“I shall call her…Mini Me.”
Kathryn Joyce is an incredible reporter and she terrifies me with every piece (this is about sexual harassment and assault in our national parks, so that may or may not be something you want to read about today):
Eventually, Donnelly compiled claims from 50 women, and in 1995 she filed a class-action suit against the Forest Service, including declarations from many of the woman who had reached out to her. The agency negotiated a settlement that allowed for continued court oversight of California’s Forest Service. But when the monitoring period ended in 2006, the old problems soon resurfaced, as Donnelly would describe in testimony to Congress two years later. One dispatcher reported that she’d been sexually assaulted and stalked by a manager. He was made to resign, but after six months the Forest Service tried to work with him again. In 2008, a male supervisor at the same forest said that he hated a black female employee and wanted to shoot subordinates he hated. When the employee reported the comment, the district ranger told her to ignore him.
Are there personal subjects that you’re hesitant about sharing on Twitter?
Not really, no. I’m a classic oversharer. I sometimes feel a bit cheap, because a lot of my humor is derived just from the sheer audacity that I would talk about lovingly giving a guy a blowjob while a Padma Lakshmi interview plays softly in the background. I mean if it’s true and invasive and is that kind of lovely referential word salad poetry, I want to write about it. I try to keep those kinds of overshares pretty specific to me though. I’m dating a very nice boy right now who happens to follow me on Twitter, so I try to be as respectful as possible so he doesn’t flee. I guess I’m learning those boundaries a bit. But who knows what I’d say if he didn’t know that I was a social media personality!! [Quick note: After Joel wrote this, the nice boy broke up with him in Central Park, presumably for reasons unrelated to this paragraph. He is now free to tweet about whatever he wants.]
“What will your kid think?” and “Are you worried your son is going to hate you when he grows up?” and “Are you going to let him read it?” and “What’re you going to do when your kid Googles you?” are all questions that, even when offered lightheartedly and in a spirit of ostensible support, feel less like genuine questions and more like a chastening. “Remember, you’re a MOM” and “Remember, you have a mother” both mean “Remember, you’re a woman, and there are consequences.”
We don’t ask male artists to consider the consequences of their work, we don’t reframe them as fathers or boyfriends or sons. We don’t keep trying to pull them back down to earth, to admonish them, the way we do women. We not only give them the benefit of the doubt — assuming they’ve done their own calculus as to how much is worth what, whom they’re willing to betray or embarrass or make uncomfortable and why — we operate as if their work is worth all that. There is a confidence, an assertion of self required in writing that we so often confuse with recklessness, but isn’t necessarily the same thing. I can be ruthless, daring, even “crazy” in my writing and deliberate and thoughtful in the choices I make with it later; to doubt that is insulting, but I’m not surprised it makes people uncomfortable. People have absurdly narrow ideas of what a good mother looks like.
Let’s talk about BUSTLES:
Beyond the obvious appeal of the lustrous silks used in the dress (modern synthetic materials would not have been historically accurate), I was struck by the dress’s engineering. Under all those layers—from the overdrape to the underskirt to the petticoat—is a marvelous device known as a lobster bustle, which gets its name from its resemblance to the tail of the tasty crustacean. “If you laid the bustle down on a flat surface,” says Tyler, “it would resemble a tunnel, with the road bed being a flat piece of fabric sewn to the sides. The stays inside the bustle are made out of powder-coated steel. Since the flat piece—the road bed—is narrow, the wider tunnel piece arches when the boning is inserted.”
That gives the dress its shape, but because each piece of boning is parallel to the next, with nothing but cotton in between, the dress allows the wearer more mobility than you might think. In particular, it makes it relatively easy to sit down, as the short video below shows. This is something I’d always wondered about, but then again, conversations about such things are common in our living room.
MICHELLE PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE US:
And I don’t plan on slowing down anytime soon. You talk about your 30s being good? Your 50s — wooo! Phenomenal. I plan to go into my 60s blazing. BLAZING! And trying to be as fly and as healthy as I can. Remember that 106-year-old woman, Ms. McLaurin, who was dancing with us? I told her, “I want to be just like you! 106 and movin’ and groovin’!” So there’s so much that I can do outside of the White House, and sometimes there’s so much more that you can do outside of the White House without the constraints and the lights and the cameras and the partisanship. There’s a potential that my voice could be heard by many people who can’t hear me now because I’m Michelle Obama, the First Lady. And I want to be able to impact as many people as possible in an unbiased way and to try to keep reaching people. And I think I can do that just as well by not being president of the United States. And you all can, too.
What it was like to be the feminism reporter for Playboy in 1969 (niiiiice):
Jim Goode, Playboy’s articles editor, contacted me that afternoon. Speaking more slowly than I thought a human could, he explained that Playboy wanted an objective account of the entire spectrum of the brand new “women’s lib” movement. “These women have important things to say, and I want our readers to hear them,” he said. “Let yourself go. Write anything you like but don’t pass judgment. Be fair.”
He concluded, “Write in a tone that’s amused if the author is amused, but never snide.”
Ann Carli, the film’s producer and one of its driving creative forces, had left her former employer—Britney’s label Jive Records—to begin a career in film, working with Will Smith’s production company. It was in her new role that she discovered a spec script by a then-unknown screenwriter named Shonda Rhimes.
The script was for a retelling of Antigone set in an African American town in the 1930s, and it thoroughly impressed Carli. “The writing shook me, it was so good,” she said. The women tried and failed to produce the film with Miramax, at which point Carli had her lightbulb moment: “What do you think about Britney Spears?”
The woman who laughed at me was one of these customers with very discerning tastes currently causing me a lot of anxiety. I was looking over all of the items I’d carefully picked out for her when she gargled that curdling laugh, making fun of my flabbergasted response to her curt manner and rude replies to the questions I had asked about her order. For a second, I blamed myself for making the mistake of contacting her to ask a question. As I palmed an overripe Granny Smith, I thought about how similar my rude customer was to the laughing character in the pea-green dress from Toni Morrison’s Sula. (To pass the time, I often listed scenes from black women’s literature that featured grocery or market scenes.) Her laugh inspired another character, Eva Peace, to feel a “liquid trail of hate”; while I certainly didn’t hate the customer who ridiculed me, I could relate to Eva’s instantaneous recognition of her emotions and the quickness with which she adapted her outlook.
we let a guy named Jeff down:
Today I found out about something called “Smell Dating”. It is exactly what you would imagine that it would be. https://smell.dating/
I felt like it was something that needed to be shared.
I don’t even have words for how much this bothers me. A guy on the train this morning was wearing way too much axe and that was enough to make me gag. I don’t want to smell someone else’s sweaty t-shirt. Even the idea of sending the shirts through the mail is gross to me. I can just see some poor shmuck at FedEx handling one of those packages and feeling self-conscious because the smell is wafting and they think they have B.O.
That is disgusting. Why would anyone do this?!
I’m with you. I don’t get it either. But I can attest that this kind of attraction exists. Someone I dated in college really like the way I smell after a long workout. Toastfriends, I do not glisten or glow; I *sweat*. And, likewise, I don’t become musky in that situation; I *stink*. And he liked that scent. Or odor. It really turned him on. So weird.
In theory- I get the concept. It’s kind of like a primal tinder I guess… BUT, the idea of getting a bunch of smelly T-shirts in the mail sounds like a nightmare.
Right? There’s definitely a chemical component to attraction that pictures can’t capture… but you’d also have to smell all the ones that you didn’t end up liking. Which would be the vast majority, I have to assume.
I would…try this? A part of me is kind of disgusted at the idea of smelling t-shirts but I am very aware of my attraction to how people smell, so I think this could work on me, actually. People who smell good are my jam.
Yeah, I would try this if I were still dating. Deodorant and perfume make me gag, but I’ve never been attracted to anyone whose sweat did not smell absolutely delicious.
3 days and 3 nights sounds extreme though. I read about a non-mail-order smell dating event, where they asked participants to wear the T shirt for 3 consecutive nights… that sounds more sensible.
“Surrender yourself to a poignant experience of body odor.”
Um, thanks but no?
“Smell researchers even speculate that high contemporary divorce rates may be related to the overuse of deodorants and the underuse of our natural olfactory intelligence.” Now I’m no smell researcher, but IMHO that’s a pretty big “may be” right there.
I’m gonna need to see the article these researchers published in a peer reviewed journal
I’d buy it. I mean, a lot of breakups seem to come from couples who each thought the other “looked good on paper”, but when you really come down to it you have to live with them and their smell, and thus some incompatibilities are revealed. Plus, looks fade with time, but the smell just gets stronger and stronger.
Pretty soon you release your corporeal form and just become clouds of noxious gas glaring at each other from across the room.
it’s like you know my life
Aaaaaaaah I just heard about this too because someone was not at the party this weekend because he was home working his way through shirts? Apparently they take a long time to arrive in the mail? And somewhere, probably in a basement in Queens, someone is receiving shirts, chopping them up, and then divvying them out again. Unbelievable.
That said, doesn’t seem likely to be worse than online dating, at least there’s no mandatory texting aspect, which terrifies me.
I am very into how guys smell. And its a big thing for me when I’m dating a guy or even attracted to him, does he smell good to me?
However. I do not want anyone smelling a t shirt I’ve been wearing for 3 DAYS without deodorant. That would not be an attractive smell.
I once had to break it to a guy that I couldn’t ever be attracted to him because he smelled just like my brother. There is no comeback to that although weirdly I’ve never used it since.
Ladies! Please feel free to use the “you smell like my brother” card to get out of awkward “why aren’t we dating” conversations!
I get how important smell is: I think my partner smells absolutely fantastic (even after he’s exercised he still smells pretty good, like a freshly mown lawn), and “you smell nice” is the first compliment he ever gave me after we started dating… but this is no way to test that. I mean, 3 days? That’s a lot of old sweat, and nobody’s old sweat smells good to anyone.
Theoretically, for hetero unions, this would result in children with exceptional immune systems. Just sayin’.
We got a Vienetta one time and it was everything I ever dreamed it could be.
My grandma had Vienetta in her freezer, and it was only for when you’d been Extra Good all week at Vacation Bible School (VBS at a Nazarene church, nonetheless; they are a hard people to please).
Yeah, I totally grew up thinking they were high class and wonderful without having ever tasted one and then I ended up having one somewhere and was not disappointed.
We had supermarket-brand ice cream as a rare treat; I do not think I have ever had a Vienetta. Clearly now I am an adult in charge of my own food purchases I should obtain one immediately.
precisely what I am planning to do today just to show that I Can.
Me too.
As an adult who is in charge of her own food purchases; I bought myself a Vienetta a while ago and was sorely disappointed by the pathetic size of the thing. This is just another in a long line of products I’m convinced have gotten smaller in recent years.
So now I buy 4 packs of cornettos at least twice a week instead.
Cornettos are pretty great.
Cornettos are the bomb. I need competing textures when I eat ice cream (which tbh is usually when I’m super baked and really into mouth feel) and cornettos provide the perfect balance in a self contained portion so I don’t have to decide to stop eating at some point and put the tub back in the freezer.
And I never got to have them as a kid so everytime I eat one it feels like a little victory for child-me.
I eat cornettos and quote Hot Fuzz to myself and smile.
Vienetta was my family’s fancy treat! It’s so funny to see it on Link roundup. I hadn’t seen it in years, but a couple days ago I was walking down the frozen aisle in a grocery store in Osaka and there.it.was. I actually squealed. It is as good as I remembered, too.
Grandma stocked a few Vienettas for our yearly visits. Grandma was great.
The mint one was heavenly.
When and where someone served it to me has vanished from my brain, but I recall it was pretty good! The world doesn’t have enough rococo molded ice cream desserts. I keep meaning to start making them for dinner parties but they require more planning ahead than I usually manage.
I feel like I missed my chance, right? This is nonexistent now, right? Crap. I think that the last time I *could’ve* bought it, I was living with my now husband and that kind of frozen dessert grosses him out (he got food poisoning from a Klondike bar once and now the idea of a thin coating of anything frozen makes him gag). Anyway, I was being nice to my boyfriend, but at what cost?
This moves “what would you do for a Klondike bar” from the fun-challenge column to the thinly-veiled-threat column. I am sorry for his loss.
How does that happen?!! That’s terrible!!
I still occasionally buy a viennetta and feel like it’s massively posh.
Somehow I assumed only the British would ascribe social class to an item such as Viennetta. I’m looking at you in a new light, America.
I bought one for myself, for my birthday, my first year of college. You know, to celebrate that I was grown-up, and on my own, and I could have “the fancy ice cream” if I damn well wanted to.
(Also I think one year for a college birthday I bought a Sara Lee frozen cake of some kind and a can of Reddi-Whip [my family of origin is 100% committed to Cool Whip].)
Joy is Reddi-Whip; sadness is realizing Reddi-Whip uses that oil that gives one GI distress.
Never had one; my childhood equivalent was our getting some frozen cream pie for dessert, Sara Lee or something equivalent. I was enchanted by the fanciness of the “whipped cream” topping (probably really something like Cool Whip) and didn’t even mind if the pie wasn’t completely thawed.
That frozen “whipped cream” was a dessert in and of itself. Signed, someone who has eaten a whole thing of frozen Cool Whip more than once in her life.
okay yes, YES, I am with you, but I swear there used to be chocolate Cool Whip that, when eaten frozen, was better than any ice cream ever, but I’m apparently the only person who remembers this???
No, it was a thing! But limited edition, Google says? Sic transit gloria mundi. 🙁
now that i am in charge of making thanksgiving happen for myself, i’ve dispensed with the buying of pies and simply get myself a tub of Cool Whip. that’s what i really want tbh.
It’s really the only way to go. A+ holidaying
Same.
People! I bring you limeade pie! It was my birthday cake for the majority of my childhood (August in AZ), and it is frozen and lime and COOL WHIP and EVAPORATED MILK and the second it’s not 31 degrees here, I’m making myself one.
My grandmother in Texas made one when I visited as a child, and it DID taste very good, but I was an insufferable child from Berkeley and thought it so odd — there are no “real” ingredients! I called it Chemical Pie, which my mother found funny.
I definitely thought Vienetta was classy as hell growing up but I have never had one! It is my birthday this week, though, so I am going to get one and I am going to eat it ALL BY MYSELF. Happy fancy birthday to me!
When we cook for the whole family while visiting my in-laws in Dublin, I always serve Vienetta, because there’s only so much space to operate in my mother-in-law’s kitchen.
It is received with as much joy as the elaborate tarts and pavlovas and whatnot that my sisters-in-law bake when they have the whole lot of us over to dine. All but one of the grandkids are in their 20s now, but Vienetta (with some fresh Irish strawberries, divine) is the Gold Standard forever.
KFC used to give away a Vienetta with a bargain bucket and sometimes we would get that and a video from the blockbusters and it was the greatest treat known to man. I could get any/all of those things at any time now, but I’m not responsible enough for that kind of power.
No one is.
Bloody Sainsburys had bloody run out of bastard viennetta. Am cross.
Read this in what can only be described as my step-mother-in-law’s precise intonations and am now slightly concerned that you may be her, though you live in the exact wrong area of Britain
Burn it down.
My grandmother routinely bought them for dinner at her place when I was a kid, NBD, but my husband was one of six kids and NEVER got to eat them. I bought one for him as a reward for doing some yard work a few months ago and he was SUPER excited.
Also the height of class and sophistication: Ferrerro Rocher.
When I was but a wee childe in the early 90s, Ferrerro Rocher had the best advert EVER (in the UK at least). Basically the premise was that these chocolates were so fancy, the Sexy Ambassador (of where? Nobody ever specified) would serve only Ferrerro Rocher at his diplomatic receptions. In hindsight it’s the funniest thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMlP_Moo0bE
Ferrero Rochers make me feel like the fanciest of fancy ladies whenever I have them; I would fit right in at that party!
Toasties! There is a marvelous benefit anthology for my ever increasing medical bills, featuring an all-star TOC, available for preorder for whatever you choose to donate. It releases April 1, and if you would check it out and boost the signal I’d be eternally in your debt. http://www.angelsofthemeanwhile.com has the info. ♡♡♡♡
This weekend, my dumb ass went on Jezebel, completely forgetting what awaits everyone ever to go on that site, and found this:
And had several thoughts about it.
1. That’s a remarkably tidy way to eat Cheetos. Good for you, Oscar.
2. Yes I said yes I will yes, Jezebel, don’t play like there’s a world in which somebody turns down Oscar Isaac in any form.
3. “Sexbang” sounds like Mallory at her most Mallory. Like, one of the articles on fake heterosexuality in western art history, or something dirt baggy and Byronic.
4. I just spent 5minutes thinking about Jezebel clickbait, God forgive me.
That headline is basically what a stupid conservative eggvatar would make up if they were designing a fake Jezebel headline to mock them.
This is a good point about a lot of things but ALSO this article makes me wonder if Oscar Isaac reads Wondermark.
Everyone in my family eats Cheetos (and all cheesie-type crunchy snacks for that matter) like this thanks to Wondermark!
Also, come on, Cheetos make him relatable. It’s the mustache that’s the problem here.
Look, that may not be Prime Oscar, but low-quality Oscar is still twice as good as Prime(?) Generic White Dude Tumblr Somehow Decided Is Hot. If hitting that means taking an unironic moustache ride, so be it.
I have not had enough caffeine. I have been sitting here trying to determine if the ride or the moustache is unironic in your scenario and then trying to determine how that shapes my opinion of the whole situation.
But also, unhesitating yes to Oscar > random white tumblr dudeface.
Actually, now I am overthinking the mustache situation. Isn’t the next Star Wars being filmed right now or very soon? Do you think they made him grow the mustache to reinforce what we already know about Poe (that he is the gayest pilot in space)?
As an avid follower of Oscar Isaac’s facial hair situation, I can confidently say this picture is probably from when he was filming Show Me A Hero last year. Against all odds he really made that thing (the mustache – as it was starring him and created by David Simon, the miniseries was very good but didn’t have a lot of odds to overcome) work for me.
Yeah, I can’t handle that mustache, and would not sex-bang him until he denuded his face.
