I feel that everyone who is going to read My Life in Middlemarch with us has already done so, so on June 16th, we will discuss it fully and move on! Where are we moving on to? Why, it is my very great pleasure to announce that we will be reading Roxane Gay’s critically-acclaimed and marvelously wonderful debut novel, An Untamed State. Please buy it, and please be ready to start discussing it on Monday, June 23rd. To help you back into it as lazily as possible, our first discussion will cover just the first 2742 words, which can be read HERE, for FREE. Then you’ll go “oh, of course, I must own this!” and then we’ll be in business, no? YES.
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I read this terrifying cave diving narrative very frequently. Promise me, as Mallory has, that if I ever die in a tricky spot, you will make no particular effort to retrieve my body; it is just a flesh prison, and wherever it comes to rest shall be a grave:
Shirley and Herbst guess that Shaw’s narcosis was then closer to six or seven martinis. “You focus on the one thing. You don’t focus on the dive anymore,” Herbst says. “The one thing becomes everything. And I think with Dave it became the body, the body, the body.”
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An incredibly topical piece on whether Led Zeppelin ripped off “Stairway to Heaven” (amongst other songs):
But songwriters from whom Led Zeppelin drew inspiration, or more, have brought legal challenges for decades, often successfully. Since its 1969 debut album, the band has altered the credits and redirected portions of the royalties for some of its biggest songs, including Whole Lotta Love and Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. A copyright infringement suit over Dazed and Confused, a defining number that formed the centerpiece of Led Zeppelin’s live shows, was settled in 2012. The rise of the Internet has made comparisons by amateur plagiarism detectives easier, with mashup videos of Zeppelin songs and their alleged antecedents appearing on YouTube.
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Your RSVP for Hey Ladies: Live!
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Lindsay Hunter on her post-partum depression:
My husband went back to work, and then my mom flew back to Florida, and it was just me and the baby. Alone together, but no longer the us we had been when I was pregnant. Now he was he and I was I, and I was the one whose anxiety prevented her from making enough milk for him, and he was the one still needing to be fed. I began supplementing with formula, allowing him to drift off to sleep at my breast because I knew he could just have a bottle after, and because I either had to keep finding a way to feed him, keep holding him and washing his tiny onesies, keep breathing from moment to moment, or I had to run from him and the home I loved. I’ll just fake it ‘til I make it, I’d said to my mom. Whatever you have to do, she’d said, and I loved her more than ever for not shaming me for saying I needed to fake loving my child, for maybe reaching back to her new-mom self, over three decades ago, and saying what she would have wanted to hear.
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Automatic linking to any article about Judge Judy:
Judge Judith Sheindlin, the straight-talking star of “Judge Judy,” peered down at a sassy defendant with disgust. “Listen to me, Miss Fibby,” Judge Sheindlin snapped at a recent taping here. “They don’t keep me here because I’m gorgeous. They keep me here because I’m smart.”
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I love Judge Judy more than I love most things. I went out with an old roommate and her nursing friends, and apparently I talked about Judge Judy so much that night that my number is saved under “Judge Judy” in their phones now.
Also, my husband is really, really into exploring the outdoors in ways that I feel are perhaps unsafe, but luckily his claustrophobia prevents him from getting really into diving/caving. To further encourage this my sister bought him a book about people dying during cave diving excursions last Christmas. She is a treasure.
P.S. Have we already discussed the Texas Monthly article about the bank robbers? Because that was BANANAS. http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/the-family-that…
I only just read the opening for that bank robbers article but WHAT THE HELL. I am mad excited to read the rest.
I will read anything about bank robbers but these bank robbers are the BEST
My aunt tried cases in front of Judge Judy when she was just a New York City family court judge! I should ask her for stories.
My uncle was a court officer in her court when she was down there! It’s one of my favorite fun facts to share.
My husbands mother and step-father were once asked to be on Judge Judy, but thankfully turned it down. Could you imagine?
Yes, because I had an uncle (errr, a different one than my comment above…) who appeared on The People’s Court, and it was oh, so good. My uncle is already a complete character, and he was so in the wrong.
It’s possible that we need a detailed run down on all of your uncles.
UGH “The money was insured so it wasn’t hurting anyone” EXCEPT EVERYONE IN AMERICA WHO HAS TO PAY IT BACK
For entertainment like this I’m happy to chip in my .003 of a cent.
Hell, bank takes a whole quarter every time I try to use my ATM card.
Wow, that bank robbers story is AMAZING. Best thing I’ve read all week, definitely.
Yay! I literally just got An Untamed State in the mail yesterday! Huzzah!
Was there meant to be a link to more about post-partum depression? That is one of those topics about which I will read endless articles.
ETA: I just got notification that I will receive my Toast shirts in the mail this week. SCORE
Looks like the rest of the article is hanging out over at The Rumpus, here: Post-Partum Regression
Thanks for the link. I really liked the article and its emotional honesty, but – I have to admit – I never get this type of perspective. 1. Who doesn’t expect their baby to keep them up all night, & to create moments of poopy non-grace as well as grace? and 2. Why do people get so upset over things like intermittent sleeping? I guess because they are already broken down by baby wailing?
I don’t know, I guess I have hung out with beloved dying people and seen all the indignities they go through, which include terrible things and most of the bodily fluids, and so in response it is hard to get too worked up over the indignities that babies inflict. But maybe also it’s not having gone through it firsthand as a parent? But I do have a hard time understanding how all these things can be such unique and revelatory experiences.
I don’t have any personal experience with PPD but I don’t think it’s a rational thing–nobody expects their baby to sleep through the night, obviously, but PPD isn’t just people getting “upset” about waking up through the night. It’s a massive hormonal change plus a massive lifestyle change, all at once. There’s no way to really prepare for something like that. (Also, going without serious sleep for days/weeks at a time can seriously fuck with you in a lot of ways, so it sure doesn’t make stress of any type any easier.)
Toastie mamas, obviously your perspective would be better than mine here, send some knowledge our way.
Before my daughter was born, I was aware that I would not be sleeping consistently after her birth. There is a vast difference between knowing this and actually living the experience of both adults in a household getting no more than five consecutive hours of sleep per night for months on end (for us, it was about six or seven) because they are being randomly screamed awake by someone who is hungry, teething, sick, uncomfortable, bored, or all of those things but unable to express them in a common language. The exhaustion and sense of futility is indescribable. You feel like you’re failing or doing something terribly wrong and you don’t know when it’s going to end.
Thanks so much for sharing, mmejoy. I’ve got my first due in about 6 weeks, and it really helps to hear stories like yours and the one in the link roundup. I already suffer from mild depression outside of pregnancy, so I’m just assuming I’ll have some nasty post-partum. It’s always great to hear firsthand perspectives from people who have been through it and that it wasn’t all beauty and bliss.
I hope the last little bit of your pregnancy goes smoothly! Gotta be tough dealing with that this time of year (assuming you’re in the Northern hemisphere here). And I hope your postpartum isn’t as bad as you’re bracing yourself for.
Thank you for saying that, EPWordsnatcher. What a nice thing to hear. And yes, these past two 80 degree days have been miserable, but luckily the rain is cooling everything way down and making my life a little easier. Thank you again! 🙂
If you’re worried about PPD, maybe look into whether there are any PPD support groups in your area. I joined one when I had my daughter and it helped immensely.
Thanks, Becky–great suggestion that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Sending you lots of respect and good wishes. I wrote about the challenging part above, but I’d like to add that I have a two-year-old now and she’s amazing. I won’t say it was all worth it, that it has gotten easier, or that I’ve forgotten the hard parts or any of that other pat nonsense that we like to lay on new parents, but that I love my daughter and I’m so glad she’s in my life and that I’m in hers, miserable frustrating parts and crazy happy parts alike.
Two things helped me. #1, somebody told me, “It’s okay if you don’t like being a parent at first.” #2, when I was getting totally overwhelmed, I would tell my husband that I was going to give the baby away to goblins. This was our safeword for “things are getting dicey, you need to tap in.” By dicey, I don’t mean “I am unhappy,” I mean “I am so unhappy that I want to slap the baby.” You need a way to acknowledge and divert that situation.
Oh, and Zoloft, that helped a lot too.
Thanks for generously sharing your experience — I really appreciate it.
I hope you didn’t misunderstand — I would never question that it’s very hard, and involves suffering! And I certainly wouldn’t question the dignity of the suffering or its rightfulness to exist or that we should all have empathy for ppd and new mothers.
It’s more: it sometimes bothers me when people sound surprised that they are suffering, as if suffering only happens to other people. Which is a really common psychological defense mechanism, but one that I really hate (because it is often linked to people well-meaningly lacking fellow-feeling with other sufferers — thinking about them from a big distance as if such a thing could only happen to the sufferer but never to them — in fact this is the kind of thing well-meaning people have said out loud to me in the past in unguarded moments, so I know it goes on in a lot of people’s minds). So the business in the essay about being surprised at a lack of bliss in the first couple weeks after such an intense desire to be a mother rubbed me the wrong way. We are born in blood and tears, you know! (I am clearly a lot of fun at parties). But I guess this surprise is something that a lot of new parents do share, especially nowadays where giving birth may be the first major life-changing event of this kind that a lot of people go through.
I think it’s very important here to acknowledge the very real difference between standard-issue dealing-with-a-newborn-ness (“standard issue,” right?), which sucks because no sleep and crying and diapers, and post-partum depression, which isn’t just “suffering” but is something much more serious.
I think part of the problem is that we have a cultural narrative around women giving birth. And that narrative is that the moment you see the baby you will fall blissfully in love, and sure it’ll be tiring and poopy but it will feel oh so worth it because you love the baby so much! And when it doesn’t happen that way… yeah, it is surprising and might make you wonder why your experience is so different from the narrative.
Also I have to admit this: “Why do people get so upset over things like intermittent sleeping?” got my back up. The kind of intermittent sleeping when my daughter was a few months old was fine – she’d wake up 2 or 3 times a night, I’d feed her for half an hour and we’d both go back to sleep. That’s what I expected and was prepared for. But when she was a newborn it was over an hour of feeding her and soothing her back to sleep, only to have her wake up 1-2 hours later, around the clock. Dealing with that level of sleep fragmentation, on top of hormonal craziness, on top of learning to care for a baby is really, really difficult. It’s very hard to prepare for what that’s like before experiencing it.
I think you hit the nail on the head — it is taboo for new mothers to not express delight & bliss right after giving birth, which makes it even harder to have (let alone acknowledge) the bad feelings that come too. That’s a great point that I was forgetting.
About the intermittent sleep: well. Intermittent sleep is also what you have when you are sleeping in the hospital with a sick or dying person too, for weeks, and the nurses come in to check blood pressure etc every hour. It feels terrible, but it was the least of my worries in the moment — it was just part of the deal.
Likewise anhedonia: obviously it’s deeply disturbing as an experience, but it was the least of my worries compared with the suffering of the dying person, and the loss of them.
I don’t mean to say any of these things are not deeply difficult, but I do feel like there is a way to talk about them acknowledge them as very much part of life and something we share with all people, past and future, in other cultures and in ours — not a rare experience. The most personal experiences are also the most shared.
Though maybe by now I am going well beyond the scope of the personal essay we all began talking about.
PS And I am really NOT comparing my experience as better/worse — who could possibly know. I just mean these things are not surprises — they are very much the cost of being alive and loving people, and it would be nice if we had a social discourse that acknowledged that instead of treating them as rare events — that happen over, and over, and over.
I’m pretty confused about comparing caring for a dying person to PPD.
Apple and oranges, here.
It’s a good thing that’s not what I was doing.
Not only wasn’t I comparing the two, but the article isn’t even about PPD, it’s about baby blues, which, as the author says, 70-80% of women experience. I.e. most people. Most people have a hard time, because it’s hard. !
So, there are several issues here:
–A cultural conversation that tends to fall into camps. “Parenting is like an extreme sport, incredibly hard but so worth it”, “Parenting is total hell till they’re five, you will never sleep again,” “Parenting is no big deal, people blow it up to be difficult but everyone does it and it’s totally survivable.”
–A pretty damn unpredictable set of variables: birth can go any which way, your baby could have any one of a number of temperaments which might or might not mesh with yours, there could be traumatic medical events for you or for the baby, and you might get any of a number of hormonal backwashes coloring the entire experience, either for rosy-colored mist effects or total despair or alternating flashes of both.
–All the advice people give you is based on their experience which could be any combination of the above.
–It is very hard to pull your own sense-of-self out of this morass when everyone else is so full of possibly entirely wrong advice with heavy cultural judgments behind it.
The only advice I very consistently give new mothers is to get someone else to hold the baby while you take time to get out of the house and attend to your own needs every day or two. And to get you and baby outside. Because trapped in house doing nothing but but baby care can be kind of a powder keg situation. You truly can lose perspective. And if you are all heads-down in the baby care books it can seem like abandonment to put your baby down and take a shower, even. There isn’t anything in there saying when you are allowed to put the kid down. I somehow couldn’t figure that part out, that’s how confusing it all was.
The author may have described it as a “lack of bliss,” but what it really is is anhedonia–inability to feel happiness about anything, which is a justifiably alarming feeling. For people who’ve never suffered from depression or anxiety before, the terror of not knowing why they’re reacting they way they are is part of the fear. Understanding that suffering exists elsewhere in the world has absolutely nothing to do with not expecting or understanding your own suffering.
You said it so much more eloquently than I did, thank you.
Chiming in here: Acknowledging that people suffer in myriad ways is what makes humans empathetic…
Just because someone hasn’t seen the same suffering you’ve seen doesn’t negate their suffering. Just because I’ve never been to a war zone doesn’t mean any suffering I might experience from a broken bone or depression isn’t a big deal.
To say that women who have given birth are “surprised by a lack of bliss” or by suffering is really a passive-aggressive comment. And what is this “dignity of suffering” you’re talking about?
The suffering women go through with PPD, and even those who don’t get full PPD – just having a baby can be a struggle different than anything they’ve ever experienced before – is INTENSE. It’s debilitating in a lot of ways – it can really make bonding with your baby difficult to impossible and that makes you feel like a shitty, worthless person. I have had the baby blues, and thankfully never brought into the depths of PPD, and my god it was tough.
We’re not talking about women who have just broken a fingernail and are sad that they can’t look cute. This is bringing a new life in the world, “can I take care of another being” kind of stuff.
Hey Standard Tuber — we are in agreement — the things you are writing are not things that I disagreed with at any point, and some of them are points that I made myself!
Again, NOT doubting the suffering or pain. And NOT comparing different kinds of pain — I find that very offensive.
But yes, being surprised by a lack of “bliss” (the author’s word) or by having physical & mental suffering in the early weeks of pregnancy, yes, the surprise, not expecting it to happen to *you* in particular even when you see it happening to most people around you, that I find funny, and especially so since it’s a mental process so many of us go through. I’m not calling out the author per se about it — everyone’s individual situation is obviously complex and multidimensional — but I do call it out as a larger social phenomenon that seems to get repeated so often: people very surprised when things that are the common lot of humankind happen to them as well.
Our attitudes to risk and our own deaths would be the other obvious example.
But YES, there is dignity in suffering, just as there is dignity in work of any kind — and dignity in extreme suffering is far more powerful. Experiences that reveal our vulnerabilities as humans are precisely what create a dignity no one can take away. You can say whatever you want, but I will never stop seeing that particular kind of dignity, which is one of the most sacred things one can see as a secular person.
Yes, of course, there can be dignity in suffering; but let’s not hold everyone to that standard.
Thanks for the opportunity for discourse.
I lived through major organ failure and a subsequent transplant before I was sixteen. My suffering is so dignified it stands to inherit five thousand a year and the finest estate in all of Hertfordshire.
My suffering has been talked about in certain social circles, I’ll have you know.
My suffering was so dignified I had it set in a jeweled choker so I could pass it down to my grandchildren.
“Nobody does suffering like Helen; she brings it to every potluck.”
You should really come to court; my suffering would be quite glad to make introductions for you there.
I’ve had a spinal tap when I was a bebe and fell out of a car when I was a kid. My kids wanted to inherit my suffering, but I thought it belonged in a museum.
I’m sorry, “There is dignity in suffering”? I don’t want to imply that I don’t believe people who suffer can or do have dignity (that would be ridiculous) but I think you are getting dangerously close to glorifying suffering, here. Pain is not a GOOD thing, necessarily. Pain does not necessarily make us better people. When you say that seeing a person suffer is “one of the most sacred things one can see” you strike me as someone who is fetishizing suffering.
C’mon, tearful, snot-filled sobbing over the fact that you can’t eat without throwing up is the most dignified anyone can be.
Hahaha, the life-story of your dignity-in-suffering made me smile. 🙂
But here is where the wires of communication are crossing:
Having dignity ≠ being dignified.
Dignity = “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect.”
If suffering doesn’t inspire respect for the suffering in you (which is different from respect for the person — it is specifically respect for the suffering that they endure, their endurance of it), you are probably a lost cause… and I sincerely doubt that!
Suffering made me bargain with God one last desperate time that he could do anything to me if I could only get my kidneys back. Suffering made me pee in a bucket for two years because I couldn’t get from the dialysis machine to the bathroom. Suffering made me look at a bottle of Tylenol when I was 25 and wonder how many I would have to take to never wake up.
Tell me where the dignity is in that.
I have no respect for suffering, and neither should you. It is a vile, shit-filled name for the myraid number of ways that people can be trapped in unending hurt. I will fight it and any attempt to dignify it until you put me in the Goddamned ground.
We’re talking past each other right now.
Look, I’m sorry, but there is no dignity or glory in my past suffering. All there was, was hurt, and the hope that maybe I’d survive long enough to get to a point where I didn’t feel like a literal pile of garbage. I clawed my fucking way out of that pit sobbing and smearing snot over myself the whole Goddamned time, and I made it to the top and out and away, and if I fall back in, there’s not going to be any dignity in there waiting for me- just the hope that maybe I can, if I am extremely Goddamned lucky, get out again, and wipe most of the snot off myself, and start over. Please don’t suggest that I should be dignified when I am literally struggling for my life.
PPD is nothing like “ugh, poopy diapers” and feeling “tired.” It is a range of things, starting at crying easily and feeling hopeless all the way to feeling suicidal.
Yeah, no PPD here and I certainly expected to be tired with a newborn – how can you not expect it when everyone tells pregnant women, “get your sleep now, TEEHEE!”?
But it is an entirely irrational thing, driven entirely by sleep deprivation and a huge hormonal shift. Actually, I blame the hormones foremost. They’re powerful stuff.
I am on board with you in some sense, in that I think our culture plays up the ‘indignity’ aspect perhaps too much. A lot of writing about babies is venting, and that has its place, but I found that I coped best when I forced myself to think of it as not about me, but about her. When she was screaming for no reason, for example, it would calm me down to coo at her, “Oh, I know it’s hard, you’re having such a hard time.”
Basically, what I’m saying is that it helped me to see it as part of life, just as the indignities of death are part of life. That sounds maybe a little hippie woooo, but I think modern writing about parenting is frequently more about what a drag it all is compared to life before baby, and I don’t think it helps to be in that mindset. But that could just be my coping method, so YMMV.
Probably worth adding that your perspective of being with beloved dying people is relatively unique – many people haven’t had to do that when they become parents, so a newborn may be their first major introduction to matters of life and death.
I have gone through it firsthand, and reading that article, what I saw was not “changing diapers was so hard,” but “the hormonal/mental/entire life changing thing was so hard, and sometimes a diaper was the last straw.”
For me, one time the Wii Fit being out of batteries was the last straw, and I burst into tears because I just wanted to get a few minutes of gentle exercise before the baby woke up again. It’s not that the indignity of no batteries is rare or unpredictable, it was just the relentlessness of those early weeks as a parent finally crumbling my last remaining wall.
Intermittent sleeping is also a hugely different thing between “those assholes upstairs are being loud,” grumble, roll over, go back to sleep vs. being awoken by a baby that needs you to solve problems that they can’t even articulate, maybe for just a few minutes, but in the newborn stage, often for hours and hours.
Thank you for posting, I came down here to ask for the link, too!
It’s a beautiful essay and maybe balances the exhaustion and despair of the first couple weeks with the feral love better than any I’ve ever seen. I just want to give her a hug.
