An intensely entertaining Reddit thread by former groupies on their best conquests. I mean, entertaining to me.
*
Everyone would like to be Joan Didion sitting on the floor while Ray Manzarek tools around on the keyboard. Everyone would like to be Joan Didion, full stop.
But there is something lost in the pursuit of this coolness. So often you’re telling a story because you want to be the one telling it, and too rarely you’re asking why. Yeah, yeah: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But we tell other people stories for different reasons. Reasons other than wanting to be heard, being cool, and being there.
*
There is no form of communal living I could tolerate, least of all this one.
*
Go home, Walmart, you’re evil.
*
Here is an x-ray film of a snake swallowing an egg.
*
The adorable old dude has dinner at Eleven Madison Park.
*
Eileen Myles did not like Blue Is the Warmest Color.
*
What I learned at law school [in Canada]: the poor need not apply.
*
Benedict Cumberbatch’s mom, looking a lot like Benedict Cumberbatch in a wig.
*
Rob Ford: still amazing, still GIF-able.
*
Old Cosmo ads. I enjoyed “The tampon that’s right even for single girls.”
*
Claire Zulkey interviews Samantha Irby!
A former sitcom writer, on his descent into homelessness.
*
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I don’t know, “descent into homelessness” is basically my greatest fear ever, so I think I will skip that one…
I read it yesterday. Like most “I lost my home and my marriage fell apart” stories, dude could have made some better choices when he was getting rich. Hindsight 20/20 and all.
Yeah…the takeaway that maybe you shouldn’t leave your extremely competitive field for two years and live off of your savings while supporting eight children in an “old money” neighborhood does not particularly resonate with me.
But he does actually admit that himself in the piece, at least. He knows that while external forces were a contributing factor, he was really the one who was responsible for his own downfall.
My mum is in a similar pickle right now (not homeless, but has been staying with her brother in his guest room now for over six months and was depending on me to pay her rent before that for over 2 years), and pretty much all of this has been because she was not conservative with her spending, didn’t maintain a money cushion and doesn’t take her own business advice. She knows what she needs to do, but always has a “reason why she can’t”.
I freaked me out, totally.
That, right there, sums up the entire driving force behind Walmart for me. They take advantage of other people’s kindness and existing welfare systems in order to increase their profit margins. They’re basically using my taxes to subsidize their workforce instead of, you know, paying them enough to live on. I know there are other egregious examples (I am looking at you, entire U.S. restaurant tipping system) but the Waltons are among the worst. Fuck them. I hope their entire workforce unionizes, overthrows the business leadership, and joins up with Costco.
My exact, out-loud reaction to that snake/egg video: “Whaaaaat? Ohhhh Godddddd nooo!”
YEAH JEETS. YEAH JEETS.
died laughing.
“As if anyone would keep banging Bon Jovi a secret. I’d put it on my CV.” Truer words and all.
“a beautiful flop house”
???????????
That snake x ray is the greatest. One time a king snake swallowed one of my sister’s pet ducks and you could see the outline of the duck’s feet while it was inside the snake. It was horrible/mesmerizing.
It’s one of those things that is so fascinating that I forget to be grossed out about it.
So, I would love to build a nice little commune with my people, but sharing with strangers is not my favorite thing (last night I came home with a migraine to discover that someone else had cooked cauliflower and I wanted to die from the smell). And that bit about paying $400/month to sleep in a different bed every night? Nope nope nope.
At least some of them seem to recognize the dangers of pricing people out of the neighborhoods.
but DO they? I don’t think they actually understand that AT ALL. I’m all for getting people to slowly accept their privilege, but all this read to me was a bunch of people who are so used to hearing the word gentrification that they’re okay in saying “we don’t want that!” and then…. doing it anyway. I mean, yeah, $400 for a bunk bed for the tech boy billionaires is pretty much the epitome of running low-income renters out.
Maybe if they were actively trying to provide low-income/mixed-income rooms or something in their communes? I don’t know? Also that thing about buying up SRO properties is absolutely infuriating. Go buy condos in the suburbs like your predecessors because god knows SRO’s don’t need any help being shuttered without you turning them into groovy commune hotels for your Mountain View bedroom community of SoMa or whatever.
*sorry, not trying to be ranty, but MAN. Have already sent this to Bay Area/housing justice/urban planning folk to be like WAIT am I right to find this incredibly awful? Maybe I’m wrong.
I think that you are probably right. The recognize that it is a danger and something they should pay lip service to wanting to avoid, but they don’t have any fucking clue what that means or how to avoid it. Maybe they will do mixed-income and affordable housing options, but that doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Here in DC plenty of places claim to have affordable housing units but a) they don’t advertise them or make it easy to find them b) they are still crazy expensive, especially if you are working minimum wage.
WORD. It is especially scary because the public conception of “affordable housing” means we think it would be, yknow, not half of a low-wage earners income (hahahah 🙁 fun fact: more than 50% of residents in the Bay Area are now paying that for their housing!) but in fact, developers get tax breaks to develop if they develop for “affordable” which often CAN mean just making enough units so that rent would only make up (i think it is one-third??) a certain percentage of the MEDIAN income, etc.. It can differ from state to state / developer to developer but man, there are lots of people making bank in DC/NYC/SF. So yeah. It is pretty crazy.
I also just love to rant against the technorati. Communes and coops should continue onward, though!
