This is supposed to be the baby’s chair. I could kick her out, but she is now 15 pounds, instead of 9 pounds 7oz, and I sense time will take care of this for me (ditto “please don’t crawl under the bed.”)
YES to this profile of BELOVED CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINER RAFFI by Sheila Heti (it is deep and lovely, and she does a great job):
When I said I probably didn’t want kids, he said, “It’s about knowing yourself and being okay with who you are, right? In [the Child Honouring] covenant, there’s a line about, ‘Children are here to learn their own song,’ which means to know who you are and live that way. And I think that’s the greatest gift we can give, not only to ourselves but to each other, because you want to know that the person you met is real. And I want the same from you. I don’t want a performance from you, Sheila. I want to know who this person is, who smiles this way, who laughs this way, who has these interesting thoughts.”
During lunch, Raffi made me feel reassured and understood — and that somehow we were alike. I felt, If we are alike and Raffi is okay, then I am okay, too. When I asked him about his failures and regrets, he said, “You’re going to let yourself down at some point, you’re going to let somebody else down at some point. We’re not perfect creatures. Far from it. That’s what our humanity’s all about. I think failure — I mean, I don’t shun the word. Some things you’re just not going to succeed at, and if you’re okay with failure, you’ll say, ‘Ah, you know what? That just didn’t work. I wonder if I was going at it wrong. Let’s try it another way.’ To gloss over everything you did as glorious — no, maybe it wasn’t, you know? Just be real with it. We are these frail human beings doing the best that we can, and sometimes we’re tested, and sometimes we rise to the challenge, and sometimes we don’t rise so well.”
Our own Mindy Hung wrote about her relationship with The Joy Luck Club:
I thought I was a June when I first read it in university.
Okay, so the book provided me with a way to sort myself—me, and maybe other second-generation readers of Chinese descent. But it must have struck a nerve with a wider population, because Tan’s 1989 novel was wildly successful. The book appeared on public school curricula, and excerpts were used in the SAT. It spawned a movie, for which Tan cowrote the screenplay. There were roles for AT LEAST eight Asian women. Ming Na was June! Rosalind Chao was Rose! In a genius casting move, Andrew McCarthy was Rose’s ex, with echoes of Bland—I mean Blaine, the rich, white milquetoast he played in Pretty In Pink.
People talked about Joy Luck—people talked about it with me. But of course, the book’s popularity was a trap as much as it was a gift, because it meant other people—white people—would classify me along those lines.
They probably thought I was a Waverly.
I agree with Mallory 100%, as a Sleepy Person Who Goes To Bed When She Wants and is not afraid to say “oh, gosh, I feel terrible, but I need to turn in!” despite whatever Miss Manners might say about never kicking out guests:
Q. Time to go?: If I’m hosting a party and there are lingering guests, is it acceptable at some point to say something like, “Well, this was lovely,” and start cleaning up to get people out the door? My partner says that’s rude.
A: The alternative is letting your party guests decide when you get to go to bed, which is surely worse. “This was lovely, thanks for coming, get home safe, see you soon, time for me to go to bed,” are all perfectly polite variations on the same reasonable theme. Letting events end is not rude. Everything ends. Your partner cannot fault you for refusing to host a perpetual-motion party or for the fact that you must sleep and will eventually die.
Mallory frequently comes to stay with me for ten to fourteen days at a stretch, at our very insistent invitation, and I never tire of her, partly because she knows that at about nine pm, my husband and I go to bed, and then she can stay up watching scary online videos until four in the morning in our charming guest room if she wants.
what if rape on game of thrones but too much and for no good reason so they might fix it?
I am very, very pale, and when I was sixteen and an idiot, I indoor-tanned at my gym for a summer, and there probably should have been a law, although I take full responsibility for my bad choices. Also, I look stupid with a tan.
1. Our boss keeps taking holiday gifts meant for the whole office
I work for a small office of 14 employees. Every holiday season, certain companies we deal with, as well as some clients, will send in or bring gifts to the office — things like gift baskets filled with goodies, cookies, thing of that nature. The people who bring the gifts to the office will announce that the gift is for all of us for our hard work, and they are cleary addressed to our company name and staff. But, after they leave, my boss will take the basket into his office and bring it home or re-gift to someone else. This bring down office morale tremendously. Should we say anything to the boss about him taking the gifts?
I don’t care what they do, I’ll watch Channing and Jenna on Celebrity Lip Sync Battle:
“Daniel Holtzclaw, Black Women, and the Myth of Police Protection”:
On his 29th birthday, December 10th, former Oklahoma City Police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who targeted low income, criminalized Black women and girls for sexual assault while on duty, was found guilty of 18 of the 36 charges brought against him. He now faces up to 263 years in prison when he is formally sentenced next month. His crimes were calculated and monstrous. But as uplifting as it is to hear his vindicated victims sing “Happy Birthday,” I can’t help but feel like the knife stuck six inches into my back has only been pulled out three inches.