Idk, I could get into the porn-stache. What does this say about me? (nothing good)
Maybe he’s taking over for Sacha Baron Cohen as Freddie Mercury in that Queen biopic. We could do worse.
…I literally don’t think we could do better, tho. Please let this be what’s happening.
I also cannot with the mustache. Full beard or no beard, Oscar, not something in between.
See looking at this picture my answer is no. But then I will go and watch the seen where he is directing pilots to bomb the bigger death star and I will lust for him like I have lusted for no other.
God damn, Poe. You can pilot my x-wing any day.
Still turning the dude he plays in “Ex Machina” down, sorry.
Yes… but because of the bro-iness (and the making and mistreatment of sexbots), not because of the bald/beard combo, because I can tell you: to my surprise, that WORKED for me.
It worked for me SO MUCH.
This Oscar Isaac, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS9LPPOIEZM
(I see so many dudes with unruly beards (because music and liberal arts academia) that I am immune.)
I didn’t realize that was the same actor until just now.
I thought I was the only one! First thing I saw him in, can’t get past it, sorry.
I refer to Jezebel as the place that taught me that feminists can be assholes too. I regularly read it and then spend 10 minutes yelling at the commenters through my computer screen. It’s quite cathartic.
I spent so many years (ok, probably like two) on Jezebel and made so many lovely friends that while I think it’s a doomed hellhole of fauxminism now, I still have a soft spot for Crappy Hour and Shelf Awareness.
I spent my entire working hours there in 2007 and 2008 and love the shit out of it. But it was a very different place then.
Yeah, I think like 2007-2010 were my prime Jez years, but I don’t even get near it now. If I want to give Gawker a pageview, I go to io9 or Deadspin.
Loved*
Important typo in my comment! I haven’t been on that website in at least 5-6 years. Clickbait assholes.
There are so many of us who left in 2010, scattered to the internet and congregating on tumblr and the toast.
Follow up, if you liked this I assume you’re One Of Us. I miss you guys (the ones I haven’t clung to already.)
Me too! 2008-2010ish, maybe? I quit for good when they did the redesign, since at that point I was mostly there to talk on the open thread (and wait to see when they’d take away my star, lol.)
This is honestly how I will eat cheetos from now on. No gross orange dust on my fingertips. So thanks, I guess, Oscar Isaac.
I was thinking “sex-bang” sounds like a parent trying to be hip with the slang. Like “twerk dancing.”
He’s eating Flamin’ Hot Limon flavor with chopsticks. yes. thousand times yes, if he’ll just share the bag, my god what I wouldn’t do to move back to LA and eat good cheetos again. FLAMIN HOT LIIIIIIIIiiIIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMOAAAANNNN
Wait, do people Google their parents? Yourself, sure, but your parents?
Dumbass curious teenagers, yes. I googled my family name after I heard I shared it with some famous mobsters, and it turns out that one of my parents has a Wikipedia page. It also turns out that people with my last name have been Quidditch players, moderately successful authors, and concert pianists, but I’m not related to the fun Queers.
I have! I learned that my mother caught a giant pike during a vacation in Saskatchewan and won some sort of derby. This was at a time when we weren’t really talking much and I missed her and did it on a whim.
It’s also how I learned that my sister married and pregnant. We also don’t talk.
I vaguely remember doing this in high school! I discovered (much to my disappointment) that my parents were exactly as boring as I thought they were. Ditto the parents of my friends.
I have. I found exactly nothing interesting, though it is disturbing how easy it is to find their address on the Internet.
… I actually never *thought* to Google my parents, because they are both pretty anti-computer/anti-social media. o.o
Exactly. Although if I was 20 years younger, my parents probably wouldn’t be, and then it might be a thing.
I did, so they could get their info off content scraping sites, because my parents have zero Internet literacy.
In 1997 my mother told me she had done a Google search for the names of the entire family and she found an actor who shares my dad’s name “who does… um…. adult-oriented movies that I hope none of you have ever seen.”
I occasionally google my last name just to see who’s our top-ranking relative (it’s an unusual name, there are only like a hundred and fifty of us). My parents don’t even make the first five pages; it’s usually some college track star followed by someone who owns an auto body shop followed by dumb quotes I gave to the local newspaper five years ago.
Same name situation here, except my Dad is the top result. And apparently my Twitter account makes the first page now, despite me having something like ten tweets?
I hadn’t before but I just googled my mum and found library listings for the English books she translated into Chinese when I was little as she was furious there were no bilingual kids books available, and now I feel super proud of her as I forgot she did that. She did Spot the Dog books and Peace At Last after writing to the publishers.
Your mom is a hero!
That’s so cool of your mum!
I guess if you’ve always suspected one of them has a scandalous secret past?
My newish boyfriend just confessed to googling my dad! Who, on paper, sounds very scary (retired general! lives in a fancy neighborhood! only has daughters!) but I can only imagine the bf was confused by the dissonance of my dad’s un-intimidating physical form.
OH NO Y’ALL. I have never done this, but just googled my mom and I think she is running for state senate. She is a nutbag tea partier and now I fear for the state I left behind. What the fuck is going on, Monday??
I found a blog of one of my dad’s coworkers once while doing genealogical research. It basically started, “When I met [My Dad], my first thought was that he looked like the Unabomber.”
Commenting just to say I adore your user name.
Well I have NOW.
(Nothing interesting–just the facebook and linkedin and photography pages for my dad middle brother of the same name. Also, there’s someone in Wisconsin with almost exactly the same name as my mom–middle name of Ann instead of Annette–who has the same job title she does. o_O)
I am going to be so sad when the Obamas leave the White House, regardless of who the next president is. They are a PHENOMENAL First Family and I don’t think anyone could do it better.
THAT SPEECH. I’m crying and I don’t know whether to sob-sing “Michelle” or “One Last Time.”
“teach the people how to say goodbye” dear God i am bawling
There was a video going around of a girl too little to remember any First Family but the Obamas having a meltdown that we have to get a new president (which I also did when I was about that age, because there had been the same president since I was born and I also didn’t understand). Her wail of “I’M NOT READYYYY” is precisely me.
Oh man, it’s like people’s reaction when their first Doctor regenerates.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/whitneyjefferson/four-mor…
I still look at this every few days when things have got me down. Be sure to look at the comments there are one or two gems in there too.
100% cosigned.
“Relative unknown Anson Mount as was cast as Ben, Lucy’s hunky, tattooed love interest. Mount was initially hesitant to take on a film starring the teen icon, but was eventually persuaded by none other than his City By The Sea costar Robert De Niro, who was a huge fan of Spears and even ran lines with Mount on set, reading Britney’s part.”
WHERE IS THE FOOTAGE
I will be picturing this whenever I am even slightly sad forever now.
“The script was for a retelling of Antigone set in an African American town in the 1930s, and it thoroughly impressed Carli. “The writing shook me, it was so good,” she said. The women tried and failed to produce the film with Miramax, at which point Carli had her lightbulb moment: ‘What do you think about Britney Spears?'”
I’ve read the article twice and I think I’m pretty clear now that the movie Crossroads is NOT the re-telling of Antigone set in an African American town in the 1930s and starring Britney Spears. BUT I’M NOT SURE.
It seems likely that sentence should be read as “What do you think about [not making that movie but continuing to work together and making a completely different movie involving] Britney Spears?”
I need this remake of Antigone like I need air.
1. That is definitely not the movie they made
2. That is definitely a movie that needs to be made ASAP (minus Britney)
Like, I DEF watched Crossroads like I was prepping for a dissertation, but I don’t remember the scene where Britney was walled up in a cave with her bf? So your reply was VERY helpful/restful for me.
Having recently read Antigone and read 29 freshman essays on it, I can confirm that not only does no one get shut up in a cave, there are exactly zero arguments about whether or not to bury a body in Crossroads. There is, however, a scene in which Britney sings “I Love Rock and Roll” at karaoke and makes hundreds of dollars. Not sure which part of the play that’s supposed to correlate to…
Maybe that was Creon’s song originally that he sang at the funeral of his wife what offed herself?
The creative process is so destructive sometimes.
Oh god, imagine it being made with Britney as the lead.
Now I’m reminded of the This American Life episode in which we find out that Peter Sagal–yes, the Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me host–wrote a serious screenplay about a teenage American girl (based on a real person) who was in Cuba at the time of the revolution; it eventually became Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights.
WAIT. WAIT WAIT WAIT.
Start at the beginning of this goddamn story and tell it VERY slowly because I am having a VERY HARD TIME FOLLOWING IT.
OF COURSE it was a Jeff
I work with a classic Jeff (real name!) who has taken it upon himself to remind us all that while we’re watching basketball this week we should pause for a moment and remember those poor guys who aren’t playing because women lied about rape after regretting consensual sex.
Jeffs.
And then you murdered him.
Every day. (It’s just too bad he respawns every night.)
It’s so inconvenient when my Mother of All Darkness, Inexorable Queen of Justice, Ruthless Devourer of Jeffs, Steves, and Phils form comes over me when I am just innocently reading The Toast. So hard to type with the enormous, razor-sharp claws.
I have a nephew Jeff who I thought was a nice kid but recently found out has a gun obsession and relishes the thought of someone trespassing on his property so he has an excuse, and relatedly I think, dreams of being a cop.
O.o
You have described my cousin, also named Jeff. Sad and scary.
Everyone should take turns punching him at random times and then pretend, as a group, that it didn’t happen but if it did happen, why was he walking around with such a punchable face?
Just thank the gods that we did not incur the wrath of a Jonathan.
Ohhh, I have a feeling our benevolent overladies will have a few choice Jonathan comments to that Jonathan article one day in the not too distant future. At least, I surely hope so.
omg vienettas. Occasionally my mom would find a coupon and buy one for me and oh, how amazingly fancy I felt!
A large part of me just wants to wear a lobster tail bustle without a dress over it. Just like, work pants and a lobster tail. I tried to go pants shopping this weekend though, and since that task always makes me want to inflict bodily harm on myself, I’d be happy to bring back the whole bustled dress shebang.
Nicole/Toast overlords: How does one supply links for the LR? I have two very important things that are relevant to Toast interests that deserve more than being buried in the comments
ETA: One of said links might be Mad Max related.
Email me!
Oh, so if I see something like the Julia Ward Howe article, I can email it to you?! (I’ll try not to go overboard, I promise!)
Done, thank you!
ETA: One of said links might be Mad Max related.
TELL ME MORE
BE PATIENT. Our Lord and Saviours of The dash Toast must approve it first.
*wordless grumbling and snarling*
OH GLORIOUS DAY
I do ask those questions about women (AND MEN) who write ABOUT THEIR KIDS though. “How is this going to affect little Jimmy now that the entire internet knows that he sucks his thumb at age 13?” Jeez people give your kids some privacy. (ETA: No shade on thumb-suckers, but I wouldn’t want that info splashed all over the NYT.)
In that article, she says she’s writing about her own feelings about parenthood rather than about her son. It sounds like what people are asking is ‘Won’t it be embarrassing for your son to know about your feelings?’ or for the earlier writing ‘Won’t it be embarrassing for your mother to know about your sex life?’ It’s about assuming that women shouldn’t reveal too much of their inner life because it’s not socially acceptable, rather than stripping anyone except yourself of privacy.
Imagine campaign ads like 30 years from now though! “Katniss Jones wants you to believe that she cares about animal welfare, but this Facebook video of her pooping on a squirrel says otherwise!”
Yes! Or how will 14 year old Timmy feel when he finds out you posted a whole album of naked bathtub photos that people he will never meet but you went to college with have seen? (Spoiler alert: those people probably don’t want to see those photos anyways)
THIS. It boggles my mind to see those pics come up on my timeline.
Or toilet training photos, which has happened across my timeline at least once. Horrifying on all levels.
Oh my god yes. I am always so uncomfortable when people post naked pictures of their young children on Facebook.
Yes, women writers are subject to a vicious double standard, but I’ve often wondered what Louis CK’s kids will think about his standup routine wishing they had never been born. Just call me Helen Lovejoy.
I’ve had the same thought any time he brings up what a pain in the ass his kids are.
LBR, anybody in Louie’s life is gonna have a rough go of it.
I think there are two separate questions (both of which are affected by sexism), because I still think it’s super fair to ask people who are writing about their kids how they balance their children’s privacy with their desire to share their lives.
I keep thinking about this, and I’m really bothered by the conflation. I think it’s ridiculous concern trolling to be all omg if your baby finds out you are naked under your clothes/have had sex at some point, he or she will be warped for life, but I remember, for instance, a Modern Love column that had a whole detailed B-plot about the writer’s tween kids’ crush (and the mom’s desire to beat the heartbreak causing kid up, or something), and that made me skin-crawlingly uncomfortable. I don’t give a damn that Joyce Maynard wrote about sleeping with Salinger, but some of the things she’s written about her children make me feel vicariously exposed.
Then there was A.A. Milne. His son Christopher never quite forgave him for Christopher Robin.
Really? Those books aren’t personal anecdotes or anything, I admit I’m surprised.
He felt that his childhood had been exploited. He wrote an autobiography about it. (Which, ya know, no one would have wanted to read if he hadn’t been the kid in the books, so it was all a bit confused.)
Madeleine L’Engle’s youngest son had a lot of problems with Rob Austin, too. (Actually, I think her other children have spoken about being very frustrated with the memoirs/journals.)
Link to L’Engle article I vaguely remembered
I guess I wonder how much you can write about your own experiences that doesn’t inevitably pull someone else in, once you’re talking about specific, identifiable people. (Like your child, as opposed to a memory about your classmates, etc.)
ps. if anyone in the world has read Nina: Adolescence and ever wants to discuss it, I have been here for that for about ten years. Or to rattle off my mini-list from when I was trying to compile a shelf of novels about girls whose artist parents painted/photographed them extensively through childhood and adolescence.
eta: that said, I wouldn’t ask anyone those questions, because I would assume they probably had already considered that, or if not, were unlikely to because of random me. This is more my thinking out loud about my comfort level, which, considering how often I feel conflicted about talking about my parents in therapy is probably not what someone else should look to.
I met Christopher Robin once, when he was an old man.
I just remember trying very hard not to ask about Pooh Bear etc, in which I succeeded. We were just down the road from the pooh-sticks bridge, too.
I think about this every single time I watch one of his specials.
Quick! Someone call Erma Bombeck’s kids!
That is a deep cut. <3
There are comedians who share funny but respectful stories about their family…. Louis CK is not one of those. Some of his material is good,but I have a hard time liking him.
I am really regretting looking up Louis C.K.’s sad hand job stand-up, which I did after reading this.
Now I severely dislike him and am having an unwieldy surge of misandry.
Not LR related, so I apologize, but last night I went and saw Carly Rae Jepsen with some friends and we wore Drescher/Jepsen 2016 stickers and multiple strangers asked for one! Also Carly Rae is super fun live.
I have been listening to the Emotions album on repeat off and on since it came out and I am not normally a big pop persons but that album is perfection!
It was my favorite album of 2015, and I am also not a huge pop person! But I do love 80s pop, and Emotion is the best 80s pop album to come out since 1989.
Wee_Ramekin was just telling us about the glory of Crossroads! I am fully on board for Crossroads 2: Cross Harder. It could be about a pop star in Vegas escaping her evil father’s conservatorship. Céline would definitely have a cameo.
Did you end up watching it?!
I was going to this weekend, but when I told my roommate about it, she insisted we watch it together, so I have had to put it off until such a time as when we are both at home.
Lol, is Viennetta that expensive?
I bought one once out of nostalgia and ended up eating the whole thing in one go, after which I vowed not to get tempted again.
In Kindergarten they let us have very slim and modest pieces for desert sometimes . My sister claims to this day that she saw the staff eat massive slabs of the stuff out of view in their breakroom.
Let’s be fair, that’s one of the joys of adulthood. Huge portions.
I dunno, I don’t think the things we perceived as fancy as kids had to be expensive per se, our parents just had to believe that they weren’t sufficient value for money on an everyday basis and so just get the tub of store brand neopolitan ice cream unless it was a special occasion. Or they had to have commercials making them out to be super super fancy.
Viennetta was, of course, a fancy thing in my house growing up. We had one at Christmas once.
Yes, I think Viennetta commercials are the human equivalent of serving Fancy Feast in those tiny crystal goblets. I don’t know how that strategy worked on cat-feeding people, but if the daytime-TV-watching cats had any spending abilities we’d have some data worth interpreting.
OT, you guys: I was supposed to have an appointment with my doctor this morning to discuss possible ADD symptoms. In a move that supports my self-diagnosis, however, I mixed up the times, and thought it was at 11:45, when it was actually at 9. I realized this at 9:15. The appointment center lady says they don’t have anything until April. I’ve emailed the clinic to ask if there’s any chance I can talk with my doctor by email or phone about my symptoms.
I also just started my period, so I naturally reacted to this whole situation by freaking the fuck out and crying a lot (although I do that a lot anyway). I was so excited about this appointment, and maybe getting a helpful dx, and finally being able to focus, and then I messed it up and also inconvenienced the folks at the clinic by not showing up for my scheduled appointment. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
It’s also Holy Week, and I’m participating in 7 or 8 services between now and Sunday evening. I still haven’t done the Easter bulletins, and now I’m just sitting here in bed crying. *long string of profanity*
Uggghhh the irony of ADHD treatment is that it requires you to be organized and focused. Remembering to take my meds at the same time each day is something I need my meds for, dude! Not losing my diagnosis paperwork so I can get a prescription refill? Hahahaha good luck. :/
And I thought I was so prepared! I’d planned out my whole day, made a list of symptoms, etc. I just fucked up the time.
I’ve totally done that before to! It’s the worst because youre all ready to go and then nope! I’m sure you’ll get something figured out though, sorry that happened
Oh my gosh, I have done that with appointments more than once. Once was job orientation! Once was a postpartum check at the OB/GYN with squirming baby in arms; they sweetly squeezed me in. Maybe they have a list you could get on to be called if something opens up?
I wish I could help you work on Easter bulletins. *hugs!*
Oh, I feel you on missing that appointment! I hope another slot opens up soon (they might have cancellations).
I had a similar thing happen when I was heading to an ADHD clinic for my diagnosis. I had left my wallet at home and had to run back and get it. A lifetime of being late for things told me I’d lose my slot. But when I called them? “No worries, we’ll see you when you get here” … apparently this clinic is used to most of their patients being late.
Anyway, let me know if you ever want to talk adult ADHD — i’ve just gotten a diagnosis, and am sorting out treatment options.
(Also, ugh for combo of Holy Week & periods! NOT FUN).
I mean, it’s preferable to starting it on Easter, which I’ve done before. The intense service schedule doesn’t start until Thursday, so the worst of it should be over by then.
On the other hand, starting it on Good Friday might be the most apt.
It would be the most apt. And also the most horrifically terrible, as Good Friday begins the Easter marathon, which is exhausting enough when I’m *not* also bleeding out of my vagina.
If it’s going to start on Holy Week, Palm Sunday is the best time.
Except if you were me as a teenager one Palm Sunday years ago: period started, teen pain was 100 times more unbearable, hadn’t figured out pain meds. Was a server. Start of the processional: my heel breaks. I hobble through the service’s marching and standing and readings on one foot, feeling more and more like I’m going to die. Making a break for it during the sermon. End up vomiting in the vestry, stealing someone’s shoes out of a closet, and returning in time for the offertory.
See, my BCP makes it so the pain doesn’t start until late in the day, which means I was fine through the morning service (except for my sore feet from doing multiple loops around the church so we could sing all three opening hymns, then standing in the pulpit to narrate the Passion story). Then I slept for 4 hours, went to another service, and wasn’t in agony until I got home, at which I could read some angsty fanfic and go to bed. I’m off work today and tomorrow, so I can just sit here with a heating pad and be tired.
Oh, good! I’m glad it wasn’t too bad. And yay for angsty fanfic and heating pads!
The angst has been resolved, and we’ve moved on to sexings!
When I was going to see someone for an ADD diagnosis I got a flat tire on my bike and couldn’t get my tire back on and cried hysterically on the side of the road before finally sorting myself out. I showed up late and covered in bike grease and was basically like “THIS IS FITTING WITH MY PATTERN OF BEHAVIOR AND YET ALSO NOT MY FAULY THIS TIME”.
Also in the same boat of just having gotten a diagnosis and sorting out treatment options. Good luck to the OP – I hope you get everything sorted soon, I’m sorry things didn’t work out today, but good on you for trying to move forward, and know that you are definitely not alone on this one.
Dude i am going through the exact same thing right now. I technically have a prescription but am still not able to get it for insurance reasons and I can’t help but feel like this would have taken half the time, easy, if only I was already on it.
Ugh I had similarly disappointing (although otherwise different) healthcare annoyance this morning. I’ve been waiting all month for next week’s appt with an allergist cause my (what I think are probably) allergies make me feel tired all the time and super, miserably fatigued and unfocused a couple days a week and I learned today there are a bunch of hoops I’d have to jump through for them to even consider whether or not my insurance will cover any of the appt or allergy test and make sure my payments go toward my deductible (per my insurance, likely they will cover none of it) and out of pocket would cost “maybe $600” but they can’t give me a definite number cause they don’t even know what their own damn test costs.
So I cancelled and invested in an expensive HEPA filter that’s still considerably less than “maybe $600” and am gonna give Flonase a try.
I hate our healthcare system.
Good luck with your appt when you get there!
i’m p sure whether you show up 3 hours late for the ADD diagnosis is in fact part of the test
Yeah, that’s the silver lining here. “Got distracted while putting the appt. on my calendar and wrote down the wrong time” is good evidence in support of my theory.
Keeping a good thought for you in hopes that an opening will appear so you can be seen. An appointment for ANYTHING is somehow the first thing to fall into my blind spot even though I’m simultaneously totally obsessed about having to do a thing. May your week pass peacefully.
Seriously, you did SO MUCH. You prepped for the appointment, you scheduled your day, you made the appointment in the first place. That is all A+ awesome responsible adulting. Everyone messes up appointment times. Everyone. I am going to say that again, because it’s important: everyone. The clinic people are used to it, so don’t worry about them. It’s very disappointing for you, and it sucks, no question.
You will get through this week, you will get the Easter bulletins done, your hormones and associated discomforts will level off, and you will make it to a rescheduled appointment. It’s going to be okay.
Meanwhile, consider this:
Not quite as poetic as the lillies of the field, but I’ll take it.
Hey, you know who else had a bad time in Holy Week, complete with copious bleeding?
Yes, but that was in the service of a very good cause. I’m just getting rid of dead tissue, not the sins of the world.
A+ response, though.
Good morning Toast <3 <3 <3 So, over the weekend I resolved my breakup situation. We are going to stay friends and I am going to stay involved in her daughter’s life in particular, but I am definitely moving out because being roommates right now would be a terrible idea.
I’m fine, but then again, I’m also contemplating doing things like skydiving and getting tattoos and changing jobs and cutting off all my hair, so maybe I am also Not Fine.
I had a tremendous post-breakup midlife crisis. I started getting tattoos, had a fling with an 18 year old male model, took up skiing and bought a new horse (the eqine equivalent of a Ferrari). Would recommend.
Nicely done! (A horse!! A really nice horse! Wow) Please send the model my way if you see him. In all seriousness, it sounds like that worked out for you so maybe having these thoughts doesn’t mean I’ve lost my mind.
I had so much fun that once the crisis bit was over I just carried on… Have been happily in a second teenagerhood since, I now have a full back piece and both sides of my ribcage tattooed, have had blue and pink and purple hair for five years, and thoroughly enjoyed myself for a couple of years getting into ridiculous escapades that nobody would believe if I told them about. I have calmed down a bit now but it’s all still there!
Sadly have not seen the toyboy for a fair while now but he was a lovely boy growing up into a lovely man last time I did.
I should add though, that it did start out with the feeling of ‘I’ve lost everything that matters and fuck it, it doesn’t matter what I do now so I may as well just fucking go for it’ – which was a horrible place to be, and coincided with much less healthy things as well.
However – I am by nature a shocking ditherer and very risk-averse, I’d been piss-arsing about wanting a tattoo and not getting one for 10 years (for instance) so the kick up the backside to just get on with it wasn’t un-needed! It was a catalyst for me for much better things, losing some of the nerves and getting out of the rut.
I’m with deenuhh… the story of your rebound would make a great series, or even just a memoir. Sounds a gazillion times better than Eat Pray Love!
Yeah. Fortunately I don’t feel like I’ve lost everything that matters, at least not forever, mostly because she and her daughter are still in my life. But there have been moments of total shock. I’m not sleeping well because I keep waking up in the middle of the night to experience whatever emotion has me in its grips that day.
I never thought I’d get married, so this broken engagement has me wondering if Well, That Was It, my one shot at marital happiness. It’s like I’m waiting at a train station and the train slows down and flashes its lights like it’s going to stop for me but it just blows right past me.
Thank you for so skillfully describing this “I’m lost now”/”but you know what, fuck it” feeling. It is bewildering.
Eat, Ink, Skydive. Somebody needs to write this.
I wish the majority of the anecdotes were the kind of thing I could put on the internet-at-large but they really aren’t.
I was with my ex for 10 years, he left just before our 10th anniversary. I had been absolutely 100% convinced we would grow old together so I do have the frame of reference.
Oh, Es_Petal. I’m sorry. That sounds so incredibly hard. Ten years is a big chunk of time. Now I’m even more glad to hear you’re doing okay today.
It was hideous, I was entirely convinced that 1) I would never get over it, 2) ever sleep with anyone again and 3) nobody had ever been this miserable.
I was wrong on all counts! There is so much light at the end of the tunnel for you. It may not be a short tunnel – mine wasn’t – but it does have an end.
I would 100% watch a movie/tv series about your post-breakup midlife crisis. That sounds AMAZING.
Thank you for updating us! I will keep thinking of you and wishing you well. XOXO
Doooooooooo eeeeeeeeeet. Hair grows back, exciting adventures are memories forever, and you only go around once, right? And although a tattoo will be with you forever, forever is, in the grand scheme of things, really quite a small amount of time. Get it somewhere you can hide it in case you don’t want others to see it.
A+ decision moving out, living with an ex no matter how cherished is a terrible idea. *hugs*
*standing ovation for how you’ve handled this*
*continues to send good vibes*
I’m back from Switzerland. Definitely felt the Bern.
Did you see the bears? The first time I was in Bern at the tender age of 19, I was just bumbling around downtown when I saw a sign saying “TO THE BEAR PIT —–>” and I haven’t gotten over it yet.
Yes! I mean, I saw only one, the other two weren’t in sight. But still. Bears!!
The heart-eyed emoji was INVENTED for discussions of Michelle Obama 😍 😍 😍
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: bustles are due for a comeback, and this time around they’ll have to have cell phone pockets so that whenever you get a call, your ass will ring.
I straight up love bustles. I love the 1930s dresses that had faux bustles on them. I’m not a super girly girl but I would wear the hell out of a 1930s-style bustle dress.
Actually, I would wear 1930s clothes in general if I had some.
I never had much of an ass to begin with and what little I had got stolen by my fetus during gestation, so anything that helps me out in that department would be MOST WELCOME.
I prefer pocket hoops for my cellphone!
They sell really cute mini-bustles on Etsy. I’m so tempted to buy one.
Oh, goodie – I wanted to respond to that NYMag article, but didn’t feel like figuring out how. Mostly, I just wanted to share a story about being a mom and a writer. My kid wrote a 2000 word “book” in the fourth grade. I helped him edit it, and we home-printed a first edition of about 50 to include in Christmas cards and give out to his friends at school. I even made him a real hard-cover copy on Blurb. I’m pretty sure that experience was a factor in him getting into a humanities magnet middle school. And he said he knew he could do it because he’d seen me write and self-publish a book. So, I don’t care that I sold, like, 3 copies of that book. The fact that he saw me doing that, and decided that writing books is just something our family “does”… that’s pure gold.
A+ parenting
You sound like a fabulous parent!
Awwwww – YOU GUYS!! Thanks, I needed a boost today.
You are awesome.
A+ parenting and also feministing.
Davis tells me that throughout the film, she had Britney absentmindedly doodle in a notebook in character as Lucy, to show the character’s creative aspirations. “I have the book. All she was writing was ‘Britney and Justin,’ all these little curlicues. It was like looking at a teenage girl’s musings—hearts and butterflies and Justin’s name.”
suddenly i am having a lot of feelings about the britney/justin timberlake relationship have we time traveled back to 2002
Never forget:
(sorry for the large image)
…the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
The image took a second to actually load on my computer and yet I already knew exactly what it would be before it came up.
. . . I’m not sure if I should be proud of that, but I sort of am.
Be proud, I am. I knew it from the moment I saw there was a picture. It’s all that was good and pure in the world.
Fair enough 🙂
This weekend at a wedding reception, my brother and I got into a conversation where he carefully delineated for me exactly the difference between Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, 98 Degrees, and O-Town. He was so disappointed in me that I didn’t know which one Joey Fatone was in. (He also knew more about Ashley Angel than I thought anyone alive actually did anymore.)
(At one point he was trying to remember the names of all three Hansons but only knew two, which was two more than I did. But without thinking, I suggested, “Gunnar Hanson?” No. No, Gunnar Hansen was the actor who played Leatherface in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I was wrong.)
Ten minutes later, the DJ played “Backstreet’s Back” and the whole table of total strangers we were sitting with rushed up to my brother going, “THEY’RE PLAYING YOUR SONG.”
Long story short: I have never been prouder of him.
“Backstreet’s Back” truly is the people’s song.
We all realized we could all still lipsync along perfectly without even thinking. Truly that song is implanted in our collective DNA now, like hunting and gathering and the need for shelter.
I’m impressed that you knew Gunnar Hansen though 🙂
Did we ever leave 2002 is really the question.
I might have teared up a little bit. Such an innocent time.
On the subject of parents not buying exciting foodstuffs, what are people’s stories of weird parental food behaviour? I read a thing a while ago in which someone was saying that a person was so weirdly health-conscious that they microwaved poppadoms instead of deep-frying them. “But everyone does that!” I thought. “Surely it says it on the box in the cooking instructions!” It doesn’t. Everyone I have asked about it since has looked at me like I have two heads when I ask if they microwave their poppadoms. It is apparently a consequence of my parents being a) frugal and b) not keen on unhealthy food. (See also: every time we had fish, being reminded “you don’t have to eat the skin”. Only getting “Saturday sweets”, a small bowlful each which were carefully rationed out. Staple meals of things like “bulgar wheat and tinned tuna, with grated carrots on the side”.)
MrChouffe also microwaves poppadoms! He claims it is much easier and just as good. We don’t have a microwave so I’ve never tested that theory.
He is in the right! (Although you do sometimes get poppadoms with both burnt and uncooked bits due to the distribution of the microwaves. But there’s no faffing about with hot oil!)
I have a gas stove and toast mine right over the gas flame. It takes a second to get the hang of but is so fun and delicious and no hot fat required!
You are a genius.
I was only turned on to the microwave method recently thanks to Jamie Oliver (it helps if you break up the poppadom, it cooks more evenly). I loved them as a kid, but never got to have them, and I think its because of the massive hassle of frying them. My children will know no such deprivation, microwaved poppadoms for all!
Ooh, I should try that. I do have a gas hob …
(We were never poor, but my parents were much less well-off when I was a small child than they are now (having three small children may have had something to do with that), which means I now have deeply-instilled habits about scraping out the last dregs of things in jars with a spatula and closing the curtains the second it gets dark “to keep the heat in”. Meanwhile my parents are now living the carefree life of 50-somethings whose children have left home, going on exciting holidays and buying whatever food they like.)
Also, you know, putting a little bit of milk into the ranch dressing bottle and shaking it up to make SURE you get the last of it out. Or tomato juice in the ketchup bottle or coffee in the maple syrup bottle or vinegar in the steak sauce bottle. Apparently this is…not a thing everyone does?
Putting cooked pasta into the pesto jar and shaking to get all the pesto-y goodness out. (Pasta + Pesto = only meal my mother knew how to cook regularly)
My dad used to put a bit of bread in the bottom of a jam jar and poke it around with his spoon until it got the last dregs of the jam (then fish it out & eat). Didn’t figure out this was weird until uni.
I rinse out the tins chopped tomatoes come in using water or (if feeling fancy) cooking wine and add the liquid to whatever I’m cooking.
Me too! I am normally adding a stock cube anyway so it saves doing extra water for that.
It horrifies people that, like my mother before me, I put cheese in chicken noodle soup (the canned kind).
That sounds super tasty. I put cheddar cheese chunks in my (canned) soup sometimes.
My father has known he is lactose intolerant for over 20 years. I have been lactose intolerant for something like 15 years. My mother still serves me dairy without warning me, so I have to ask individually about each food when I visit. She will, on occasion, name ingredients like baking soda prior to mentioning milk and butter.
Also, once i came over to make Beef Bourguignon, and I did not wash the meat and I did wash the mushrooms, and I thought my mother’s head was going to explode.
I had parents who were terrible cooks and I learned to cook on my own as an adult, so I get the reverse of this where my parents are scandalized and amazed by my generally normal cooking habits that seem completely strange to them. I had my mom over for dinner once and I blanched some green beans with a bit of lemon and garlic (takes five minutes to prepare, extremely simple, three ingredients) maybe five years ago? She STILL sends me texts about the “amazing green beans” at least once a month.
My mom’s food staples were tacos, spaghetti, meatloaf, baked chicken breasts, and dry pork chops when I was growing up, because my father has the palate of a grumpy six year old. I will make food for her and still get texts about it years later (chicken and dumplings, sweet potato enchiladas, anything with garlic). My brother also moved out of the house and immediately started experimenting with food as well, though he gravitated towards the “how many animals can I put in one dish” theory of cooking, whereas I went for “this could use more garlic”.
You and your brother can both cook with/for me any day of the week, as I am a hybrid of your two wonderful, wonderful styles.
Ugh, yes, you and your brother could be me and my brother if you replace “meatloaf” with “KFC and Wendy’s night,” ugh. I guess picky parents with kids who cook is a thing? My mom is convinced she is allergic to garlic because she doesn’t understand the difference between garlic powder and garlic cloves and won’t listen when I try to show her, it’s very sad!
Were you also told you were a picky eater as a child because your parents were picky?
No, I was a legit picky kid– my mom made anything with ground beef with chopped onions in it, too (so the tacos, spaghetti sauce, and meatloaf), and I would meticulously pick every single onion scrap out of it before I’d attempt to eat it. My maternal grandparents were where my mom got her cooking from, so I knew that at grandma’s house, I’d eat Skippy and homemade pear preserves on Wonder Bread for at least one meal a day. Mr Ipo also was an onion-picker as a kid but his mom loves to cook, so he had a wider variety of things to pick out of. We found that we both got over being picky kids when we moved out as young adults and were broke af– hunger makes lots of free food tasty. I probably haven’t picked an onion out of something in 20 years, now I think they’re a legitimate food group for us.
Yeah, my parents aren’t TERRIBLE cooks, but they’re fairly uncreative, plain Midwestern cooks. I married a total foodie and we cook all kinds of stuff from different food cultures, which bemuses my parents constantly. My mom comments in amazement every time I eat Mexican food (my favorite) or anything spicy – “I just don’t know where you got that!” Exposure to differences, mom.
On the other hand, my mom’s slight allergy to garlic carried over into my bemusement when people do things like eat roasted garlic by itself on purpose, or put chunks of garlic so big you have to chew them into things. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that flavor.
My mom finally tried sushi when she was 63. I still haven’t talked her into Thai or pho yet.
I mentioned to my mother that I was planning to make crock-pot tortellini yesterday. I ended up making it at her house for dinner and she raved about my ‘exotic pasta’ and how clever it was to brown sausage to add to it. My father apologized for not liking it, it was too spicy for him and had spinach in it.
My dad drinks red wine mixed with Diet Coke out of those huge plastic cups they give you at Taco Bell.
Kalimotxo! We definitely had a summer in our 20s where that was a staple.
I recently tried this, but it was gross to me? Is it better with real coke?
It is not.
It’s good for daydrinking on your front porch while wearing your rattiest t-shirt, which is the context in which I am familiar with this. I’m a big fan of drinks that cut down the abv of a standard beverage, because I’m a lightweight.
Also there is no need to ask if something involving regular coke is less gross than something involving diet coke, because nothing is as nasty as diet coke.
Mmmm, kalimotxo.
We eat brown sugar on dinner rolls. It is delicious and I don’t care. (I also microwave poppadoms. Deep frying is a giant pain.)
My grandparents fed us “brown-sugar sandwiches” regularly – wonder bread with margarine so that the brown sugar will stick. They are the best!
My great grandmother used to eat pieces of bread sprinkled with water and sugar – she wasn’t allowed to, so she used to hide under the bed to not get caught!
She used to grin when she told us that story, and always said she could still remember how good it tasted.
My mum and her sisters used to eat sugar sandwiches. She cites this as one of the reasons her generation has much worse teeth than mine.
My parents’ bizarre allegiance to margarine. My mom will go on SCREEDS against sweet’n’low and imitation vanilla extract, but those plasticky fluorescent-yellow sticks of grease shall never exit her fridge. When I moved out, the very first Adult Lifestyle Decision I made was to make my home butter-only. Sometimes, I bring my own when I visit.
My mother spent years telling us “butter kills” (and, by extension, “pastry kills”). According to my sister, they now have real butter in the house all the time and use it instead of margarine. I’m so confused by this change in allegiance.
Apparently we have the same mom. Who knew.
For a mix of anxiety and she won’t treat her IBD reasons, my mom is convinced that she is allergic or intolerant to a wide variety of foods and so are all her children. Soy in all its forms and random Indian spices are her favorite culprits, even though she often eats them and has no discomfort… and when they do make her ill, almost all foods make her ill.
Yeah I mostly cook Sichuanese and Korean food, and recently ate half a pound of tofu for dinner with plans to repeat tonight. This horrifies her and has her convinced that one day I will explode, except I treat my IBD and am just dandy so long as I avoid lots of lard. I’m eating a sweet potato and broccoli curry for breakfast. I am FEARLESS.
In my family we ate crepes (piled with powdered sugar and fruit) every sunday. But we just called them pancakes. It took me years to realize that “big pancakes” are actually the standard pancake.
Also, it turns out a lot of people think it’s horrifying to serve your children wine with dinner on special occasions (or to make your teenagers try every beer or bourbon that you drink, so that they can develop a good palate). But that was my house.
Yeah, I definitely got a half-glass of wine with Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter dinner starting when I was around 13. But starting a much earlier age I was given a sip of peppermint schnapps on Christmas Eve to help me sleep. And the first time I ever got drunk was entirely my dad’s doing because he wanted me to know what it was like in a safe environment.
Then I turned 16 and from then until I was 21 it was “you can have a glass of wine OR you can drive” and my parents got themselves a willing designated driver for the holiday parties. Though the older I got, the more I opted for the wine. All my aunts and uncles did this with my cousins, too.
That latter part is BRILLIANT and I am stealing it for my future offspring.
SAAAME. I had my own wine glass at age 4. Heavily watered down, of course, but for special occasions it was totally legit.
My parents also served me and my sister wine on special occasions! They also would put a teaspoon of brandy in hot tea whenever we got sick. They never gave us beer or other liquor though.
One night I reached for the glass of milk I was drinking without looking, and instead grabbed my dad’s glass of scotch. He watched in horror as I took a sip and then had a good, long laugh at the face of horrified disgust I probably made as I sipped my first taste of scotch, at the age of 9. If memory serves, he encouraged me to try to swallow it, but I think I went and spit it out in the sink. As an adult who now sometimes enjoys scotch, I realize he did this because it would be a shame to waste good scotch.
One time when I was about nine I tagged along with my mother to her company softball game, and as we got in the car she set a big cooler thermos thingie (like these, except thicker plastic and opaque) in the cupholder and said, “Don’t drink this – it’s wine.”
Well I assumed she was lying because she didn’t want me to drink her pop or whatever, so I grabbed the cup and took a big, defiant swig.
She wasn’t lying.
I definitely grew up in a “the kids can have a sip” family. For my parents’ dinner parties, I had a very special, very tiny glass goblet in which I would enjoy a thimbleful of mimosa, sipped with my pinky out like a LADY.
We had these too! I guess cordial glasses have some function that adults use them for but in our house they were for me and my brother getting a sip of something. I remember drinking a very tiny amount of drambuie while pretending to understand all of the “sophisticated” adult conversation my mom was having with her coworkers.
Or, if the family’s Catholic, the kids will get their first taste of booze from sour, watery, covered-in-cooties Communion wine at the age of 8, and get turned off from alcohol for a good long time.
See I always figured that the Catholic M.O. was to familiarize your children with the taste of wine well before their first communion so they don’t spit it out in front of the priest/ because the part of the Bible that most inspires your lifestyle is the wedding at Canaa
We got to have a sip before the official ceremony in case we spat it out at the time, we could opt for just the bread/cracker at the ceremony. Nobody spat it out but everybody’s face wrinkled in disgust and they opted for just the bread.
We were always offered sips of my parents’ wine as children and drinks of our own from mid/late teens onwards. Sadly, it did not make me like red wine.
When I was a kid we had a bowl full of candy bars in the kitchen and every night my siblings and I would each get to eat one for dessert, but we had to discontinue that after my dad started sneaking downstairs and eating them all at night. Hiding junk food from my dad became almost an Olympic sport later and I’m still hyper-possessive about food because of him (especially the time that he snuck into my bedroom and drank one of my Propels that I bought to have with my lunch at my summer internship; still mad about that one; rest in pieces, dad!).
My parents are kind of the opposite, in that they almost ALWAYS have multiple snack foods available in the house. My brother and I (we’re roommates) do not because… eh, we just don’t. This horrifies my parents; they were particularly concerned by the amount of weight Bro has lost since he moved in with me and stopped snacking all the time (because we’re both of the temperament where, if there are snacks available, we WILL eat the shit out of them. Actually, that’s really the reason we don’t keep a lot of snacks around). “You need to get him to eat more!” they said to me while visiting over the weekend. To which I replied that, actually, Bro does most of the cooking in the household.
Naturally, they have never once suggested to me that I need to gain weight. Ugh.
I have never understood how people can have, say, a thing of oreos in their cupboard for multiple days. If I buy oreos they are going to be eaten until I feel physically ill at the sight of them and have to throw the rest out. Now I just don’t buy snack foods at all except for special occasions. It’s amazing how much less I eat when there just isn’t food in front of me all the time.
Right? A friend of mine was mentioning the other day how she carefully rations out her Girl Scout cookies so they last several weeks, and I was like, I went through four boxes in literally two days.
I got two boxes and one half of one box remains 4 days later.
But only because I briefly forgot about them in favor of playing with my new rice maker.
I have a ‘cupboard of joy’ in my kitchen which is always stocked with chocolate and sweets. I find that if I havent’ got any, I WANT IT ALL NOW but if I actually have three packs of jaffa cakes, a chocolate orange, a pack of peanut butter oreos, a jar of biscoff, four candy canes (from 2014, I should probably eat them soon), three packs of jelly waiting to be made, a big bar of raspberry chocolate and a tube of pringles, I do not need to eat everything in the world.
That is current inventory, I am typing this on the kitchen side while I check it.
My favorite weekend dad-made food was hot dogs in pancakes. Slice up hot dogs, warm them up on the skillet, cook in the pancakes, serve with pancake syrup. The perfect mix of sweet and savory! Hot dogs are almost like sausage, and it’s really just a de-constructed pig-in-a-blanket! However, my college friends were HORRIFIED that I ever ate this as a child. I have no regrets.
Also, my dad was in charge of dinner on Sunday nights because my mom worked. He thought it was funny to base his dinner “menu” off of our elementary school lunch menu, which once results in our Very Favorite Dad Dinner: Mac and cheese, green beans from a can, and “Manager’s Choice of Cookie” which was…Ritz crackers with cheese. If you called me and my sisters right now and said “manager’s choice of cookie”, we would laugh for a year.
My mom loves to tell the story about how when my brother and I were kids, she and my dad were going out and she got a babysitter. She told the sitter that we could have cookies, but only if we asked for them. When the sitter asked us if we would like a snack, my brother asked for an apple and I asked for a carrot. The thought of cookies did not enter our tiny minds, because we so rarely got to have them.
When I was very small, my parents gave me crackers and called them cookies. This lasted until I was probably 4 and my great aunt gave me real cookies when we visited.
My dad knows how to cook approximately seven or eight different dishes. They are all pretty good (baked chicken thighs with parmesan and basil were a big part of my childhood), but he does NOT branch out into new territory because “I don’t know how to make that.” And I’m not talking about, like, making bolognese sauce from scratch; I’m talking about simmering a pot of green beans. Everyone has their staple dishes, I get that, but…
Food is such a thing in my family, but for terrible reasons. Mother and brother are both skinny little shits, and Mother is just terrible about food in general (as I’ve said many times. WHO FORGETS TO EAT. I refuse to believe this is a thing.)