Also, boy did I identify with her talking about the nurses coming in every 45 seconds in the hospital. I am not anti-modern medicine, but man, I think the package it comes wrapped up in does not help moms and babies get off to the best start sometimes.
I loved delivering in a birth center – the nurses sort of ghosted out the door after the baby arrived, but they let us know they were just outside if we needed anything. We got to enjoy that first night together uninterrupted, but with a safety net.
Ahhh I just started reading An Untamed State yesterday! I’m gonna spend a lot of time crying on the subway/plane to my honeymoon/on my honeymoon!
Words All Spouses Love to Hear.
(Jk obviously the teaser at longreads was awesome and cry-worthy and your honeymoon will be awesome but non-cry-worthy as well! I hope!)
I’ll be reading it on the 10-hour plane trip to see my mother-in-law, because she loves nothing more than to receive me, puffy eyed, jet lagged, and emotionally devastated.
It triggers all of the “here, have some tea and rashers and brown bread with lots of butter” reflexes, which is all I want in the world.
My daughter just told me that Maya Angelou had died. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/arts/maya-angel…
That Obit was pretty short for such an important figure
Oh. Oh, I am so sad to hear this.
I did not expect to tear up upon hearing about this, but here I am.
Thank you for everything, Maya.
edit: This obituary from the Winston-Salem Journal comes closer to doing her memory justice.
Yeah, I definitely teared up immediately and unexpectedly when I got the NYT alert on my phone. I saw her speak when I was in school and she was just incredible. Definitely one of those people who is supposed to live forever, GOSH.
Oh, no.
I am very sad, now.
Wait, what? Oh no!
I think she was only found this morning, so that obit will get a longer as time goes on. They usually try to put one up right away and then later they’ll publish a huge piece.
Such a sad way to start the day, but now I know why the weather has been so gray lately – the Earth is sad.
I was sad, and then the Sesame Street twitter posted this picture, and then I started actually crying at my desk.
OH GOD.
why did you post that picture? why did I click on it? desk crying is the worst
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo
Crying with you 🙁
She had such an incredible life. I’m so sad about this. RIP, Maya.
NY Times has now updated their original http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/arts/maya-angel…
Totally gorgeous. Thanks for the update!
The closest I get to caving is visiting any ‘Show caves’ in any place I go, and they are large enough to stand up in and the owners give you a free hard hat and they have lights shining on the more interesting rock formations.
That article is not changing my mind on this.
(In the Dan Yr Ogof caves, they perform weddings! http://www.showcaves.co.uk/furtherinfo/weddings.h…
I went to the Show Caves sites and they have a whole section on “Meet the Dinosaurs” and it turns out they are my kind of people. They have created one of the world’s largest dinosaur parks! (fingers crossed I meet Ian Malcolm when I visit…)
The dinosaur park isn’t as good as my local one, though, which actually hides the dinosaurs in the woods. http://www.dinosauradventure.co.uk/
The whole Dan-yr-ogof site is well worth a visit, should you find yourself in Wales.
I went to the salt mine when I was in Krakow, which does have caves in it, but they’re seriously developed and have electricity and giant salt sculptures and stuff, so I felt pretty OK about it.
MISS FIBBY
I understand that when your job is to deal with stupid, loud people constantly and all the time, you might become a bit tetchy. But I find Judge Judy really, really tedious and like she’s aiming to be as obnoxious as the people in front of her, which is not a noble goal. I’ll see myself out now.
But not before complaining that the Texting Dirtbag Hamlet t-shirt is not being made and my life is no longer worth living. Oh, and I have Braxton-Hicks contractions going like hell this morning, so I just give up on everything.
I was bummed about the Texting t-shirt not being made too, but then I ordered a Hamlet/Ophelia one so now I feel better. Unlike poor Ophelia.
My eighth grade English teacher was on Judge Judy! She also used to throw erasers and she once dumped a cup of water over someone’s head, but I think the Judge Judy case was something about her neighbor’s dog.
Caves are just natural crypts. Don’t go in!
Gah. Cave diving. No thanks! I don’t even like to stick my head inside wrecks… there’s plenty to see OUTSIDE the sunken death-trap, thank you very much. Like the huge turtle taking a snooze on the deck, or the friendly eel poking his head out from a porthole. That’s excitement enough for me, tyvm.
