenly the mixed-race artist became an “R&B” singer. “I share certain sonic threads with classical music; my song ‘Preface’ is like a hymn. So let’s talk about that,” Barnett says. “If I was white and blonde and said I went to church all the time, you’d be talking about the ’choral aspect’. But you’re not talking about that because I’m a mixed-race girl from south London.”
I love weirdos in fashion, and Isaac Mizrahi is no exception:
When his father bought him a sewing machine at age 10, Mizrahi started making puppets. He conceived elaborate stories and began a small puppeteering business, performing at birthday parties to earn money. But his creativity wasn’t celebrated within his insular community. Mizrahi says the faculty at Yeshivah of Flatbush, the Orthodox Jewish school he attended, was less than thrilled with his enterprise, and as a result, he often clashed with authority. His teachers preferred he agonize over Talmudic interpretations, but Mizrahi was far more interested in doodling sketches in the margins of his Hebrew books.
“The puppets themselves were a conflict because at Yeshivah, we would talk like this was idol-making,” he says. “But any sort of art was looked down upon, so already I was kind of behind the eight-ball. It was this really bipolar existence because I didn’t fit in at all. The idea of being homosexual in the religion is not exactly something that’s accepted, and while I wasn’t out yet, at that age I knew and I was effeminate and artistic, and I was bullied and ridiculed for it.”
So tricky and uncomfortable (she shared in the comments that she’s found a new job, so it’s a happy ending!):
Yesterday, I had my mid-year review with my boss and during the conversation, she shared that it was obvious how unhappy I was and that no matter how much I demonstrate that my position is overworked, absolutely nothing would come off my plate (in fact, there is a good chance the workload would increase). I’m doing the work of 2.5 people and am often relied upon by colleagues across the organization to do work outside of my job duties, because of my background/skills.
My boss told me I need to think about whether or not this is the job for me, and if so, commit to the job description as it is (and stop raising issues/concerns) or work with her to develop an exit plan. At this point, I shared with my boss that I have been actively looking. It was a scary thing to say, but I think it opened up a productive dialogue. My boss asked me to think it over and share my decision in my next one-on-one.
Obviously we will discuss the new Captain America: Civil War trailer at the current time:
Nice try, Dan Who Is Very Confident He Knows How Feminists Talk:
