Roxane looks back on her first foray into competitive Scrabble:
I have a Scrabble nemesis. His name is Henry. He has the most gorgeous blue gray eyes I have ever seen. The beauty of his perfect eyes only makes me hate him more. He has been known to wear a fanny pack and often scowls. Nemeses aren’t born. They are made.
10 Things Your Bitch Ass Better Not Do At Thanksgiving Dinner, from Very Smart Brothas, is hilarious (you can be a vegan if you want, though, and if you are, bringing your own food is fine):
2. Say the food will be ready at 4…and have it not ready until 7:46
If you’re like me, you starve yourself the morning of Thanksgiving. Because there’s no point in eating my customary hotcakes and shrimp if I’ll need all that room in my belly for 3 o’clock. Which is why you can’t be fucking with people’s emotions and hunger pains by making us wait for hours — sitting in front of a TV watching Hitch and eating honey roasted peanuts and olives and shit — because your bitch ass still don’t know how long it takes to smoke a ham.
Yeah, Mallory’s got this job handled:
Q. Two Hands Clapping in a Forest: Can you advise me on the correct emoji skin tone to use if, say, using the clapping hands to applaud a friend’s good news announced on social media? On the iPhone’s five-color scale, my hands match the second-to-lightest shade, but in the “human diversity as it exists in the world” scale, I’m a pale white person, and I wonder if the nonobnoxious thing to do is just to go with the one that’s clearly intended for pale white people, rather than be the white person who can’t tolerate there being so much as an emoji that’s not for her. Thanks for the input!
A: Say, “Congratulations! I’m so excited for you.”
I am biased, because these are made by a librarian friend of mine, but if you want a beautiful onesie to buy for a friend’s baby that has rare book engravings on it, MAKE IT HAPPEN.
Very excited to read the new biography of the poet James Merrill:
Hellen knew perfectly well that there would be no bride, but mother and son spent half a century wrangling over his sexuality—he dissembling, she inveighing, he writing coded lines like “some blue morning also she may damn // Well find her windpipe slit with that same rainbow / Edge a mere weekend with you gives / To books, to living…” (“To My Greek”). It was Hellen who discovered young Merrill’s affair with Kimon Friar, his professor and mentor at Amherst, and convened a war council with Charles (hiring a hit man was discussed). It was Hellen who ruthlessly burned all his letters from this period of first love, in an effort to destroy evidence of his orientation. But it was also Hellen who introduced him to poetry: His first surviving poem, written at age 6, is an uncanny early version of the episode in “The Broken Home.” (Hammer suggests that Hellen may have doctored his prosody.) She was a writer of occasional doggerel herself, and instructed her son on the joys of rhyme and meter, bidding him recite poems in company. Merrill would always be beholden to his earliest pleasure in form, and to the imperative to “impress and entertain” with it.
The majesty of Brown Girls Do Ballet.
The trials of women who grow, and what weed legalization may mean for them:
“The best thing women can do it figure out how to get compliant. Being a legitimate business is the only way we can address this,” says Amber Cline, a 32-year-old farmer who says her artisanal weed business subsidizes her vegetable sales. Anticipating the legal changes, Cline began giving presentations around the region earlier this year on how farms can adopt environmentally friendly techniques that comply with new regulations. Cline estimates it will take existing farms at least $50,000 to get up to speed with new requirements, an amount beyond the reach of many. “There are a lot of us trying to grow with integrity, using the best practices we’ve developed over the years,” says Aleman. “But even if we think positively and organize, I think there will be a lot of hard years ahead, and a lot of people won’t make it.”
I couldn’t sleep, so I started watching True Blood. It is terrible. I am told that Joe Manganiello will come soon, which is good, bc that old vampire guy is NOT hot, and all the sex scenes are horrible, and I am not sure if Anna Paquin is a bad actress or that character is just unendurable. I would like your thoughts.
I do NOT welcome your thoughts on Jessica Jones yet, bc I am only two eps in. Can we communally table our Jessica Jones conversations until post-Thanksgiving?
On pandering (I think this is a great essay. Porochista Khakpour and Jacqui Shine and Roxane also really like a lot of the essay, but have some thoughts (on their respective Twitters) about what it might fail to encompass, or where it falls short for queer women, and I recommend both the essay and said discussions merrily):
It is the fall of 2009 and I’m in the final year of my three-year MFA program. The program is hosting a reading by the writer and P. T. Barnum figure Stephen Elliott, who, in addition to being a novelist and memoirist, is editor in chief of the online literary magazine The Rumpus. The university does not provide him accommodations so our program director passes along his request that someone put him up for the night. I volunteer. Kyle Minor, another writer and an alumnus of the program, fetches Stephen from the airport. Stephen, Kyle, and I have lunch, where we talk about Denis Johnson, our works in progress, and our agents. I’d landed a hotshot agent six months earlier, am still freaked out by how, when I Google her, names like Junot Díaz and Jonathan Safran Foer appear. I have a story coming out in Granta, a collection in the homestretch, and I’m eager to talk about all this with writers who’ve been there. After lunch, Stephen takes a nap at my house while I go teach. I come back and take him to his reading, then to a bar with the other grad students, then to get donuts on our way home. Stephen flirts with me all night and back at my apartment he attempts, with what I’ll graciously term considerable persistence, to convince me to let him sleep in my bed rather than on the air mattress I’ve inflated for him in the other room. I decline several times before he relents, doing so only after I tell him I’m seeing someone. He sleeps on the air mattress, and in the morning we have breakfast and then I drive him to the airport.
Later that day, a friend forwards me the Daily Rumpus e-newsletter, which Stephen wrote in the airport and sent to his subscribers, allegedly a few thousand readers, writers, and fans of his site. Its subject line is “Overheard in Columbus.” Of the visit Stephen wrote:
It was really a great time, though I can’t put my finger on exactly why. It might have been the ride from the airport with Kyle Miner [sic] who’s living the post MFA life with a book of stories out, a couple of kids, teaching classes up in Toledo, finishing what sounds like a fantastic novel and contemplating law school. Or it might have been Claire, the student I stayed with. Or the walk for donuts at 10:30 on a Wednesday night, which felt late in that town, especially on the strip.
I tried to get in Claire’s bed. It was a big, comfortable bed. She said no, how would she explain it to the boy she was getting to know. I said there was nothing to explain to the boy, nothing’s going to happen. It’s like sleeping with your gay friend. But she wasn’t so sure. She had been drinking and I don’t drink. I slept on the air mattress in the other room.
Now, I realize I’m not a special snowflake, that every woman who writes has a handbag full of stories like this.
A history of Bjork, via her coverage in Dazed:
“Over the years I’ve been asked a lot of questions about what makes Icelandic people so special. I used to talk a lot about things like elves and isolation, but as I get older I think, especially with what’s going on in the world today, I think perhaps what really makes us stand out is the lack of religion. Give me a few bottles of red wine and I could probably go into that one all night. It’s just amazing talking to friends, especially from the States, who will tell you that half of their teachers at school were religious fanatics. I never had any religion imposed on me, I went to church maybe twice as a child.
“I find that when a lot of foreign people go through problems, like messy divorces, they suddenly start going to church more. In Iceland you wouldn’t do that, you’d start going in to nature more. The difference is as you grow up you don’t expect anyone else to sort out your problems – a priest or a president or a god or any kind of authority to surrender to or seek punishment or guilt from. If you are in trouble, you have to sort it out yourself. There are plenty of things we’re not good at, though. We’re hopeless at teamwork because everybody is so independent.”
Rembert talked to DeRay Mckesson:
To some degree, what you are doing is simultaneously selfless and a privilege, in the sense that there are people who want to be out there every day, but just have a nine-to-five and can’t. So it’s as if, at times, you’re speaking on behalf of those people who want to be there. But it’s also a privilege to be able to do it.
We’re trying to be a reminder that they’re not alone. We are representing all the people that can’t come, and we stand with you. And we want you to know there are so many people that support your work. We’re also doing it on Twitter, we’re telling these stories. We’re meeting with people, meeting with the protesters. The Mizzou football players reached out. So we had this text chain with like three black football players, with me and Netta — we’re trying to figure out how to support them, they’re trying to figure out things. Hopefully we’ll have a call tonight — but those are the things that people never see. They think that I’m just going to Mizzou. The guy doing the hunger strike,9 we’ve had long conversations with him in his DMs about this and that. Same with the Yale kids. Like, we know all those people.
Fucking True Blood. I think this show made Anna Paquin lose her ability to act. Or maybe I was blinded before and did not see she wasn’t good at it? It’s unclear, but dear god was that show unbearable at times.
BUT Pam. And Nan. My one dream in this world was for them to have a sassy spin off where they go on a road trip murdering people they dislike and wearing fabulous outfits.
Also the opening credits are some of my favorite opening credits of all time.
In fairness, she won an Oscar at age 11. I realize that doesn’t really mean she can act, but I think we can all be forgiven for letting that convince us she is a better actress than she is. I wanted to defend her acting, but I didn’t think she was good in X-Men and I thought she was pretty bad in True Blood (although that one’s more difficult – some of the writing on that show and the character in general are kind of terrible, too).
Anna Paquin peaked as a child in her acting ability, everyone knows that! (I was not impressed with her in The Piano.)Nobody watched this show for the acting; everyone watched it for the cheese and to check out the results of the actors’ workout regimens.
The video extras were always far more entertaining than the actual show.
Anna Paquin’s best role was in X-Men, nothing will convince me otherwise.
A truth universally acknowledged.
Yep. I found her Rogue much more sympathetic than the comics version, which was poisoned early on by her stealing Carol Danvers’ memories and further ruined even after Chris Claremont tried to make her more sympathetic by his cheeseball rendition of her southern accent.
I do think a lot of it is that the book series it is based on is not good. Fun, but not good. And since you are riding around in Sookie’s head most of her actions seem less stupid then they did on the show.
I have never seen true blood, but I LOVE their soundtracks, including the credit track. They hit southern gothic in exactly the sweet spot.
Part of it is Paquin. Part of it is Sookie, who was ten thousand times less annoying in the first few books.
I found her far less irritating in the show. In the books (I only read the first 2) she has a constant inner monologue in which she trashes all the women around her for their allegedly slutty clothes.
I had forgotten about that. It was just so refreshing to see a waitress who will grab a chain out of the back of her brother’s pickup if you fuck with her that I think I elided a lot of the crap until the series got straight up ridiculous. (WERE. TIGER.)
Pam is an absolute treasure. Sometimes I wonder why I sat through all 7 seasons of True Blood and then I remember Pam and it all makes sense again (sort of…)
I am forever baffled that Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer are married in real life, because they have the least chemistry of any on-screen couple I’ve ever seen.
WHAT. I did not know that and it BLOWS MY MIND for the reasons you’ve already stated.
Pam, Nan, but also, Denis O’Hare as Russell Edgington and James Frain as Franklin Mott can Get It. They’re just so clearly having so much fun in their roles.
Pam, Lafayette, Jessica, Russell. The greatest change between the books and show was the decision to keep Lafayette around. God help me, I love that show so much even though my BFF and I spent seven seasons’ of Monday mornings sending each other indignant texts about FUCKING SOOKIE.
Now that opening credits song will be in my head all day! (Not a bad thing.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwY34GKKhDU
ETA: Haaaaaaaaawesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPNjPpdjKU
Yeah, The show at any given time was like 75% shitty, but the 25% that was good made me keep watching – that 25% usually included Lafayette, Pam, sometimes Eric (less so when he was obsessing over Sookie), Jason, and different other characters would move in and out of the 25% based on their storyline.
Oh, True Blood. I liked season one a lot but felt the subsequent seasons did not fulfill the promise AT ALL. For example, what was up with the painted demons that looked like they were auditioning for the Return to OZ (the people on roller skates), or Detective Stabler trying to pretend he was a charismatic cult leader? Various characters had their moments…Tara…Tara’s mom…Pam…Jason…and Lafayette was always great. (Please can Nelsan Ellis get more roles?!?!) Bill and Sookie just morphed into totally different and unlikable people.
Sookie was terrible, but she reminded me of proganists are often rather terrible in longform stuff? She had this Buffy-like saviour complex where she’d run off to fix a situation without thinking it through/consulting her network/etc and thus ultimately endanger everyone she loved. Except with the added extra of sickening sweet naiveté.
Often my girlfriend and I would be like WHY ARE WE WATCHING THIS TRASH AGAIN and then we’d remind each other about Alcide’s Abs, Everything About Eric, and Homoeroticism In General.
One of my coworkers’ sons went to school with the dude who plays Alcide and was good friends with him. She said she could never watch the show because she remembers when he was 15 and sleeping on her couch!
True Blood was garbage, like, most of the time. But one thing I will always love about it is that it was an HBO show that shamelessly pandered to the female gaze the same way that most HBO shows pander to the male gaze. I think mostly I love this because it inspired one of the most amazing straight male whines I’ve seen. Any show that makes this guy this angry can’t be all bad!
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/nov/24/way… I know this is irrelevant and I don’t know who Wayne Newton is, but I think it’s very important that you know that he puts glitter on his horses
Danke schoen!
Okay if you don’t know who Wayne Newton is that probably makes no sense. But he is a performer. I know he had a Vegas show for a very, very long time (possibly still has it?) and the fact that he would put glitter on his horses is not at all surprising.
And he played a televangelist in a Bond movie!
All I know is that I really want to go to his house
All I need to know about Wayne Newton I learned from Balki on Perfect Strangers.
All I want in life is to live like an old-school Vegas performer.
“Newton narrates the exhibits himself, flashing that showman’s grin and sounding genuinely forlorn over the decommissioning of his private plane, which visitors can now climb aboard, planting their butts on his plastic-wrapped cushions.”
I got a set of non-toxic glitter paints and stencils with which to decorate my horse last Christmas.
i would love to see a picture of your glitterized horse as the link round up pic some time in December. Who’s with me?!
I will do some festive ones, at the minute I have skulls and crossbones and lightning bolts and the like.
Those sound good too! But there really is no reason to not take advantage of all horse-glittering opportunities.
Wait, so you can put ACTUAL CUTIE STAMPS on your horses?
I would also like to see your Customized Christmas horse!
(And I will admit to putting Santa hats, antlers, etc. on my big boys because A. I can and B. it cracks me up. ❤️)
Ahem.
SQUEE!!!!!!
The last Saturday before Xmas we have fancy dress riding hat competitions and play games instead of serious lessons and all the ponies wear tinsel and antlers. Or a halo and wings in Petal’s case!
That sounds awesome! My equivalent is the facility hosting a large friends and family Christmas party complete with bonfire, hot dogs and beer…lots of beer! No riding or dress up (see “lots of beer”) but every year, I’ll slip away and just hang with the boys.
Your event, though, has given me some inspiration: perhaps this year’s Christmas
Come Along will involve more horsey dress-up!
GLORIOUS
Wayne Newton is, like, the epitome of Vegas lounge singer-types. When someone does a cheezy lounge lizard-style cover of a song? That’s what Wayne sounds like. Covered in glitter and pomade.
/long tangent–in MG Lord’s AMAZING Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, Lord analyzes the “Day to Night” Barbies, whose professional costumes “transformed” into evening wear, as being a manifestation/representation of sublimated anxiety about professional success being a threat to being perceived as feminine. Ken also had a Day to Night incarnation but “his seems to represent cross-class, rather than cross-gender longings. By day, a TV sports reporter; by night, a Wayne Newton impersonator.”
Ooo, Imma need a minute with that last line. I mean…are they really saying “TV sports reporter” vs. “glittery Vegas performer” ISN’T about performances of gender and societal perception because…???
Heh, true! I have a ton of affection for that book because I read it when I was twelve and it was my first exposure to all kinds of gender critiquing, but there are lines that having been through enough theory classes, I go. . .”hmm.” She does have a great turn of phrase, though. (Of course, it might also be that by the time they got to Day to Night Ken, they were no longer doggedly giving him accessory sets featuring long, vaguely phallic accoutrements to compensate for what wasn’t in his pants.)
I only know who Wayne Newton is from Vegas Vacation. But glitter horses sounds about right.
On the subject of putting things on horses, my boyfriend just shared a bit form The Elements of Style with me which tells readers “Do not dress up words by putting -ly on them, as though putting a hat on a horse”. I would be thrilled to see a hat on a horse.
Your wish, my command. I did this at the request of the band whose t-shirt I was wearing because they said they wanted to see a horse in a hat ridden by someone wearing a t-shirt of a horse in a hat.
This is wonderful. Thank you!
Very satisfying!
Emoji person, there are like a gazillion emojis out there for you to use. Why are you sob wedded to the hands clapping? Words are almost always more powerful than a tiny image anyway! If it’s so important just use a different one! Streamers! Balloons! Cake! Whatever! Use your words!
You know what we need? A ‘use your words’ emoji. Like a little dictionary.
Pencil Writing
Love emoji person’s follow up ‘I’ve already said congratulations! But now it’s clapping hands emoji time and I’m stumped!’ Somebody’s too far down the rabbit hole there.
If not for the wording of the original question, which suggests someone clued in to conversations on modern racial semiotics, I would have thought it was a fake letter from some curmudgeon trying to set Mallory up for mocking. You know, because snake people and their emojis and whatnot.
I appreciate the well-meaningness of it (don’t use white as default), but if you spend that much time thinking about emojis you need to take a step back.
Eh. I kinda sympathize with the letter writer. I’m a white person in a mixed-race relationship; I text a lot with my SO’s cousins and with other friends who aren’t white, and so I think about this stuff a fair amount too. People use emojis a lot when they text (to be honest, I’m hearing a faint ring of “dang millenials with their emojis” in a lot of the comments here), and if you’re even moderately conscious of racial semiotics, you’re going to think about what it means to default to a mode of communication that reads as white when you’re talking to someone.
I though it wasn’t a bad question. If the emojis are read as representing specific races – palest is for Europeans, second palest for Asians etc. – then yes, use the palest even if you technically aren’t that pale, but if they’re not read that way go with the one you think looks the most like you.
I want/need to add here that I don’t like the idea that specific shade emojis are meant to represent specific ethnic or racial groups because someone is always left out and it totally ignores biracial people. I think they should be like a well-designed hosiery collection, representing the actual range of human skin tones.
Yeah, I prefer the idea that they represent the range of skin colors and you pick the one closest to you; I’ve seen black friends pick from the last three, Hispanic and Indian friends pick from all four that aren’t white, and Chinese/Japanese/Korean friends pick from the middle three (and one smartass Chinese dude that I know who goes with the default yellow and tells people he’s taking that back).
Also, I typed up like another hundred words about how I choose which one to use, then realized that it doesn’t really matter and isn’t always consistent. But still: I have thoughts about this.
Yes! Thoughts and Feelings both! I seriously don’t blame the lady for writing in about it but I also agree that it’s good to tell those of us who live with exposed-nerve sensitivities to the possibility of hurting other peoples’ feelings that some things don’t need that kind of worry.
Sent from my iPad
I just got a new phone that can handle emojis, and I feel like I’m learning a new language everyone is fluent in! There really are nuances and things to overthink (and thankfully there are neutral yellow smileys and cat faces). Reading that letter I was like…wait, is there a situation where clappy hands are required and sparklies or smileys are gauche? Because otherwise why worry about the hands? It’s kinda cool and bewildering to see the etiquette for this stuff being made in real time.
I rarely use emoji, but recently my mom went to Scotland and visited one of the castles from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and texted me a picture of it, and the ability to respond “[cow emoji][rabbit emoji][cow emoji][person blowing raspberry emoji x 5]” was definitely the high point of my week.
It’s possible to fully and accurately tell the entire plot of The Rocky Horror Show in emoji. Ask me how I know this.
I want to send you my phone number so you can send me this and I can save it forever.
Haha! I’d be happy to. If you are on the twittar, I can be PM’d at at elitzan 🙂
I, too, wish to witness this.
a friend made a game that was basically ’emoji charades’. you can do almost anything with them.
I have yet to get a smartphone but probably will soon. The thought of learning emojis is a bit overwhelming.
I basically only use emojis with one other person, so I am also a bit confused about general emoji etiquette.
But then again, my friend and I use the ghost emoji to signify hugs because it looked kinda like the hugging bear on Skype, so we’re kinda just making up our own stuff as we go.
I think it’s somebody clued in to those semiotics who’s still trying to make fun of “SJW”s. And Mallory just refuses to accept the premise of the question, because it’s silly.
I wondered if that could be it, too. It doesn’t seem to lean on buzzwords to the extent that I’d expect from someone impersonating an “SJW”, but then there’s more than one way of doing that. What I like about Mallory’s answer is that it works regardless of the writer’s intentions.
I’m still hung up on “forced march to the Nutcracker” grandma, tbh. Maybe she needs to express herself in emojis?
Right? Like, the grandmother is so confused why this little girl doesn’t want to see a literal nightmare happen in front of her while she is awake. The Nutcracker is fucking terrifying.
I have so much to say about Jessica Jones and I will wait. I am, in fact, a glass case of emotions about Jessica Jones, and really, unexpectedly so, but I will wait.
Something something, vampires, glitter on horses concluding in Twilight.
I’ve found that the comments on the AVClub’s Jessica Jones reviews are pretty insightful, if you’re feeling impatient.
aaaaagh I want to talk about it too. I’m not done with it yet, but I am already so impressed by its treatment of survivors of trauma and the kinds of sex it shows vs. what it only shows the results of.
me too. but i have to doubly wait until i’ve put myself back in the correct head space to finish the show because powering through the first 3/4 messed me right up.
but i have Lots O’pinions about those episodes. but i will wait.
I have 2 episodes left and I can’t seem to watch more right now because I am so stressed out by it.
I had to stop after episode 3! Triggered! It was weird. The first time I’ve ever been triggered, maybe? Well, first time triggered and then consciously aware of it. “Ohhh, that’s what’s happening. Because of this.” Man, I need to talk about it with you guys, or a therapist. You guys are free, though and have late night hours. Plus, you know, you guys are generally *the best*.
Just checking – I should go ahead and prioritize watching this over my looooong ass list of other tv shows I want to watch? Cause everyone’s gonna wanna talk about it?
I think so. It was extremely powerful. Like, spike to the heart intense.
It seems to be the case with lots of Netflix shows since you can binge-watch them, that everyone will want to talk about them for about 2-3 weeks, then move on to something else.
We watched all of JJ this last weekend.
Can we communally table our Jessica Jones conversations until post-Thanksgiving?
Yes please! I’m only three episodes in (loving it so far!) and as much as I want to discuss all the things, I’d much more prefer to remain unspoiled.
I’m halfway, but definitely won’t get around to the rest until the weekend, so I’m fine with tabling! Some non-spoilery thoughts: I think it’s the most terrifying thing Marvel’s done so far, and profoundly feminist.
Yeah, that’s why I haven’t been able to watch more than three episodes – the last couple of days I’ve only had time after 9pm, and I’m already like, nope, not something I want to watch before I go to bed.
I’ve been ending my nights with an episode of Master of None as a palate cleanser, which works quite well.
Me too! I like to think Netflix released them both at the same time on purpose.
Oh that is a great idea.
Me too! (I am 7 episodes in)
It has caused me to seriously reconsider my deep and abiding crush on David Tennant.
Oh man, yes. Especially since he incorporates to many of Ten’s tics into this performance. It’ll be awhile since I can look at his Who episodes in the same way again.
Seriously, he’s like Ten Gone Horribly Wrong.
A former roommate of mine started watching it last night, and she texted me “DOCTOR WHO IS THE BAD GUY!” I had a brief flare-up of nerd pedantry, but I managed to quash it before I responded.
Back when he was first cast as The Doctor, I watched a British Lifetime-movie-equivalent called Secret Smile, starring David Tennant as an abusive boyfriend, heavy on the gaslighting and the dichotomy between the abuse shown in private settings and the utter charming adorableness of the abuser in public settings. Honestly, I think he’s even more disturbing in that than he is in Jessica Jones.
(I was the only one of my friends who could stand to watch it through to the end. Fortunately, it has a very satisfying Lifetime-movie resolution, where the woman murders the abusive boyfriend and starts a new life in the south of France. But.)
Ah that’s what the show was! My parents said when they saw him in Who that they first saw him play a super creepy dude, it must’ve been that show.
Ouch, I can totally see his ability to play super-creepy in JJ extending into that kind of character. Having been in a relationship like that in the past I think I will skip that one.
My personal theory is that he has grown tired of being beloved by Dr. Who fans and thought, “What’s the fastest way to make them hate me?”
Unfortunately, people (terrible people) are flooding fanfiction website with sickly sweet stories about how much he luuuuuuuurves Jessica. Pass the sick bucket.
The boy and I watched episode eight yesterday and he started (not in earnest) to say things like “awh, why is she being so rude to him! His only trying to be nice!” and I had to kindly ask him to not say that shit even as a joke. I do think that the fact that he’s played as very charming, almost reasonable at times, is really important because it shows that abusers aren’t unambiguously monstrous all the time (and that’s what makes them so dangerous).
Yesssss, and also I think it shows how abusers are being awful even when they’re being nice and how you don’t owe them anything just because they do “nice” things sometimes.
Knowing that Melissa Rosenberg worked on the Twilight movies adds a very interesting dimension to the whole show. I like to imagine that these are all the things she kept biting her tongue over while writing Eclipse.
Jessica Jones is a show I wish we could’ve had on a serial weekly basis rather than for bingeing, because this is a show that is better taken slowly like HTGAWM. I’m on episode 5 & it’s SO GOOD, but after every episode I have to take a short break just to emotionally recover! It’s unrelentingly brutal.
Jessica Jones is going to force me to finally get Netflix. It’s just to slow going when I have to go visit boyfriend (boyfriend’s Netflix) and then watch an episode of portlandia in between each to recover.
I am three episodes in, too. I would have binge-watched it all weekend except that I am trying to be a good partner and only watch it with her. It is HARD.
I have to keep taking breaks because it’s a very exhausting show to watch. Like, I think it’s the most sensitive handling of non-combat-induced PTSD I’ve ever seen in the media and I’m so grateful for it, but I feel wrung out after three or more episodes in one sitting.
Don’t people just use the emoji skin color they are? It never occurred to me that people would feel they had to use other colors to be representative. I just thought “Oh yay, now my praise hands look like my skin!” (RANT- Why can’t we change the color of the little detective guy?!?)
Also- great piece from Vulture on Jane The Virgin’s Radical Depiction of Motherhood.
Final also I am at my parent’s house all week soooo…I’ll be doing a lot of interneting.
I usually use my own skin color, yeah, or I use the Simpsons-yellow version (I admit I had sympathy for that writer because this is exactly the kind of overthinking trap I would fall into).
Why wouldn’t that LW just use the default yellow one? The skin color range is a new feature. If she’s that confused, why not just use the ones that are just supposed to signal hands?
the color range thing doesn’t even work on desktop twitter?? or my android twitter. i just see a beige square that says “light skin” when I hover which makes me REALLY glad for this thread because FINALLY i understand why my twitter feed keeps tweeting “light skin” squares.
Thanks for posting that Jane the Virgin article! I don’t have kids, but I have some friends that do, and Jane is the only show I can think of that shows all the gross baby stuff I hear my friends talk about like mastitis.
YES to the Jane the Virgin piece! It’s become the only show I need to watch live (often with a breastfeeding or fussy baby) in part because it makes me feel better about going a week between showers or crying when I leave the baby at home, and in part because I watch it along with one of my long-distance besties who does not have a baby herself but learned a lot about pregnancy and new motherhood from watching the show!
That Jane the Virgin article was really great! I am childless, so obviously I can’t completely relate; but I was old enough to be the third parent to my little sister and I remember being so boggled by all the seemingly mundane things new babies couldn’t immediately do (and how much constant work/supervision they needed).
Don’t people just use the emoji skin color they are?
Not if they’re on an Android device. No darker skintones (or even super pale skintones) are available.
Damn, I always just use the default bright yellow one because I like how it looks like NOBODY’s hands.
I only saw the first 2 True Blood episodes because I couldn’t condemn myself to listen to hear them say “Beee-ill” and “Suckay” for more than 2 hours. Just give me Anne Rice’s campy vampires.
In the third season there is a most excellent in-joke about how terrible the damn accents are.
But then you have to get all the way to the third season.
This is valid!
Although I do enjoy the amount of on-screen nudity. If only it weren’t surrounded by such a ridiculous plot.
I wanted the maenad to bring back the Horned God, myself.
I couldn’t deal with the fact that it was Ensign Ro. And also the destruction of Gran’s house, because that’s a lovely house.
But seriously. Imagine how amazing a series based on Interview with The Vampire would be. Especially if you got a really knowing & hammy actor to play Lestat. Like Tom Cruise’s take on the character, but with more self-awareness.
You know who is not a big boy?
That’s right, Charlie Potato Hashbrowns!
I only seem to be able to get pictures of him sleeping, because he mostly refuses to stay still otherwise. We had a bit of a battle royale over his nipping yesterday night, which ended with him FINALLY going to sleep and me having my hands and feet feel pretty sore. On the bright side, house training is going pretty well and he is still the cutest thing to ever happen to me.
95% of the pictures of my cat are him asleep because that is when he is still enough to pose for photos.
nooooo he’s so little so so littleee
oh my god he has a teddy bear almost as big as he is
Sookie Stackhouse was an unendurable character in the books and she was annoying on the show as well. But I don’t think Anna Paquin’s acting HELPED anything either.
Also, I would really love to buy one of those very beautiful onesies. If I had seen them yesterday I probably would have bought one. But this morning my 3 month old pooped on the outfit she was wearing, peed on the thing I had planned to change her into (I don’t know how she accomplished this!), and then spit up on the thing I finally got on her. So now I feel like it would be a terrible thing to do to a gorgeous onesie. Maybe I will feel differently tomorrow!
honestly sometimes I don’t know what emoji to use because most of the girl ones have either blonde or black hair and my hair isn’t blonde or black but then I realize that nobody cares. #millenialprobs
To literally anyone who doesn’t have an iPhone, those clapping emojis just look like white hands with a weird colored square next to them anyway, so…
(Seriously, it took me forever on my android phone/desktop to figure out wtf that was and why.)
My iPhone is old enough that I’m afraid to update the OS to a version that supports emojis because the Internet informs me that this will make the phone SUPER slow, so I also see the weird squares and partial hands.
But, in order to not feel left out, I’ve taken to copy/pasting emojis that other people send me into other text messages even though I have no idea what some of the emojis are. So my friends are all like “Why did you send me a horse emoji after I told you I had the flu? Am I missing a joke?” and then I get to pretend I did it on purpose. It’s pretty fun.
I never knew this! I thought emojis were just awkward! Weird!
I did notice last night that the ambiguous high-five/praying hands on my android was clearly a praying person on an iphone.
Yeah, haha. They all look entirely different between android and iphone. There’s an app I have that shows what they look like on iphone and sometimes I get offended, like, that’s not at ALL what I mean to say with that emoji!
Yeah, people don’t seem to realize that emojis differ vastly between operating systems — I have an android and an ipad, and I use Slack and google hangouts, and emoji are different on all of them — so worrying about how people will view your emoji is also assuming people will read your emoji as you intended, and…frankly, emoji are too confusing for me to ever use, beyond the occasional well-placed poop. Why we decided to go to magic-eye puzzles to communicate, I don’t know, I’m old.
The google hangouts emoji look like someone left an emoji out in the sun and it half-melted. They’re the worst.
They are really and truly ugly. I always put a smiley out of normal habit then cringe when I see the hangouts version.
The worst is the horrible little thing that pops up and giggles at you when you type “hahahaha” into it.
My MOM started using emojis before I did, because she had an iPhone when I had an early Windows Phone (yeah, I know). So for about a year I just thought that my mom’s texts were full of weird squares and formatting problems, and concluded that she didn’t know as much about technology as a clued-in millenial like me.
Oh good, I’m not the only person whose mother innately gets emoji better than they do. My mom can barely type, how can she integrate emoji seamlessly?
My mom both started using emoji before I did (besides bog standard smileys) and uses them way more often than I do.
Yep. I always think of the white hands as wearing gloves and the other ones are all Simpsons yellow. I think it’s great that there is an opportunity to make them more diverse, and I think it would be cool if the default color wasn’t white, but on my devices they all look the same anyway.
The default emoji color is sort of a function of your operating system/emoji font. On older versions of Android, Windows, and OS X that lack emoji support, the fall-back is the line-art representation of the symbol, assuming it exists (emoji entered Unicode as a separate set of symbols, but since their introduction more and more “traditional” symbol characters have been emojified). If no line-art representation is available, you get the dreaded “unknown character” box.
On older versions of iOS, the non-smiley-face emoji were white people. Since the introduction of diverse emoji in iOS, the default has been Simpsons yellow, with skin tones available on long-press. Android also uses yellow for its emoji, though from what I can tell it doesn’t support diverse skin tones yet (the skin tone variants are actually a pair of Unicode symbols with a “joining” character between them, so if your device doesn’t support the diverse version as a single symbol, you’ll get the default symbol next to a square that ideally shows the skin tone, but could also just be the “unknown character” box, depending on how far behind your device’s Unicode support is).
Microsoft being Microsoft, their Windows 10 emoji font uses a kind of creepy undead gray as the default color for their diverse emoji.
(I hope this doesn’t come across as ‘splain-y; that’s not my intent. I just think emoji are a neat collision of linguistics, society, art, and code, and I enjoy talking about them and their weird quirks. As a final aside, Emojipedia is a great resource for looking up emoji to see what they look like on various platforms.)
SOOKEH
BTW, you should track down the io9 reviews of True Blood because they are HYETERICAL. That show goes so deeply off the rails, it’s glorious.
I can’t stand him but Jacob’s reviews at TWOP were beautiful.
Oh man is TWOP still around? I haven’t looked in on them in……my gosh, years and years. One of my most favorite things remains the recap of the infamous “hay wall” episode of Trading Spaces, entitled “A Hideous Trainwreck, by Hildi. On Crack.”
It’s alarming how quickly the title alone brought back the trauma of that episode. I had a crush on Hildi, so I took it very personally that she was out in the world destroying people’s homes.
That couple had CHILDREN in the house! With a wall covered in HAY oh my god I will never be over it.
Hay and glass rods. Glass rods! As her imaginary girlfriend I bear some responsibility and I apologize. It was seriously not cool.
TWOP is dead, but the company that bought it out has left the archives up.
Lol, one of my college roommates and I spent, like, a year randomly growling “SOOKEH” at each other.
yeah, same.
“BEEEEEEEL!”
I finally gave up on watching it somewhere in the second to last season and then tried to finish off the series out of some weird sense of completionist obligation, but then the last season made the vampires into zombie vampires and it was just too much.
Is it a faux pas to leave emojis the original cartoony Simpsons yellow? Because I’m not devoting any mental energy to choosing the correct skin tone (out of five whole choices!) of my freaking emojis. Although, wouldn’t you just try to get close to your own? Since you’re the one communicating the emotion and all? Maybe I’m just an old over here.
No, of course it isn’t. I’m not going to search out extra emojis either. Use your words. :-p
However, there’s a powerful norm that being white is the norm that carries over to representational art. It’s good for your praxis to show you don’t assume that white=norm, so mix it up with representational emojis and doll selections. I remember being young and painting a surrealist dream of a swimmer trapped in a pool that was really a glass being poured by an anonymous all powerful hand. My art teacher said, “Why don’t you make the hand look like yours?” I’ve never been white, and yet, that never occurred to me. Conformity is the mind stifler. If you believe in the power of microaggressions, surely you believe in microaffirmations?</ Tumblr theorist>
I totally get that. I guess I should have clarified that I never ever ever use the emojis, unless my brother and I are texting random ones back and forth, and in that case, they’re animals or random objects (and therefore no skin color option), and the underlying convo is “Wtf is this for? Eggplant eggplant eggplant.”
I think your art teacher anecdote is a really good, succinct way to describe internalized racism, and whiteness as the norm, and thank you very much for sharing it with me.
If you’re communicating your own emotion, yeah. But if you want to tell a little story with the emojis, maybe not. A friend who is African-American runs a marathon and I want to send her encouragement:
:black running person: :black bicep: :black crying face: :black running person: :trophy: :100!: :party horn: :beer:
Is that ok for a white person to send? Would it be better to send them all as default yellow? I would say I pretty clearly shouldn’t send them all as white emojis. Is it different if I’m tweeting that message or texting that message? (Does it matter that the running person emoji is a dude and I am sending this to a lady?) I mean, yeah, you can say I’m overthinking it, but I think a lot of this is just figuring out norms in a new form of communication that’s still actively evolving.
I don’t think you’re overthinking it at all! These things that can seem minor on the surface are important! They’re the building blocks! I think my disconnect just comes from never using emojis at all, maybe smiley faces and random animals to my brother, but it would never occur to me to use them in the way you describe here. Maybe it’s just my latent ludditism causing my confusion here, because I’m certainly not shaking my cane at you kids and your crazy new communication styles. It’s just not the way I text, I guess. Thanks for giving me more to think about!
Hahaha. I get that. I’m 26, but I didn’t really start using a ton of emojis until a few years ago when the younger cohort of my cousins hit high school and got phones. They’re freaking miracle-workers with emojis – they can hold multi-person conversations that span a week and use maybe ten words total, and the stories are easy to read and funny. They’re all literate and intelligent people who can also carry on a conversation in written text or in person, but they’re also working with what amounts to another language, which makes me envious. I started using emojis more after we set up a WhatsApp channel for all of our cousins. (I also listen to more, better music because of them. It’s fun to get to see people that you met when they were born grow up into cool adults that you admire.)
Aw, man, it’s like you have a bunch of teenage Gandalfs to guide you through the world of cool! As you can tell from my Gandalf reference, I am not and have never been cool, and so I am envious.
They’re seriously all super-cool, and it’s strange, because I am there with you, I was weird as a youth. (I mean, I still am weird, but I’m grown now, so I can be just as weird as I want without suffering basically any negative effects.) It’s interesting to see how the other side lives in high school.
Questions this morning –
1. Book recommendations for the long weekend ahead? The last book I loved was Station Eleven.
2. Anybody watching The Man in the High Castle? Saw the pilot last night and can’t stop thinking about it. Though that stunt Amazon pulled by covering subway cars in Nazi imagery was….just no.
The Origins of Sex by Faramerz Dabhoiwala. Not exactly seasonal, but fascinating and everyone should read it.
I’m reading Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare and it’s very good.
Silence for the Dead by Simone St James is a wonderful November book. Broody, ghosty, horror-adjacent, pondering the aftermath of war, lots of chilly damp and drizzly rain…
I read Neal Shusterman’s Challenger Deep on the train yesterday- pretty wonderful.
I just finished EK Johnson’s A Thousand Nights which was a lovely retelling of the Scheherazade story. The prose was gorgeous and the emphasis on the critical yet typically anonymous nature of women’s work reminded me a bit of Hild, which I also loved.
2. Man in the High Castle [I watched ep 1 and attentively slept through ep 2]
I’m mildly suspicious that it’ll turn into some rly ridiculous plot with a captivating-to-watch alternative history as a backdrop…but damn, is that alternative history captivating to watch. The influx of Japanese culture! The tense interactions between the Japanese and the Germans! The public obsessing about Hitler’s health! Americans shamefully admitting to being WWII veterans! The American Nazis! That guy with the hot eyes from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter!
(the horrendous marketing decisions! oh wait)
Emily Mandel’s first three novels are also pretty boss! And if you’re feeling suffocated by family, LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner is a wonderful witchy antidote.
Recently read The Bone Clocks again, it feels thematically similar (sort of) to Station Eleven (which is one of my all time faves).
If you’re okay with a YA book, i just finished Moon over Manifest yesterday and loved it. Somewhat predictable at times, but I still got all teary at the end.
I just read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, and liked it.
Hands down, the best book I’ve read in the last year.
If you haven’t read it yet, Ancillary Justice trilogy by Ann Leckie. If you have, Fluency by Jen Foehner Wells.
ancillary justice forever, so good. i just read aliette de bodard’s “on a red station, drifting”, which felt extremely similar in some ways but different in very interesting other ways
I’m reading The Woman In White and you were all so right, it is SO GOOD. (Marian!)
You’ve already read Rebecca, right? Cause I read it last week and it blew my mind.
STATION ELEVEN. I took an extra sick half-day to finish it.
Besides that, my last tore-through-them-in-a-day books were ‘Astonish Me’ and ‘The Rocks.’
I also loved Station Eleven (I asked Emily st John Mandel on Twitter if the letter in the epistolary section that started “It’s cold in Toronto but I like where I’m living” was a deliberate Leonard Cohen reference and she said yes it was – direct connection to today’s Toast!) The last book I read that I loved as much was the Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Can someone explain the Dear Prudence format to me? I’m new to this. I’m seeing a few questions and answers, then some questions that are in regards to the first questions posted, and responses to those, followed by new questions that don’t concern others in the column. Where are the questions in response to already-answered questions coming from? Are these posted and discussed somewhere else? Is everything I’m seeing not published all at once?
I’m so lost.
There’s an open chat during lunch on Mondays! You can submit questions and Prudie will answer them in real-time. People will also comment on previous questions as they show up. After it’s over, it all gets converted to a regular q&a format.
THANK YOU!
Why why why were the two stories I picked to read the women who grow and Stephen Elliott ones? Now I’m angry and depressed.
ETA: Oh! I have a giant Hamilton theme that’ll post on my Tumblr at 9am CST today and tomorrow. It’s a lot of posts for just one day’s theme and I didn’t want to take over people’s dashes.
Off topic, but OMG “The Fall” .gif!
Love that movie so much.
it was so pretttttttyyyyyyy
Toasts, I have found the perfect Christmas present for the Hannibal superfan in your life.
*slow clap*
Cutting off your own leg to use as snail food is optional, but shows the depth of your feelings for the giftee.
*tiny screams*
Hi, everyone! It’s my last day at the job and I think I’ll be done by lunchtime, which is pretty groovy and also implies lunch drinks, y/y?
Champagne for everyone!
MANY lunch drinks and then a post-lunch nap.
Oooh yes, that is a good idea.
My grandfather & Jame Merrill used to write to each other about poetry (I think), and James’s brother founded my high school, and (I assume) still comes in at least once a year to give a talk, so Merrill gossip always feels like family gossip and I’m going to read that entire biography.
This article is totally worth blowing one of your free NYT credits on- it lays out, clearly and damningly, the impact of Wilson’s racist policies. You can send it to people who are all, “But he was a man of his time!” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/opinion/what-wo…
Hot on the heels of the Snuffalupagus conversation, that woman forcing her granddaughter to put on a nice dress and attend the most boring ballet in all of history is really getting my hackles up. How hard is it to just believe your kids?!
Someone in the comments says that they have a life-long aversion to ballet which began when their ballet teacher assaulted them as a very young child… so yeah, might want to ask the kid why she doesn’t want to go and see the Nutcracker rather than forcing her to go.
Someone else points out (and this is more likely) that she’s seen a bit of it on TV or something, and she found it scary (I mean it’s weird as fuck). Whatever the cause of her aversion, she’s so not going to get anything out of this and it will in all likelihood intensify her aversion to it.
Also, why does grandma love the Nutcracker so much? Just do something else with her, Jesus.
God seriously, there’s just no REASON to force her to do this, infinite reasons to NOT do it, and the only outcome is going to be harm to the kid either in being traumatized by something frightening or triggering, or by teaching her that she doesn’t matter and she can’t trust the adults in her life to take her seriously. Or both, you know.
Seriously. I was a ballet freak. Since the Cleveland Ballet folded my children haven’t seen any. My mother is taking us all to see Coppellia–good story, good scenery, fun choreography–and shorter than the nutcracker(at least, in my memory) . Or go see some modern dance. There are so many non-traumatizing options!!!
Didn’t the grandma also say something about a getting the granddaughter a fancy dress? Maybe she doesn’t want to wear that, grandma! It might not be the actual ballet at all, but all the heteronormative conditions that can be attached to “formal” events.
Between forcing her to go to the nutcracker and wanting to dress her up like she’s a doll the whole thing screams “I would really like photographic proof that I am a great grandmother to show off to all my friends” rather than “I love my granddaughter and would like to introduce her to something I think she would enjoy.”
Yes, and I sincerely hope the child’s parents are running interference for her with this grandma – the child shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of crap by herself or at all.
I actually like the Nutcracker story, probably because I have a Maurice Sendak edition, the Hoffman character is named Marie (which is my name, and not that common in children’s books), and it pushes a bunch of my weird personal buttons about fairy tales/minatures/automatons/rapport (obviously of a non-sexual kind) between weirdos like Drosselmeyer and little girls. But I can’t imagine in the WORLD it being worth “forcing” someone, for heavens sake.
As an adult who hasn’t lived with her parents in more than a decade, my parents still do not believe me when I state an opinion or preference if it is not the same opinion or preference that they have. So, really hard, apparently.
I know, and I’m sorry that your parents are like that. It sucks, and it leaves lasting impacts on kids (ha ha ask me how I know). It really pisses me off.
hooray, high five for lasting impacts!
My favorite was my grandma, who insisted to me that “kids don’t get headaches” when I started getting migraines in early puberty (around 10-11 years old). I can still vividly recall the impotent fury and helplessness like it was yesterday.
We are apparently the same person! I also started to get migraines when I was 11 and was also angrily informed that migraines don’t exist and if they do, kids certainly don’t get them, you are obviously pretending to be sick to ruin our trip/dinner/evening. Ughhhh, I feel ‘ya.
I have a friend whose mother told her the excruciating abdominal pain she was experiencing was because she was fat…right up until the ER doc correctly diagnosed a ruptured ovarian cyst.
So, yeah. Impotent fury and helplessness.
I have been lucky enough to not really get headaches at all, but I distinctly remember my mom telling my cousin “you’re too young to have headaches.” We see my cousins like once a year. And she was 12. HOW WOULD SHE KNOW THAT
I haven’t lived with my parents for going on 40 years and they are still that way. Oddly, they don’t treat the grandchildren and great grandchildren this way.
Mmm, yeah, this. Funny how my parents do this to me and not to my two brothers. I wonder what’s different abou… oh, right, I’m the girl.
WHAT COULD IT BE IT SURE IS A MYSTERY
Mine can be like that as well. I am 26 (today!), and yet it still happens. Often it is when they are trying to do nice things (such as buying clothes for me I do not want or have room for, and getting cross when I reject their kind gift), but it is still hard and stressful.
This is something I’ve been talking about a lot in therapy lately, so. . .yeah. Solidarity.
Oh god, I’m sorry. My sister’s like this and she does it to my parents and me; it must be even more annoying when it’s your parents. I can’t count how many times there’s been some variation of, “Yes, you might like that book/show/movie/experience, but I don’t” met with a blank stare. It also translates into gift giving, so Christmases and birthdays are always fun, when she…remembers to actually buy gifts.
Yeah, um, oof. My dad is convinced that I don’t ACTUALLY know what I like and that my entire life is a phase of self-delusion. And he thinks that the Venn diagram of our interests is a circle. Like, no. This even applies to books and movies that he likes that I have no knowledge of! For a man in his fifties, he has a rather poor theory of mind.
aaaagh that one made me SO MAD! “Adults will make you do things, just because they can” is one of the crummier life lessons I remember from kid times. Even if her aversion is totally an irrational, baseless, weird kid-thing, she’s gonna be so miserable and make the whole trip no fun.
It rang too true for me, which is why I could never be Prudie: my answer would have been a much harsher version of, get over yourself, grandmother, your daughter isn’t your personal doll but a real human being!
That one had red flags for “grandma has an idealized version of granddaughter with no basis in reality” allll over it. Particularly the part where no one had any idea why granddaughter refuses to see the nutcracker. Is it that hard to ask? Or did you just not listen when she told you exactly why?
Agreed on all counts except one: The Nutcracker is not the boringest ballet. That honor is held by Giselle, which goes like this: Act I: Giselle falls in love, is betrayed, and dies off-stage. Acts II-IV: Giselle and a billion other women in white dance around for hours, endlessly, and then her BF arrives and they maybe kill him or maybe it is you the watcher who is truly dead and anyway white dresses forever the end. (Swan Lake suffers from similar issues but has the decency to break up the tutupalooza with Odile vamping around in black.)
This is… basically true of Giselle but I love it anyway. But your ballet company is cheating you if she dies off-stage! In the production I know and love, she realizes she’s been betrayed, her poor weak heart gives out, but somehow she finds the will to keep dancing for about 20 minutes, swooning three or four times, before finally dropping dead.
Wow, I’ve never seen Giselle but that sounds just like every Kabuki play ever!
I saw Giselle performed years ago in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and it blew my mind as one of the most sublimely beautiful, enchanting experiences of my life. I only have one childhood viewing of the Nutcracker to compare it with, so now my personal experience says that ballet is either boring as hell or utterly transcendent, with no in-between. I’m sure this is inaccurate, but now I’m hesitant to see more ballet (well, and also, I have other things to do) because how could it be more perfect than Giselle in the Bolshoi?
If I were Mallory I would have had trouble not making mean comments about the Nutcracker. Are there no other ballet shows that you could take the kid too? Ask if she is just opposed to the Nutcracker or all ballet. Exposing your kid to different things is good, and all, but c’mon.
Are there no other ballet shows that you could take the kid too?
Not in December there aren’t.
In my provincial town, which is oddly stuffed with ballet companies, two are doing Nutcracker (yes, two separate ballet companies in two different productions) and the third is doing a ballet version of A Christmas Carol. My oratorio choir is doing a musical version of A Christmas Carol, and a local theater group is doing *their* Christmas Carol.
I sense a theme this year. However, the radio drama group is doing Miracle on 34th Street, so at least one company has been dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.
It is infuriating. Why force children to go to something they have said they have no desire to go to (and isn’t something necessary)? (A few years ago, my parents dragged me out to a play I had not wanted to see; they bought tickets without consulting me and told me I should come. On the day, I had a job interview which involved a six-hour roundtrip by train, and received the results for my undergraduate degree, which I was disappointed by. I did not want to go out. My parents refused to take no for an answer and I sat there crying all evening. I am still bitter. Let people say no to stuff!)
I still miss Grantland, but I am so glad to see Rembert writing and writing so well.
ETA: Good use of footnotes (sidenotes?) though the one defining “woke” is an interesting look at who is the audience of the piece.
I really enjoyed the pandering essay, and it made me realize that we need to write our futures in our stories – flip the script. Then maybe we can influence the next generation of readers and writers into believing this is how the world is, and they’ll search out books and stories like this instead of The Road or Death In The Afternoon with an all-male universe, or one where the women exist to pick up the pieces and make-do. And they won’t write emails calling 26 year old women girls.
As a mixed person, I appreciated her mentioning white privilege. I didn’t expect her to even go there.
Betsy Phillips, who is lovely, picked up an angle the writer didn’t and strongly feels that, given the mostly female program, there was some intention to offer up the student as a sex bonus. 🙁
WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUCK. That’s horrible.
Ahhh, that’s horrible and disgusting and unfortunately immediately makes sense as soon as I read her thoughts on it. Columbus has hotels/motels, professors have spare rooms…ugh. People suck.
B works in academic publishing, she knows some things and as soon as she said it I was like “CANNOT RULE OUT AAAAAA.”
Not surprised, though dismayed?
I went to an MFA program at the beginning of the 2000s. One of the (female) visiting profs had been a student decades earlier. Female applicants, when she attended, were asked to include a picture of themselves in their application. She didn’t. She got a call from the program’s director, who was still there and teaching while I was doing my MFA, “helpfully reminding” her that he needed that photo.
He then proceeded to hit on her for the duration of her degree, which made her think, “Wait, am I here because my writing is good? Or am I here because Prof thought I might be a nice affair partner?” Which is a form of imposter syndrome no one should ever have to deal with.
*BURNS THE WHOLE THING DOWN LIKE MRS DANVERS*
Whaaaaaaat. Link?
It was on her twitter, @AuntB, yesterday.
I related very much to the essay too. Trying to defeat the devil of patriarchy that keeps my mind fearing the judgement of white men of my work. It’s something you need to do constantly until it starts sinking in. And I want to balance it too with maintaining an appreciation of the work by White Men ™ that I actually like and think is important. It gets easier as you get older and wiser and read back some of mid century misogynists and realise how utterly silly they sound a lot of the time. What seem at one time to be Profound Utterances are revealed for what they are when the protective carapace of privilege is stripped away – the incoherent rants of irrational minds.
(Side note: I really enjoy referring to White Male ™ Writers Who Are Also Racist and Misogynistic as ‘hysterical’. I know it’s a loaded term, used to hurt women over the years, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being inspired by emotion, but I love flipping the term back on those who came up with it, and refining its meaning to its most exact form – those who use language to create an impression of rationality, while making utterly irrational arguments based on nothing but reactionary prejudice. Also, it really confuses and annoys the defenders of said White Men ™ when you use that word to describe them.
Anyway, every day I hope to get closer to dismantling the “working miniature replica of the patriarchy in my mind” (What a great term!) Also, I am proud to say I have never read any Philip Roth, and never intend to 🙂
I feel the same way as your sidenote about calling misogynistic guys “emotional” or “sensitive” because inevitably they are the kind of people who are constantly outraged and angry and overreact to every perceived slight while sneering at “emotional” women. Anger is an emotion, and while like you said there’s nothing wrong with emotion, let’s call it what it is.
Applauding your use of “hysterical” very loudly indeed! Because they are indeed over-emotional and blinded to reason by the presence of a womb. Top work.
The Brown Girls Do Ballet article is adorable but let’s have a dialogue about the sixth photo down where the girl with the hair ribbons is hug-choking the blonde girl and what exactly is going on there.
I think the blonde girl is just leaning into the girl w/ the hair ribbons’ right shoulder/arm? You can’t see what’s going on with the second girls left arm.
I don’t think it’s a picture of a girl with another girl in a headlock, if that’s what you’re getting at.
I don’t think it’s a picture of a girl with another girl in a headlock
is… is that not what ballet is?
I was trying to be humorous!
Whoops, sorry, I had no chill this morning. ^^;
Pardon me if this was shared yesterday,but did anyone see The Good Wife on Sunday? I never thought I would hear this particular sentence,employing Mallory’s favorite phrase: https://twitter.com/eric_ucsf/status/668662508404…
OT but I need to vent- Facebook occasionally shows me posts of people I don’t know that my friends have liked and commented on. In the past 2 days I’ve seen 2 toddlers I don’t know dressed in khakis, beige sweaters, and Native American headdresses. One had a “toy” “tomahawk.” Wtf.
I hate that – and it is one of the reasons for my current Facebook sabbatical – I don’t want to see even wedding photos of people I don’t know, much less all the stupid unverified political “facts” it turns out my cousins have decided to like because how dare a person of color make them feel uncomfortable.
Anyway, if you hide individual posts it will give you the option to either unfollow your actual friend or to not see any more from the random stranger (or hateful FB group). Don’t know that it does anything other than find different crap to show in your feed, but I keep blocking the strangers in hopes that FB might finally catch on.
A friend *just yesterday* uploaded a Chrome extension that will hide all shares and friend-of-friend likes. It’s in super alpha stage right now, so it’s just the nuclear option of hide everything, but he’s going to update it this weekend to give it a little nuance. My contribution to the development was naming the tool then saying “yes, it works on my computer too.” You can also install it.
Ohmigod, this is the best thing ever and when I am ready to go back to FB I am taking this with me.
I keep going through and blocking random people and unfriending racists and somehow Facebook keeps finding more for me. Please be smarter facebool!
I would pay ***cash money*** to control my own FB feed.
I wonder sometimes if that’s what they’re ramping up to. “Pay to remove this sponsored content! For an extra monthly fee, you can stop seeing posts of your friends’ racist families!”
Things I would pay to never see again:
–wedding pics
–“just saying, my lovely spouse is the best evar, no reason”
–anything tagged #blessed
–“Your friend likes this: “Rando!1 and Rando!2 have been friends on FB for eleventy billion years!”
–memes from FM radio stations
I am luckily unafflicted by racist FB.
I had to unfollow an acquaintance because my news feed was totally filled with her liking every picture of every baby at her church. Either she attends a very large church or it is a fertility cult. At any rate, I only want pictures of babies I know.
Yesterday my sister-in-law posted a pic of my little niece at her preschool Thanksgiving party, where all the kids had construction paper-and-feather headdresses on (PINK FOR GIRLS BLUE FOR BOYS) with “Indian names” (e.g. “Dancing Butterfly”) written on them. I’m so baffled that neither sis-in-law nor, um, the preschool itself, an educational institution in a very liberal region in 2015, seemed to consider that this was wildly inappropriate!??!?
NO. NO. That is so offensive on so many levels.
I win this game. I am Dutch and therefore this is the season I dread each year, where sometimes on Facebook I see photos of my Dutch cousins’ children in blackface (or adjacent to other people in blackface.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet
The joy of True Blood is in embracing the campiness and mostly ignoring Bill and Sookie. I know Sookie kind of has to be around to drive the plot, but why on earth we are expected to care about her when there are people like Pam and Arlene and Tara around escapes me.
TERRY. LAFFY. Even Sam is more interesting.
Pam wearing amazing clothes and hating everyone is really all I needed from the show.
Pam is my spirit animal <3
I keep waiting for Tara to kill all of her stupid “friends” and ride off in a blaze of glory. (I also haven’t watched past season 3 so if that doesn’t happen please don’t tell me thank you.)
For the Hamilton history fans out there: James Madison may have put quite a lot of spin on the history of the Constitutional Convention to make himself look better: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/w…. Of course, his book is the major source for our knowledge of the Convention.
I’ve been rereading Ellis’ Founding Brothers and I really want to track down a bio of Madison to see if he’s really as terribly Machiavellian as Ellis makes him seem. I know Lin-Manuel Miranda kinda conflated him with Monroe (specifically in the Reynolds Pamphlet scenes) but still, Madison seems awful. (None of this is intended as shade towards Okierete Onaodowan, who is amazing as Madison.)
This is only tangentially related, but today I found myself humming Angelica’s part in Take a Break, aimed at my research partner – I know you’re very busy, I know your work’s important, but I need this publication and it just can’t wait.
Hamilton lyrics can be appropriate in so many situations.
God, I hated True Blood. I gave up in the middle of the second season. Ugh. Can’t even. The last time someone asked me if I liked the show I said I would have liked it without the vampires and without Anna Paquin.
I am sad and scared for Minneapolis right now. 🙁 My hometown is being terrorized by white supremacists and no one seems to care.
Five Black Lives Matter protesters were shot in Minneapolis last night by white supremacists. These men (or others like them) had shown up at the protest with guns days ago and the police (obviously) did nothing. Please send Mpls your thoughts and support, my heart is sick over this. Check out the local BLM twitter feed for more information: @BlackLivesMpls
Over/under on Republican candidates that will call for a ban on white immigration, or a national database of dangerous white people? +/- 0?
Oh my god. That’s horrible. I don’t have words. They’d already shown up with guns before, and no one did anything, and they came back and shot five people. How.
HOW were they allowed to openly show up with weapons at a protest?!
right outside a police station! So damning. There is no way the police were unaware, right? But we’re gonna hear both sides, because that’s fair, right? Aaaaaaagh.
I don’t think it’s Anna Paquin, Sookie’s a pretty insufferable character.
Yeah, they really didn’t give Anna Paquin much to work with there.
Sidebar: my husband is a huge Prudie/Emily Yoffe fan. When Mallory became the new Prudie, we had the following exchange:
Me: “The new Dear Prudie is the founder of my absolutely favorite website!”
Him: “Oh yeah, I saw that. The Toast? It’s cool that she started that with her partner Nicole.”
Me: “You know she means, like, platonic partner. Or business partner.”
Him: “Well I think in her introduction as the New Prudie she said that Nicole was her life partner. So…”
Me: “Well Nicole has two children and lives with her husband in Utah.”
Him: “Modern romance is complicated!”
Modern romance is complicated, indeed!
That is uniformly charming!
A: Say, “Congratulations! I’m so excited for you.”
Oh The Shade!
non-spoilery Jessica Jones thought : The Purple Man is pretty much that asshole who tells random women to “smile” dialled up to a 10000000 and I’m LOVING IT
I thought about that too! I am only two episodes in, but his telling Jessica to smile hit me right away.
Here’s a response to that Rebecca Solnit piece from the other day! About what we can learn from reading misogynist writers. It makes some good points, some of which we talked about here. But I feel like it’s very directed at Literature People, scholars or writers or similar, while Solnit was talking more about “why is this stuff considered literature *everyone* should read?”
This thing in BookRiot about doing a year of women-only reading put it into much better terms for the kind of reading I do and made me do little silent desk cheers. Given finite time and a practically infinite number of books, limiting my reading is the opposite of limiting. I’m not doing one of these reading challenges, but I still just want to yell that I am not saying no to any books, I am saying yes to the books I want.
I would probably pay more attention to books if it weren’t for the way so much writing about them is aimed at Literature People. I have no English degree and no subscriptions to prestigious journals; I don’t live in New York and spend my time at book signings. I pick books because they interest me, not because I’m trying to keep up with the current intellectual scene. And I don’t read nearly as much as I should anyway. All I really want is for someone to tell me how to narrow down the practically infinite choice of reading material and find something that doesn’t waste my time.
yeah, I feel like BookRiot is the closest thing to my ideal book blog on the internet – there’s stuff beyond reviews & lists but it’s not capital-I Intellectual, plus they have a good comment policy & enough readers to get a conversation going. Honestly, if I could have Toast comments in book blog format, I’d read the heck out of that.
Ehh, pretty hard not to roll my eyes at, “We’ve created a literary climate where women are scared to admit that they enjoy a male writer’s work, because some other women have accused him of sexism.” Mmm have we though? Or have we created a climate where women whisper conspiratorially about liking sexists’ work and then maybe have Frank Feminist Discussions about it? I mean I could find like two hundred thinkpieces on Liking Problematic Things in a ten-second google search, we’re not talking Stalinism and thoughtcrimes here.
right? and those guys are either classic lit icons or current bestselling authors – it would be weird to say “no one should like him!” Franzen’s particularly polarizing and if I liked his books I’d feel pretty defensive talking about it. But in pretty much every conversation I see about him, people still call him talented or say they liked The Corrections or whatever.
Yeah, exactly. Literally last week in my sociology course (we were talking about sociology of literature) my professor ended up recommending The Corrections, with the caveat that she knows Franzen as a person is really obnoxious. I don’t think this interaction was scary for anyone involved.
I went on one-year women-only book binge in 2014, inspired by another project like that in BookRiot, and forgot to stop. I do not regret it.
i’ve been faithfully recording books in goodreads all year and am really looking forward to crunching the data at the end of the year. I *think* I’ve been reading something like 80% women, and ~1/3 of that women of color, and I’m curious whether my perception is right. If not…might be time for more intentional book selection!
One of the things that bothers me about a lot of these discussions–it was one reason among many I left one writing board–is that it’s considered okay to say you don’t read literary fiction or romance, or to refuse to read books written in present tense/narrated by children/whatever or even literally because the cover is too ugly–but if you say you won’t read something because you really dislike the author’s handling of women (or POC, or LGBT characters, etc), you are being “political” and close-minded and guilty of inflating the authorial voice with his POV.
omg yes, thank you for articulating this!
I had a lot of thoughts about this article, and I can’t seem to wrangle them into any very coherent form, but I’m already like nine hours late, so I’ll just plunk them down and hope they make some kind of sense:
I wish that writer had done more with the point she started with, which seemed to be that Franzen, though a misogynist, is not a misogynist writer – that despite his flaws as a human being, he’s a talented artist committed to writing characters as individuals, and that that artistic imagination allows him to transcend his own misogyny. I’m not saying I agree about Franzen specifically – I haven’t read enough Franzen to know. But I do think it’s possible.
It seems to me that there’s no possible artistic defense of truly misogynist writing, any more than there’s a defense of racist writing, because both involve a failure of the artistic imagination. Fiction writing is about character, and if you do not see your characters as people, then you are a crappy fiction writer and we should all feel free to throw your work out, not because it is un-pc but because it sucks. Or at the very least, we should be able to say ‘This book would have been a hell of a lot better, artistically, without all the misogyny.’
So I don’t think the author of the article is really making the argument she thinks she is – she’s not really making a case for reading misogynist writers, except to the extent that their works can serve as cultural artifacts that tell us about sexism. i think she’s making a case for why writers who are seen as misogynist aren’t really, and why we should make up our own minds. Except she doesn’t quite get there.
You’ve summarised this really well. I feel the same. ‘Failure of the artistic imagination’ – that’s an excellent way of putting it.
I had to go back and re-read yesterday’s Enya link. I think I would actually read AHP just describing hanging out with Enya for days and days and possibly weeks. It is extraordinarily calming.
More on topic for today – those onesies!!! I have several people who would appreciate those.
I loved that link. It’s great that Enya was exactly like you’d think she’d be.
I was actually expecting her to be more ethereal, if that’s possible. Like, infringing on Kate Bush territory, only more ethereal and less WTF-style bizarre.
If you haven’t heard yet, some white supremacists rolled up on the Black Lives Matter/Justice for Jamar protest here in Minneapolis and shot five people. Everyone is projected to survive (one person got shot in the stomach and is in surgery). The cops refused to act or chase the shooters down, even though this happened outside a police precinct. They told the protestors, “isn’t this what you wanted?” and then maced people trying to film them.
You can donate to the protestors’ efforts here: http://www.bit.ly/blacklives or to Jamar Clark’s funeral fund here: https://www.crowdrise.com/jamarclarksfuneralan
The cops refused to act or chase the shooters down
“isn’t
this
what
you
wanted”
Jaw-dropping. No words.
How is this even. Oh my god.
The Very Smart Brothas piece made me curious: who else loathes the practice of eating Thanksgiving dinner at 3 p.m.? I’m one of those people whose bodies get very unhappy if they don’t have meals at regular, scheduled mealtimes (shakes before, shits after), and I’m not going to skip lunch just because I know they’re serving “dinner” at three (which is usually more like four or five anyway).
YES. I hate this. I want to eat at a normal time. Noonish, 5ish or breakfast.
Maybe that should be a new tradition… Thanksgiving breakfast, so you can get on with the rest of your day. Sweet potatoes with nuts and maple syrup, some bread and cranberry jam etc…
My mom makes ham biscuits and sweet rolls on Thanksgiving morning, which I eat semi-reasonable amounts of so that then I’m not super hungry until it becomes Thanksgiving dinner time (around 5pm). Usually there is a cheese ball or something to stave off any hunger pangs that may occur between breakfast and turkey time.
I’m coming to your house on Thursday.
For sure. My body like routine- inconsistent eating and sleeping schedules both give me massive migraines. We always say we’re eating at 1, which would be fine but it always ends up being 3 because some relatives are incapable of being on time. I’ve started taking a sandwich in my purse and eating it covertly if we don’t start exactly at 1.
Team “eats peanut butter sandwich in the bathroom” FOREVER
The sad bathroom pb&j is so sad. There’s all that great food! Right there! But we can’t eat anything until the turkey is done/the last cousin shows up.
YES! Why is this so common? My family ate at 4:30 to accommodate my grandparents, but my partner’s family eats at like 2 or 3, which messes me up the whole weekend!
I do too! Luckily the past two years we’ve been able to schedule around watching football, which means the earliest we eat would be 5ish. In other years, we often went to restaurants, so we took whatever reservation we could get.
We don’t have thanksgiving, but loads of people I know have Christmas dinner at like 12pm. It is insane.
Usually Christmas dinner is around 5 or 6pm in my family.
My family have Christmas lunch at around 2 or 3 (means people are hungry enough to do it justice, and there’s no need for an evening meal because everyone’s eaten so much and there are leftovers to pick at).
Noon Christmas dinner just means the whole family stares at each other in confusion and boredom for the rest of the day because no one can actually remember what time it is.
I have nothing to say except I love your username.
Thank you! 😀
the sun should be down and I should be able to ooze from table to couch to bed uninterrupted (except for cleanup duties and maybe refilling my wineglass).
I wonder if the 3:00 Thanksgiving dinner thing is really just an attempt at being accommodating to people who celebrate Thanksgiving with both sets of in-laws that’s spiraled out of control into its own weird tradition. I mean, growing up, Thanksgiving was a pretty sizable affair on both sides of my family. My dad’s side was usually a late-lunch affair around 3, while my mom’s side was a more dinner-time thing at like 7 or 8. It usually ended up working out well enough; we’d get up to watch the Macy’s parade on TV, have a big fancy breakfast (a rare occasion) afterward, spend the next few hours listening to mom clatter around in the kitchen making sweet potato souffle in as many corningware dishes as possible to take to the family gatherings, and then have lunch around 3 and dinner around 7.
Actually, this is pretty much how every holiday worked when I was a kid – Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, 4th of July, you name it: morning at home, afternoon with dad’s side of the family, and evening with mom’s side.
We have always had it at a ‘normal’ dinner time (5-7, whenever things get done). I do not understand this practice of eating at 3.
We always eat at 5 or 5:30, because the grandkids need to eat at regular times or they all fight. It’s easier to schedule around them than to deal with cranky kids
Oh weird, I had no idea that was a thing! My family eats the big meal at 1pm, dessert a little while after that, and then we usually start scavenging the leftovers around 5 or 6.
Yeah. During my college years, I was so sleep-deprived that on Thanksgiving morning I usually crashed asleep through noon, and then I had to figure out what to eat so my stomach could handle my meds with people scolding me for “ruining” my dinner with a piece of toast.
right?! just becasue it’s a holiday doen’t mean The Great Meal Clock can be reset. i still expect to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner: cinnamon rolls go in the oven whe we wake up, we have heavy snacks when we start getting hungry again a couple of hours later, and i start on dinner after the snack mess i cleaned up. easy fucking peasy. (it helps that there’s only 2 of us and i don’t do a full turkey.)
I know – 1pm fine, 5pm fine but that big carb-loaded meal right smack in the middle of the afternoon is a killa.
The VSB piece had me rolling. A dear friend is cooking this year and she’s mistress of the “dinner on the table in 10 minutes!” thing when the turkey thermometer isn’t close to popping, I’ve just started chopping the potatoes for mashed and her husband is looking for the car keys so he can go buy the green beans which were forgotten in the first shop.
That pandering essay is so good that I am only a little disquieted by the parts about motherhood and writing, as they are really really not the conclusions I was hoping to follow her to. It is such good writing that it seems gratuitous to want to spotlight her moral uprightness too, but I do. She NAMES NAMES and I know, I know it’s not productive to hector women into doing that when they don’t want to, but when they are willing to and they do take that step, I want to cover them in gold, they deserve it. I usually read essays like this and am struck by them to whatever degree but forget their authors soon enough unless I’d already been following them, but I am going to remember the name Claire Vaye Watkins until the day I die because I owe it to her for saying Stephen Elliott instead of “a well-known editor of a literary blog” or whatever the fuck. name name name name name names. Smart great writing; heroic name-naming.
Why did the parts about motherhood and writing bother you?
I put a separate comment below about why the motherhood parts bothered me. Curious to know if you felt the same.
Coming here to disagree a little bit with PrudieMallory. While it sounds like division of labour dude’s wife is a bit on the bananas scale with respect to her Christmas cards and social media, etc, the idea that sending out Christmas cards is not labour and has no value to a family is making me twitchy. It gets right into the emotional labour conversation we’ve been having here (and I’ve been having in my life generally).
Yes definitely. Staying in touch with friends and family, knowing addresses and sending cards, these are all typically thought of as “women’s work,” right? So not only is it sounding like the dude thinks it’s silly and frivolous, but that he straight-up doesn’t think of it as work because it’s ACTUALLY a “hobby.” Ugh that dude.
Not to mention the backlash you might get if you decide to opt out of cards one year–because that will not be directed at husband.
Yes! Organizing the junk drawer is work, but organizing social relationships is a hobby? <Insert image of a lonely old man organizing his junk drawer all alone because his wife always handled that ‘social’ stuff>
I agree. I immediately thought about that essay about emotional labor. Either way, though, it does sound like dude and his wife need to have a serious conversation about household chores.
Yes, frankly VERY SKEPTICAL that this robot-man (beep-boop what purpose do christmas cards or herbs or friends serve?) is a fair and reasonable arbiter of which chores matter. Partially because the ones he mentioned – snow and tax – are not the chores that *matter*, in terms of maintaining a fair, reasonable balance of household chores, they are not the constant, wearing efforts that break down your soul and leave you a comically embittered, angry shell of a person who is completely unable to have perspective, the ones that make you think about changing your name and disappearing forever, or wonder if it’s possible to unleash a parasite into your mate’s brain that will make them spontaneously remember that they should do these things without you having to tell them every.godddamn.time.
Which is to say, I don’t disagree with Mallory’s advice – he did not give enough information (SUSPICIOUSLY, I think) to truly tell who is not doing their fair share – but she should answer the person who asked the question, and in case, if he truly feels it is unfair (which I doubt he should because men haven’t experienced truly unfair in one hundred thousand years) the correct advice is, as in many cases, to just have a stupid conversation with the person who spend ALL OF YOUR TIME WITH, how is this hard?? UNGH I just feel bad about what an insulting, infuriating conversation it’s setting her up for, especially if, as i suspect – from how he phrased it (i.e., she does social media while I do taxes and snow removal) – that they split up who does what chores, and she ended up with “dishes” “laundry” and “cleaning”, which I think everyone will agree with me are the big three of invisible, relentless, cripplingly time-consuming household labor.
Anyways, I really hate household chores.
AND ANOTHER THING!
How much does it matter if someone kind of likes the labour they contribute? Like, I am becoming one of those (possibly insane?) ladies who really identifies with her kitchen and kind of craves 20-30 minutes alone in it every morning making coffee, emptying the dishwasher, and wiping and arranging everything, before I spend 20-30 minutes drinking the coffee and reading a book. But because I enjoy it, does it have no value? If my partner enjoys raking, does it not count?
I think people definitely get more credit for miserable tasks, but if my partner was like “but emptying the dishwasher (and making me coffee in the morning) is your HOBBY” because somehow those tasks bring me peace and make me feel grounded at the beginning of every day, I would be mad. (He has tried it, not quite as hamhandedly, but he has. He regrets it.)
In my profession, when someone gets the benefit of my time, they pay for it. And I love going to court – I get to show off! But they still pay, even when I enjoy it.
Some of the issue is that what is typically seen as women’s work is actually literally invisible to many men. I have heard my brother say to my mother when she asked him to bartend a party that she should not worry, that “it will all work out”. That is actually how my brother thinks of parties – as things that just *happen*. Not as the result of a huge amount of labour. And this snow-shovelling dude probably thinks of the social connections he and his family enjoys and relies upon as things that just *happen*, not as the natural result of his wife’s assiduous Christmas carding labour.
Oh man, I think REGULARLY about this article the toast linked to like a year ago: http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/…
And that (“But you like doing it!”) completely one of the arguments men’ll come up with, when cornered into doing their fair share.
And yes, I agree!! Even if we give this guy the benefit of the doubt, it’s clear that he is trying to pick apart which ones “count” and then anything she enjoys goes in the “you do it because you don’t mind so much” pile and THEN you split the rest of the chores equally. Now that you mention it, I think that’s the bit Mallory could’ve hit on – like, dude, work is work even if you don’t value it, and maybe you should take a second to try and understand why it has value, and also, when you have this conversation, please try not to be an entitled, self-serving juicebox. You know, just try and talk him down a BIT so that when he bounces into the herb garden and says, “Honey, baby, the internet says things that you enjoy doing are worthless and it’s completely unfair for me so if you’d start doing the shoveling from now on, that’s be great, thanks.” and she’s so stunned, just like “Oh fucking no he didn’t” he won’t be surprised, like, “What? But the internet supported me with my extremely skewed version of events??”
The Politics of Housework! The Redstockings! Thanks for the reminder, you just warmed my feminist baby boomer’s heart. It’s hard to convey the explosive power these ideas had, at the time. I often think of Muriel Rukeyser’s lines:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
Ahhh the ‘it will all work out’ men!! They have no clue (or maybe they just don’t want to know) how much preparing and planning goes on behind the scenes to make social life smooth and easy for people.
Scandinavian news: Sweden is cutting down on accepting refugees, to the lowest level that the EU allows (remember how the rest of the EU are taking almost no refugees at all, with the sole exception of Germany? The lowest level is… low).
And the rules are now sharper, too. For example, residency permits will be temporary instead of permanent, even though the reason that permanents permits were made the default in the first place is that temporary permits were shown to only add bureaucracy (and horrible uncertainty) while not adding any usefulness at all. People who got temporary permits were pretty much always granted permanent permits anyway.
Twice the bureaucracy for the same end result and more human suffering! Surely this will save money!
🙁 That is shit. (Although I live in the UK and can’t exactly claim we’re much better.)
Forgot to say – in case you didn’t know, Sweden accepts a comparatively high number of asylum seekers, and more asylum seekers per capita than Germany.
So, this is a disaster. Now, Germany will be the ONLY European country to accept a significant number of refugees. Everyone else is taking a few thousand people at the most. 4 million have left Syria, and the richest economy in the world is closing its doors.
I like the addition of a tip jar to Toast pages! However, I was afraid if I clicked it “just to see what would happen” that I might wake up in a Santa Fe motel room with no pants on. So does it take you to PayPal or what?
I tried it just to see! It does indeed take you to a PayPal page, so now I’ve tipped a dollar to show my appreciation for the very accurate Leonard Cohen post. Brb off to listen to some depressive Leonard Cohen songs now.
PS: Anecdote time: found a book of Leonard Cohen’s poems in my parent’s bookcase. Turns out my dad gave it to my mom shortly after they met, it even had an inscription from him to her. It also contained at least one poem about the glories of oral sex. I see you, past version of my dad. I see you.
I salute your bravery! Trying to make some pin money to top up my PayPal, since I just gutted it buying stupid feminine hygiene junk, and this is good motivation. I’m still waiting to have some kind of meaningful intersection with Leonard Cohen and starting to realize maybe I need to let it go, but I like how his appeal is so broad but also sticks to each individual it touches like gilt.
I’m still a little wide-eyed from finding the book inscribed to my dad “A night in June, a hillside, T.S. Eliot,” which is definitely NOT from my mom.
What an evocative phrase! Perfect writing prompt…
Every time I see the abbreviation BLM I first think “Bureau of Land Management.” Actually, the headlines about gun-toting white supremacists at BLM protests make sense either way.
Bucknell alum here (the college Claire Watkins mentions, although I was not her student) and a former student of Porochista Khakpour’s. I am just having so many emotions right now I don’t even know where to begin.
Porochista mentions another, male, faculty member from Bucknell (not James Peterson who is by all accounts extremely awesome, although I only met him in passing,) and I just want to ask why Porochista couldn’t have been asked to stay (as all her students desperately wanted!) and then Claire could have taken his job? (I mean, I KNOW why, but still.) Because I think I know who Porochista meant and I can confidently say both she and Claire are much, much worthier than him. And when I think of the professors who made a difference in my life they were all women and nearly all women of color, too.
If anyone would like to yell incoherently about how unfair and frustrating everything is, I am ready and waiting.
(And if anyone is at all curious to know more about Bucknell I’m more than happy to answer any questions!)
Bjork! I’ve never heard of Dazed before, but that was great! What’s your favorite album? I’m going to go with Post.
Vespertine or Biophilia or Homogenic, though the rest all have excellent songs on them.
The most recent one is lovely but an emotionally hard listen.
It is my birthday! I am off work and received nice cards and presents (my boyfriend got me the Fury Road comic book, Alien and The Second Shift, saying he was going for a feminist theme) and went to a museum to see an excellent exhibition about crime. http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/london-wall/what… I am enjoying it very much.
Happy birthday!
HB!! The Museum of London is a truly great and under-appreciated place, you will love it.
Happy birthday!
“If you’re like me, you starve yourself the morning of Thanksgiving.” I am nothing like him. Nor is my family like his, if they’re really against people bringing their own food, either because they’re on a special diet or just to contribute something. In fact, the general feeling in my family is that you should bring something, even if it’s just crackers and cheese or that cranberry relish that Susan Stamberg gives the recipe for on NPR every year that only you really like, which is just too damn bad for the doubters because it’s just the best thing to put on a leftover-turkey sandwich the next day.
Right? My family is doing Thanksgiving next Saturday, to avoid holiday traffic traveling and such, but I plan to basically be eating constantly from wake to sleep. Isn’t that the point? I also fail to understand all these “Healthy Thanksgiving tips!” articles and recipe nonsense. It’s a freaking indulgent feasting holiday, America! Just do it and stop flagellating over experiencing some pleasure. It’s a day. Just enjoy the flavors.
Yeah, come on – I mean I’m English so we don’t do TG, but from my Christmas experience of many years, surely you have to start training your stomach the night before and continue at breakfast…?
I thought the Thanksgiving piece was funny and didn’t mind reading it, but then I clicked over to this: http://verysmartbrothas.com/maybe-youre-single-be…
wtf
“(say, 7.5 and up)”
right?! That’s about where I stopped reading.
from the original, even: “a pleasant Delta to sit on”
women as furniture!!! now THAT’S always funny
The whole thing is just comment after disgusting comment about women’s bodies. God forbid a woman show any agency in her own life – better use “humor” to put her back in her place.
I guess a little bit of sexist humor in the week prior is a good way to get ready for Thanksgiving with many people’s families!! Sort of a homeopathy thing?
The comments very clearly call the author on the carpet about this piece. Folks were all over him within minutes of the posting.
My regular house keys are missing. Since the last time I saw them was after escorting the cat sitter to the building door, I can only assume the cats figured out I am going away for a few days and hid them. This IS the face of an evil genius, isn’t it?
Look who is gracing the centerfold of the “America’s Best and Brightest” issue of Smithsonian this month!
This is now my desktop wallpaper, thank you!
CAN WE TALK about the abomination that is Fox’s “Grease Live”???
Carly Rae Jepsen as Frenchie. I just.
….and WHY, even? “Well, it worked so great with Carrie Underwood in The Sound of Music and Alison Williams in Peter Pan!” uuuuuugh
I have to say I ADORE Carly Rae’s latest album, which is a bubbly 80s delight. I don’t adore anything about the live musical trend, which is awkward and terrible.
Regarding the pandering article and her comments on motherhood:
I’m thinking back to a discussion on last Friday’s open thread about why there are not more important books about motherhood.
It’s interesting that Claire Vaye Watkins said motherhood has made her soft and uncreative as a writer. I think she was saying this partially believing it to be true while acknowledging that it’s a misogynist attitude. In a way I know exactly what she means, because for me early motherhood seemed to reorder my mind like a chalk board with “BABY NEEDS” written in giant letters surrounded by tiny chatterings of husband, job, friends, family, hobbies, etc. And yet now that I have a couple of years of motherhood under my belt, I find that motherhood has actually made me a good deal tougher and sharper, probably because a) I have to practice self- and child-discipline and b) I want to protect and guide my child well in our complex world. So I hope that she refuses to listen to voices that tell her motherhood is “soft” or unserious or that anything she creates or experiences as a mother is unworthy. I hope she and other writers add to the canon of books about motherhood.
Being a good mother is difficult in a deeply personal way–it is like an earthquake to a woman’s identity. Even in the “BABY NEEDS” stage it is creative because there is no information anywhere on how to be a good mother to THIS child based on THESE values. We have to invent it as we go. Mothers create the narrative in their homes day by day. Motherhood is very serious because a bad mother damages her children for their whole lives and a good mother gives them a permanent foundation, and the children pass on these things to their children.
While we are out there insisting that our bodies are not shameful and our work is valuable, I definitely think we need to reclaim motherhood from sappy pink greeting cards, wry blogs, and discussions about diapers.
I like this post very much, I think I will bookmark it for future reference. Thank you.
I have been hanging out at Very Smart Brothas lately and it is a delight.
We gave up on True Blood two episodes into Season 7. Should we have persevered? It had become a zombie show, and I hate zombies. Unless it’s iZombie, which is fabulous and 99% shamble-free and you should all watch it.
Toasties, I did a thing, and please reassure me that I am not a horrible human being? Details in a subcomment, and CW for ableism and rape threats.
I was on a feminist group on Facebook talking about disability and how disabled people are at higher risk of practically everything, including rape. Some bloke commented with “Not really, Disabled people are not as easy to rape than Normal people” and then immediately commented, “I know from experience.” I also received some sort of attempt to start a private message conversation from this guy, where he just said “Hello”, but I deleted it before noticing it was the same name, and it seems to be gone now.
So I went to look at his profile. He appears to be a teenager. I’ve messaged his parents and his school with a screenshot of the original exchange. This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? I’m hoping that someone that poor at covering his trail (I had to figure out his school from his friends’ FB pages, but his parents were listed right there) won’t know enough to hack me or anything else nasty in revenge.
Yes- absolutely the right thing to do! I really really hope that his parents and school handle it with the seriousness it calls for. I don’t think you should have any issues about security although maybe double check your Facebook privacy settings. They change them all the time with little or no notice.
Thank you! I keep getting nervous whenever I get a Facebook private message or email, but no response yet.
Ugh. I can’t believe his parents aren’t foaming at the mouth. (Unfortunately that is a lie, I can believe it.) As a person with a mild disability I am more upset about this than I need to be. Keep us updated if you hear back from anyone.
You are a brave and good human being. Thank you.
Test comment – not sure my account works
I felt very excited to read the new biography of the poet James Merrill too.
thanks for sharing. :/
thanks for sharing. :/