I just finished that piece about Dave Shaw. It’s so tragic, and he was trying to do such a good thing for the Dreyers. I have such a heavy feeling in my heart about it. Also, this has nothing to do with the story, but did anyone else have issues with the footer and advertising content on Outside Online covering up the last few paragraphs of the article? I had to copy/paste the text into notepad to finish it.
And of course, RIP Maya Angelou. If you are on twitter, I highly recommend lurking around in #MayaTaughtMe. Such a great hashtag.
Yeah, I couldn’t read the last page or so. I didn’t think of pasting it into notepad!
yeah I had to do the same thing to finish it.
Holy shit that piece was incredible. It definitely gets tough there at the end, when they’re watching the video. Gave me a tiny bit of panic.
Good call pasting into notepad – I’ll try that!
Yes to the can’t read, saved by the nifty conversion to body text-only feature of iOS7 (Reader on OSX) on left and right sides of the web address bar, respectively. Some webmasters turn the feature off, so you’ll see their ads, but when it’s left on, it’s so great.
Apart from Maya Angelou’s death, the only news I can focus on today is this (content warning for sexual assault) or, if you want the shittier article, this. I went to Duke and did a lot of anti-sexual assault activism there, and this makes me feel sick, like I can’t breathe.
Christ. I’m not sure I can read past the second paragraph. Disgusting.
Considering how many women have been screwed by those types of disciplinary panels, I am finding it hard to muster sympathy for him.
Oh, it may not have been clear, but I have zero sympathy for him. It’s incredibly rare for victims to come forward at Duke, even rarer for anything to happen to their rapists. With the information I have, I strongly believe they did the right thing in expelling him. It’s the fact that he’s suing, and the way some folks are writing about it, that I find so awful.
Oh no I wasn’t clear either then!!! I was agreeing with you. This is very “Newsflash: Man realizes his actions have consequences, more at 10.”
The school is absolutely allowed to decide you violated their code of conduct and should be expelled, regardless of the findings in a court of law. Ta-ta, asshole.
Exactly! Basically, UGH, humans are awful and for ONCE Duke did the right thing and now, ughghghg.
Only Judy can judge me.
Was that cave story not featured on This American Life not too long ago? Sounds horribly familiar.
This is a wonderful reason to buy and read An Untamed State–Roxane Gay is amazing and I’m so looking forward to it. (After I finish One Hundred Years of Solitude for my real-life book club, that is…)
Roxane Gay! I’ might have nightmares tonight after reading the first chapter but WOW what a writer. I’m really looking forward to the rest.
TRUE STORY: One of my favorite orders I’ve ever been given was at work, when someone whispered to me “Judge Judy needs a gin-and-tonic. She said to keep them coming. And heavy on the gin.” (Keep them coming! YES.). So I brought it to her. She kept unbroken eye contact with me as she very slowly took a sip while I tried not to tremble before her. She gazed at me, and then said “I would say . . . this is good. Well done.”
You have passed the first test. You may now ascend.
Ahh, I was planning on buying An Untamed State in the very near future as it is. This seals the deal.
Oh hey no link for the Lindsay Hunter article! Easily googlable. Worth reading.
Just a reminder of sorts that if your husband is acting really out of line you can light him on fire.
nyti.ms/1px6im4
And that husband was REALLY out of line, wow.
Oh my god.
CAVING. I did that once when I was doing this employment skills course with 11 other innocents from Croydon. It was part of a team-building residential in Derbyshire. We were led into the cold dark by a man who wore an animal onesie between his thick chest hair and boiler suit. I genuinely thought it would be fun. The enveloping black, the helmet which simply didn’t get on with my glasses, the heavy boiler suit, the wellies which were buckets in the sense that they were capacious and contained both my feet and an uncomfortable amount of water–
Well, no one MADE me do it, but.
We're talking past each other right now.
It's a good thing that's not what I was doing.
Not only wasn't I comparing the two, but the article isn't even about PPD, it's about baby blues, which, as the author says, 70-80% of women experience. I.e. most people. Most people have a hard time, because it's hard. !
Thanks, Becky–great suggestion that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise.