My little buddy Mr Wilson wanted to say hi.
Life and how it happens to a cook:
“My best days are behind me,” Claudia tells me, dismissing the flaky, buttery evidence to the contrary that has made a mess of my shirt. “Let people take the mantle and do what they’re going to do. It’s a young person’s game. To be good at it you can’t really have too much other stuff going on. I used to go to sleep thinking about things and wake up thinking about flavor combinations. Do you know what a luxury that it is? You’re sealed off from shit—good shit, bad shit. But I don’t feel competitive any more. I don’t have the fire in my belly, you know?” she says sincerely. “Life happens.”
ICYMI, I just thought Laura Passin’s piece on Gwendolyn Brooks was so lovely:
According to the standard literary history narratives about Brooks’s career, there is a distinct Before and After. The key event, in this story, is the 1967 Fisk University Black Writers’ Conference, one of the founding moments of the Black Arts movement. This was definitely a radicalizing experience for Brooks–it’s when she started publishing with black-owned small presses, for instance (a bold political move for someone as established as she was). Many people see a new kind of directness about race and poverty in Brooks’s post-1967 work, as she allied herself more explicitly with other black writers. But this version of Brooks’s poetic career has always troubled me, because it seems to suggest that Brooks was pandering to the white literary establishment before 1967. It also implies that she needed the urging of black men (Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and others) to fully invest in writing about black life, which is simply untrue. In fact, Brooks wrote about not just black oppression but also intraracial colorism from her very first book. Personally, I read Brooks as always already radical; everyone else had to catch up with her.
the fuck is wrong with your sister:
Dear Prudence,
My sister got married recently. Some weeks before the big day, she pulled me aside and asked me to dye my bright blue and purple hair a more innocuous color so that I wouldn’t stand out too much. She wouldn’t listen to reason as to how I love my hair, nor as to how the process of bringing it to a more natural color would be difficult, expensive, and damaging. At the suggestion of a friend, I invested in an excellent honey-brown human hair wig, similar to my actual hair texture and length. Her big day went off without a hitch, and she never even seemed to notice my “innocuous” hair. At the end of the reception, after nearly everyone had left and my family and I were helping tidy up, I removed the wig.
My sister freaked out. She’s still angry, and she says that I violated her trust and that for the rest of her life when she looks at her wedding pictures of the family together or of me in the background, she’ll know that there’s blue-and-purple hair under there, and it will infuriate her. I don’t see any problem with what I did. I didn’t want to change my hair color for ONE day in her life, and I even invested in a hairpiece specifically meant to give her peace of mind. I hadn’t considered telling her about the wig beforehand, simply because she was busy and, as long as I showed up with “normal” hair, it should have been fine. How am I in the wrong here? Did I owe it to my sister to actually color my hair for her wedding? I wasn’t even a bridesmaid.
—Sister Wigging Out
I know Blackfish was manipulative and played with a few facts for sentiment AS YOU DO, but I am really glad that SeaWorld caved in the face of overwhelming public opinion, because that documentary made me cry with my WHOLE BODY even though I eat, like, a billion animals a year:
We are proud of contributing to the evolving understanding of one of the world’s largest marine mammals. Now we need to respond to the attitudinal change that we helped to create — which is why SeaWorld is announcing several historic changes. This year we will end all orca breeding programs — and because SeaWorld hasn’t collected an orca from the wild in almost four decades, this will be the last generation of orcas in SeaWorld’s care. We are also phasing out our theatrical orca whale shows.
It’s Steve’s birthday! We are watching The Night Manager and I’m making steaks.
Oooh, a happy update to an Ask a Manager column I think about WAY TOO MUCH:
It’s been a very crazy situation, so I’m sorry to have taken so long to send this. I feel like I’ve only just gotten over it properly this last week.
Thanks again for your and everyone else’s advice. I showed it to my coworker. We have both since quit and are working at other jobs. YIPPEE! I must say, the “normal” of working with people that are respectful, work hard and aren’t compete weirdos was really startling to both of us at first (in a very good way)! Seriously, I pinch myself each day and feel extremely lucky.
What does this season of Game of Thrones have in store for NOT A DOG Sansa?
Turner also made some other, vaguer proclamations. “I mean this season is a really, really big one for Sansa,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s probably her best season yet. It’s her really coming into her own. She, this season, really commands the respect that she deserves and she grabs hold of it and she runs with it and it’s really good.”
Has anyone on “Game of Thrones” ever had it “really good”? And what would that even mean?
Be warned: Things are about to get potentially spoilery, so you may want to stop reading here. Seriously, you’ve been warned.
Sansa has a new harness she wears in the car (it is also a dog rock climbing harness, but I’m waiting to see how much Chill she can muster before I start lugging her up cliffs):
This long exchange is hard to read: burn the letters of Charlotte Brontë?! Modern eyebrows raise at the suggestion of a new husband “censoring” the “rash” correspondence of two women—lifelong friends. But it’s all made easier to ingest by the fact that we know “dear Nell,” as Charlotte often called her, who lived until 1892, never made good on her promise, and 380 letters that Charlotte wrote to her over a span of 24 years survive. Indeed, Ellen devoted the remainder of her life to trying to get the letters published and into the hands of people who would understand their value. In this massive corpus, one gets precious glimpses of the everyday life of the famed novelist, and her equally talented but less prolific sisters, Emily and Anne. Ellen, Charlotte’s closest friend, received letters on the deaths of Branwell and Emily. Indeed, Ellen accompanied Charlotte and Anne to the spa town of Scarborough, where Anne would die in May 1849, two single women giving a last look at the sea to a mortally ill and frail companion.
The history of calling people “garbage,” which is something that I personally am trying to give up, because it makes me feel bad about dismissing actual humans like discarded diapers, even if they inarguably suck:
“Garbage person,” like “bloodsucker” or “Neanderthal,” is the type of descriptor that pretty much defines itself. In the interest of clarity, though, the term as used here does not refer to a sanitation worker, or a person made from actual detritus. It is, instead, someone terrible beyond belief, but in an everyday sort of way.
According to recent headlines, someone who ends their texts with a period may be a garbage person. Same with someone who refuses to chase down runaway napkins when they blow off their table, or chooses to listen to songs from the Entourage movie trailer.
In my high school in Long Island, I only knew girls who wore chopsticks in their hair to dances and none who knew how to eat with them. This was a far departure from the Queens neighborhood I grew up in, one of those actually ethnically diverse, actually working-class neighborhoods in which the kids of color far outnumbered the white kids, to the point that when in fourth grade we had a transfer student from Ohio with the kind of Irish skin that was so pale it flushed pink without warning, we mocked him ruthlessly, covering our eyes to indicate how his white skin blinded us, not realizing there was a whole other world where we, with our hair and our skin tones and our facial features, were destined to be the butt of most jokes.
ugh i love this fuckin’ song (my kid demands to listen to it before bed every night: “want Crosby, Stills & Nash!”):
< https://youtu.be/Bw9gLjEGJrw >