This is only a tangentially related rant, but there’s a “sustainable” apartment complex that just went up in my neighborhood that makes me rage every time I walk by it (for context, I am absolutely for sustainable housing & think that the neighborhood level is a really powerful place to start addressing climate change etc.). I don’t doubt the building’s green credentials, but there are two main problems: 1) the largest apartment is 2 bedrooms, which is not family-friendly, and 2) those two-bedroom apartments rent for four thousand dollars a month. That is not any kind of sustainable, in the sense of creating a city that’s low-impact over the long term.
Basically, I’m very much into rethinking our approach to housing, because obviously not everyone can have a massive private house either, and to community living and sharing resources, but it can’t just all be rich pretty young people.
<keels over> It isn’t that I don’t know there aren’t rents like that in this city I live in, but $4000 makes my head spin. WOW. Also I’m with you on the greenwashing of language, especially trying to distract people with shiny words like “sustainable” and really, that just sort of sounds like luxury rental housing that yay! LEED-certification, but WOW.
ETA: Sorry for all the mad-replying, I just like talking about this stuff with cool Toasties as opposed to urban planning students who will give me one thousand professional explanations to shoo away my fury.
And granted, it’s an expensive neighborhood in an expensive city (Seattle), but a big part of not fucking this planet completely up is finding ways to fit more people more efficiently into less space, and raising rents so high that even middle-class families are pushed out to the ‘burbs is the opposite of that. For me, sustainability has to be environmental, economic, and social, and that development is at best one of those.
(and don’t be sorry about replying – I’m always thrilled to have a chance to bust out my rants on people who haven’t heard all of them yet 🙂 )
I’m assuming you mean the Greenfire campus? Because that’s emblematic of the new wave of Ballard housing– completely unaffordable to anyone but those making easy six figures with no kids. Say you pay $4k for rent, plus $2k for childcare for the one kid you can have in there (that’s the cost of the daycare in Fremont that I looked at for FT infant care), that’s $6,000/month before anything else, which is completely ridiculous. We live in your neighborhood and while I love walking to tiny breweries where they know my name and favorite beer, we want to buy and will never be able to afford to do so north of downtown.
That’s the one! And yes, the only thing that keeps me from being really pissed that we can’t afford a house in Ballard is the fact that right now we can’t afford a house anywhere.
Look south, my friend, look south. I’ve got a serious heart-on for westwood/arbor heights/highland park/white center. Anything to avoid moving back to the suburb from whence I was raised and escaped, though my mom keeps sending me links to affordable houses in her subdivision.
Yeah, the median income in the DC metro area keeps going up and we have had a huge influx of young professionals in the past decade and it’s wreaking all kinds of havoc on the housing market. What a single 25-year-old wants/needs in housing is not necessarily what a young family wants (and what makes sense when you have a toddler isn’t necessarily sustainable when you have a teenager) or what an elderly person wants. Some buildings are recognizing that and are accommodating it by having multiple sizes of rooms, but those units are still pretty expensive. There is tons of new luxury housing going up in the District, but not much in the way of truly affordable living options. There was also an article in today’s paper about the problem that as neighborhoods start to skew younger, older residents’ voices/needs are getting ignored.
And yeah, my boyfriend and I are looking for 3+ (a two-bedroom w/ Den would work) bedroom housing, but that means we are pretty much looking at houses instead of apartments, because there are so few apartments and the ones that are are insanely priced.
“a large high-end South of Market loft with mattresses that are shared among residents. Each pays monthly dues for the right to use the mattresses on a first-come, first-serve basis. ”
This sounds like a nightmare!! Mattresses that are shared among residents! On a first-come, first serve basis! I can’t even… just… no.
Seriously. If I’m paying money to live somewhere, I better have a bed of my very own, JUST FOR ME. With my own sheets and my own pillows. That whole article was like a giant pile of DNW.
For comparison, there was a place that was renting bunk beds in a converted hostel for $1200 a month. (Or $300 a week.) I like my own sheets, but maybe not $800 a month like them.
Hmm. Maybe I should also add ‘a job in San Francisco’ to my DNW pile.
Maybe keep it to “an apartment in San Francisco”. At least until the bubble bursts.
I really cannot see how Benedict Cumberbatch’s mom looks like him in a wig. Their faces look nothing alike to me.
I’m about to lose a whole lot of time to that ‘best conquests’ reddit thread, aren’t I?
I’m with you. He looks way more like his dad.
Definitely. I just googled his parents to see and immediately was like “oh THAT’S where it comes from.” It’s not his mom.
A lot of the same features, I think, just without the skull-trying-to-escape-his-face* vibe.
*I wish I had come up with that description on my own, but I did not.
Definitely. I just googled his parents to see and immediately was like "oh THAT'S where it comes from." It's not his mom.
One of the girls in my Intro to Creative Writing class freshman year of college wrote a poem about how she had sex with Tech N9ne when he came to town to do a show. She read it aloud to everybody in the class. She’s still kind of my hero for the sheer guts that took.
but did he leave $23 and a sack on the table a la Lil B?
I love the “Why Are You Telling Me This?” piece! I actually recently pitched a story to the Toast and wrote it like a personal essay, despite not writing many personal essays since my college application. I thought that would be the most interesting type of writing, because I love reading personal essays. But you guys, it was so bad. And now I know there is a God, because Nicole rejected it, though I think that means Nicole is God.
I’m not going to get past that Reddit thread before it’s time to go home from work. Hooray!