NO INDICTMENTS in the John Crawford shooting.
Absent from the (enjoyable and informative) articles I’ve seen about the MIT Hackathon’s attempts to design a less-terrible breast pump: the REALLY IMPORTANT and under-reported fact that Obamacare mandates that your insurance company buy or rent you a goddamn breast pump. And those things cost a fortune, so inform thyself and get yours. If you are on Medicaid or WIC, check with your state, like literally just google “mystate WIC breast pump” and you will get meaningful assistance with breastfeeding and QUITE LIKELY a pump, but will not fall under the Affordable Care Act’s mandate.
Me, I checked with my insurer (Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Utah), and they actually will get me a decent one (yours may not! and they may try to jack you up and dodge your calls!) And since I get hit with a $5000 maternity co-pay (which does not count towards my deductible) every time I have a kid, I am very happy to shake my insurer down for everything I got comin’ to me.
I recommend checking with the Medela site for your insurer’s info, Lord knows the breast pump companies are happy to help you out with this, they do not care who is paying them.
TELL YOUR PREGNANT FRIENDS.
if you claim to be tough on crime but don’t want to go back to executing animals after elaborate trials smdh:
Alas, 30 years later the weevils returned and the town was forced to take them to court. The trial began on April 13, 1587, with a lawyer named Antoine Filliol assigned as the weevils’ public defender. He argued that his clients had been placed on Earth by God, who would never have put them here without the sustenance to survive. It was just a bit unfortunate that this sustenance happened to be the town’s crops. The prosecution, however, asserted the town’s dominion over the visiting weevils, that “although the animals were created before man,” Evans writes, “they were intended to be subordinate to him and subservient to his use, and that this was, indeed, the reason of their prior creation.”
JESUS CHRIST, they’re shoving pregnant women to the ground now.
AHP’s book excerpt in Vanity Fair! I have read the book, and we’re planning on reading it TOGETHER, and this chapter was a real kick in the face:
Clift’s sexuality, like those other 50s idols Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, was carefully concealed from the public. But that didn’t mean that the gossip press didn’t hint at something different, something queer, in the broadest sense of the word, about him. Just look at the fan magazine titles: “Making Love the Clift Way,” “Two Loves Has Monty,” “Montgomery Clift’s Tragic Love Story,” “Is It True What They Say About Monty?” “Who Is Monty Kidding?” “He’s Travelin’ Light,” “The Lurid Love Life of Montgomery Clift,” and, perhaps most flagrantly, “Monty Clift: Woman Hater or Free Soul?”. Benign to most but, in hindsight, highly suggestive.
It has been one day since we lost Debo
Jack Handey remembers Phil Hartman:
Several times since Phil’s death, I’ve had the same dream about him: I am back in the studio, working on Saturday Night Live, and Phil is there! “Phil,” I say, “I thought you were dead!” It turns out that it was a mistake that Phil was dead, or that now he’s some type of reanimated zombie. All I know is I am very happy to see him again.
THE AMTRAK RESIDENCY LIST IS OUT AND CONGRATULATIONS TO KATIE HEANEY BUT OBVIOUSLY NO ONE LOVES TRAINS LIKE MALLORY.
uh, get off bim’s case? i do not know why the village voice is taking this particular tack
There’s a new article in Slate about explaining the academic job market to non-academics that reminds me a whole bunch of these two recent pieces by Amanda Ann Klein, so I will share those instead! One and Two.
PARSNIPS ARE GREAT BUT MOST OF THIS IS WACK.
Gather round, for I have another little story about Zen for you, one that I am reminded of with some frequency and have changed only a little for privacy reasons.
This one is not from my teacher, it is from one of my teacher’s teachers, who, some years ago, as a normal, non-Zen-practicing person, suddenly lost his wife to cancer and found himself with several small children and a gaping emotional wound the size of the Grand Canyon. And he dragged himself around, lost in misery and pain, trying to act like a functional human for his children, and it wasn’t getting any better, and he decided that this is generally the sort of thing that leads people to find a spiritual path of some kind, so he started checking out various options, like a character in an indie movie.
And after numerous fruitless trips to churches and synagogues and temples, he found himself at the Zen center, which was, on that particular day, featuring a talk by a visiting Russian monk. So he sat down, and the Russian monk, a slightly-dour-looking woman, gazed out at the room and said:
“ZE FIRST THING YOU MUST UNDERSTAND ABOUT ZEN, IS THAT IN ZEN, ZHERE IS NO HOPE.”
And, right, this would not be great for everyone, but the protagonist of our story was all OH MY GOD THANK YOU THAT IS THE BEST AND MOST HELPFUL THING I HAVE EVER HEARD, THIS IS THE PATH FOR ME.
Because he realized, right, as many of us do, that for him, the greatest source of his pain was thinking that things were gonna improve, and every day his life CONTINUED to be garbage and his wife REMAINED dead, and he was constantly experiencing that horrible human condition by which the gulf between his expectations and the reality of life made him deeply, deeply unhappy.
And so he let go of the notion that things were going to get better and began expecting nothing of the universe other than exactly what was, and then, when things eventually DID get better, it was quite pleasant, and he eventually received jukai and became a robed monk himself, and I have met him and sat zazen with him and he is pretty much suffused with peace, and absolutely no hope.