Carmella’s human mother, my friend Carrie Frye, wrote a truly wonderful end-of-year piece for The Awl, and I am sorry for quoting so much of it in a chunk, but obviously you will click through and read it:
One Saturday morning this summer, I was sitting on my couch working on my book. It was early. The windows were open, and I could hear my neighbor and her toddler out in their yard playing and singing. Their voices drifted over in a burbly, companionable way, not too loud, not too soft: “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands (clap clap).”
My book’s a novel, and one thread is set in the late nineteenth-century Arctic. That morning I was reading about Robert Peary, the American who claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909, the first to ever do so. (Peary rejected Frederick Cook’s claims that Cook was the one who made it there first, in 1908.) Now if they ever issued a series of nineteenth-century Polar explorer trading cards (snow-crusted beards, fur hats; think of the profits!) Peary’s card would be the card I least cared to keep. Short version: He was a dick. Still, I had been in a stir of sympathy for him all that week as I read the accounts of his different expeditions—five in all, the first one in 1886—and sensed how, with each trip, he was growing increasingly desperate and haggard, feeling his chances at glory running out. On one expedition, undertaken when he was forty-two, he traveled for so long and through such intense cold that he lost eight toes to frostbite. EIGHT TOES! Only his little toes were left. He had his feet bandaged up, had his men strap him back to his sledge, and kept going. That is how badly Peary wanted to reach the North Pole.
There’s a part of my brain that can’t experience anything right now—reluctant admiration for a dead explorer, listening to a neighbor and her child playing (if you’re happy… clap clap), exhilarated feelings, sad stripped feelings, whatever—without an accompanying low scampering hum of “what of this can I use for the book, what of this can I use for the book.”
Now that I have two kids AND a puppy I have no idea how I would make it to London for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child but motherfucker, I sure want to.
bring your feels to buzzfeed’s most moving personal essays of the year
THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO TURN DOWN A FEE WAIVER REQUEST. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s take on the situation, also in the piece, is so worth your read, too):
Dan Sandford, director of graduate admissions at Tisch, emailed Jackson to turn down the request. Here’s Sandford’s response in full:
“Please do not take this the wrong way but if $65 is a hardship for you how will you be able to pay the tuition of $60,000? Of course we do provide scholarships but the most we usually offer is $15,000-$20,000. This still leaves a considerable gap. Maybe you should give yourself a year off looking at ways to fund your graduate education. That way, if you apply to a fine school and are offered admission with a good but not complete financial aid package, you will be in a better position to accept it by bringing some resources of your own to the table. Our application fee is quite low compared to our peer schools. We keep it that way on purpose. However, the contribution of each candidate is essential in order for us to meet our expenses. We do not have a separate budget to pull from. If a candidate were not to pay, the department would have to absorb the loss. I apologize that we are unable to provide a fee waiver and hope this does not dampen your resolve to apply to the Arts Politics program.”
Jackson’s response? Posting the email to Twitter, writing, “Please explain.” The tweet has prompted discussion — and perhaps changes at NYU.
There are MANY roundups of The Best Thing I Read This Year, but I liked this one the best, and especially this rec by Kevin Nguyen, because Jazmine’s essay changed how I thought about things, and for the better:
Kevin Nguyen, editorial director, Google Play Books: “How Many White People Does it Take to Ruin a Good Joke?” by Jazmine Hughes, The New Republic
Jazmine has written a lot of my favorite pieces in 2015, but the one I keep going back to is “How Many White People Does It Take to Ruin a Good Joke?”Like Jazmine, I’ve long been a fan of making jokes about white people. Every POC experience is different, but perhaps the universal thing we can all relate to is that white people are constantly reminding us that we are not like them. The way this manifests itself is usually in well-intentioned-but-othering interactions, so jokes about white people are a great inversion on that feeling. But Jazmine explains it better than I can: “[W]hat most white-people jokes have in common is that they are not about white people per se. Instead, they are about inequalities between whites and other races.”
Which was great until white people started appropriating them. Is it the natural impulse of white people to colonize everything that belongs to people of color, even our jokes about white people?
Jazmine’s piece—patient, smart, painfully funny—deconstructs just why this phenomenon is so annoying, and touches on its more insidious implications. (“[W]hen a white person tells any white-people joke, the humor can go from subverting whites’ status to rubbing it in.”)
nbd but my little cousin Liam was on Murdoch Mysteries last night, he’s one of the choirboys singing “I Saw Three Ships” (the cutest one, obvi) in this clip, it starts about thirty seconds in
I am not going to be doing a big wrap-up post about what I learned this year, but if I have any advice, it’s that this was the year I started asking “Wait, Am I The Asshole Here?” whenever I find myself in a conflict, and it is really useful and often illuminating. I can think of a handful of things I really fucked up this year (I am sure there are dozens more), and asking that question helped me move through to the Briefly Writhing Shamefully and Learning and Growing and Apologizing phase a lot quicker than I would have otherwise. What have you learned?