Father OTOH definitely had Orthorexia before it was a thing. The man ate a macrobiotic diet for 40 years and gave 2 of the 3 children that lived with him eating disorders. Staying at his house as a child usually involved a serious vomiting fit because the food was such a massive adjustment (and instead of giving me comforting food that I was used to, he’d just keep serving me the same meal, usually cold porridge from breakfast, until I ate it and saying ‘your system will adjust’). And eating had a whole big ritual around it, we all had to sit perfectly at the table, and you had to sit straight or you’d be given the chair with no back, and you had to chew your food properly or you’d be given out to (He never explained to me what ‘properly’ was, so I’d watch him and copy how much he was chewing. This was of course Not Allowed, so he told my brother to watch me eating to make sure I wasn’t watching him eating. Can you say Irony?). Also for some reason we weren’t allowed to drink water with our meals, which was a real fucking problem for me because I was allowed to drink with my mum and I didn’t know how to eat without drinking (and also drinking with your meal is actually good and he can go fuck himself.)
So yeah. Food.
I forget to eat. And sleep. Pee. Any basic bodily functions, I can forget to do. I have a junk metabolism and spend most of the time vaguely dissociated from my body for gender and chronic pain reasons. It’s still weird, though.
I don’t think I’ve ever cooked poppadoms at home, but we did compare different cooking methods in a home economics class when I was about 12 – deep fried, microwave, and maybe grilled? I don’t remember what won, of course…
My mom is vegetarian and has always been very health conscious to the point where when I was a kid, most “junk food” (snack food) was forbidden in our house except on vacations. She never raised me or my sister to be vegetarian, and but it did always play into family meals.
For a while in elementary school, we had a successful thing going that we called “junk Food Friday”, where my mom would buy (and hide) big variety packs of single serving chips and other delights, and on Fridays we would each get one or two in our lunch box. On the other days of the week, other kids would go “eww” over our lunches of vegetarian dinner leftovers and sandwiches with sprouts.
Not that I’m complaining about the healthy lunches. I became a vegetarian on my own, over time. Once in 4th grade, on my birthday, my mom made me my favorite lunch, which another girl found gross enough that she needed to tell me she felt sorry for me. I was confused about why one would feel sorry for someone over a cream cheese and jam sandwich, with celery sticks and peanut butter… Or, maybe it was the mini can of tomato juice that made her feel sorry for me? I was also a weird kid who liked tomato juice without any help from my mom. Shrug emoji.
Ugh I had that so much in school! My mum always gave me carrot sticks and fish sticks (not the covered in breadcrumb kind, those are fish fingers, these are like tubes of reconstituted ‘fish’ wrapped in plastic. I was never allowed to eat a chicken nugget, but apparently fish sticks were just fine.) and other random things for lunch and the thing I hated the most about other kids was how closed minded they were;
Like the other kids would see my lunch and say ‘ewww gross. What is that’. How can you say something is gross when you don’t even know what it is?
Also I would get sandwiches wrapped in the paper that the bread came in instead of cling film or little sandwich bags (probably because those are expensive and wax paper comes free with the bread), and this bit of ingenuity on my mothers part meant I was to be ridiculed endlessly.
Kids. What assholes.
It’s more that people in general are jerks. It took several years for people in my office to stop acting horrified by my primarily vegetarian lunches. They think my food is a referendum on theirs, as opposed to being delicious to me. 😐
Cream cheese and jam sandwich is delicious!!!!
We had to make very specific pleas for non-Jewel brand bread, which my dad not only likes for thriftiness, but genuinely prefers to bread which doesn’t taste like damp kleenex.
Sometimes I worry what my kid is going to think about everything I write about him online (hey, JHB if you’re reading this in the future look I was thinking about it), but then I figure that these kinds of concerns are predicated on technology that existed when I was a kid. Is privacy even going to exist in ten or fifteen years? Is EVERYONE going to have a bunch of embarrassing shit about them online?
I don’t know, might as well get some good jokes out of it.
(so, that is what I decided, I decided that I care about good jokes. ENJOY ADULTHOOD SUCKER)
And I mean, parents are still more likely to be far more embarrassing in person around their kids than they could possibly be online.
There’s nothing my mom would have said about me online that she wasn’t going to say out loud every time she walked through the living room when I was with my friends.
So, yesterday, I replied to a comment on Twitter and mentioned Marilynne Robinson. Apparently someone has an alert set, because this comment popped up VERY quickly: https://twitter.com/MRASociety/status/71172961265…
Which, ok, that’s a little weird. BUT I am so beyond delighted that there is a Marilynne Robinson Appreciation Society with the Twitter handle and web address “MRASociety.” That is just fantastic. I cannot get over it.
That’s amazing.
Having had class with Marilynne Robinson, that is both amazing and somehow totally to be expected.
eta: she is terrifying but in a most excellent way, and has beautiful handwriting.
I have said this before in a few places and I’ll say it again: the fact that my mom maintained a creative professional practice (ceramics) throughout my childhood (indeed, from before she met my dad and up to the present day) is unquestionably a factor in A) her being a good parent to me and my sisters, because she was doing something she was very good at that brought her a lot of enjoyment and helped her keep track of who she was, and 2) a powerful lesson that creative and professional pursuits were important, worth time and energy and not being interrupted even if someone wants a glass of juice right now right now right now.
I spent some time with some moms last night (I am not a mom) and all of them were complaining that they didn’t have time to read, although one did say she was often up until 3 a.m. cleaning. They all seemed to be implying that their kids and husbands came way, way ahead of themselves. It made me a little sad.
And I thought back to my mother who read constantly and kept a clean-ish, but not immaculate house. My mom was really clear that she had her own interests outside of ours or our father’s. And that was great.
It’s a good lesson for everyone to learn that while those in your life care about you, you’re not the star of their lives nor should you be. You need to entertain/care for yourself.
But also my mom worked and so did her mom and her grandmother and so on back through time, so there wasn’t really a family culture of spending all your time on your kids.
Cosign all of this. And I wonder too what I would have learned differently if, like basically most people in CapitalLand if we’re going to be real, my mom had been working at something that actively frustrated or harmed her, in order to survive and help us survive.
I love that you posted this. I have a two year old and have been struggling with reintegrating things in my life that have value to me, in part to un-do programming that says there should be nothing of more importance than child and mate. I want my daughter to see that I am a person, who cares about my own well-being and identity, and that she is free to be a person, and pursue a satisfying self-actualization and well-being.
You will be giving her a gift when you show her that. I wish you so much luck (and fortitude, because the programming from outside AND inside your head can be exhausting).
I hope you can find or make some women friends who want this too. Two of my writer-friends here in town support each other in this way, and it seems to help a lot.
That National Parks article is probably going to take me all day to read, I keep having to take breaks. I don’t work for the parks service but the experience is pretty universal to women who do field work. I want to go thank all of the amazing women I’ve worked with and then rage about how that kind of behavior is so normal and almost expected from a subset of the men we work with.
That article is TERRIFYING (and excellently written). I know a biologist who deliberately appears “scruffy” for this very reason and she still gets comments but now it’s along the lines of “you know, guys like girls who do A, B, or C to themselves, you should try that if you want a boyfriend”, etc., etc., etc. God, she can’t win.
YUP. I buy men’s field clothes 2 sizes too big and always wear long sleeves and pants and dudes will still find something to comment on.
Sweet Baby Jeebus…!
i read it last friday while procrastinating at work and it was horrifying.
Hijacking this comment thread to announce that I have arrived savely in the US of A.
You guys sure do have a lot of parking everywhere. Currently trying to wrap head around the fact that it’s morning and not afternoon. Seattle is, so far, pretty.
Sorry about the rain! It’ll get better at some point. Go get some Top Pot donuts.
The last time I was in Seattle, my friend and I bought a dozen top pot donuts and each had a bite of each one to decide our favorites. It was a wonderful way to eat donuts; no decisions! I am going back to visit her in a few weeks to meet her baby, and hopefully we will get out of the house long enough to repeat the experience.
Pertinent fact I’ll never get to use again! There are apparently 2.5 parking lot spots for every car in the US.
factoid actualy (sic) just statistical error. average car has 0 parking spot. ParkSpot Georg, who lives in Nebraska & maintains massive fields of 10 millions of parking spots, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
dammit parkspot georg
THERE’S A MONORAIL!!!!!!!! I will have breakfast and go on the monoraaaaail! wheeeeee!
Welcome to Seattle! The monorail is actually not very useful at all unfortunately, but is fun to ride. I recommend Lola for breakfast if you get the chance (get the fresh made donuts).
Also, go to Monorail Espresso (downtown, on Pike between 5th & 6th, near the monorail itself), probably my favorite coffee in the city. (Cash only, though, so be prepared).
Oh my god do they still do the bacon maple lattes? I haven’t been in forever but those were the bomb.
Haven’t tried the espresso yet, but the monorail (yes, it’s obviously not much use except for touristy people. I am a touristy people. Fun was had). Now trying not to sleep and looking at those humongeous houses while finishing the paper…
That Huffington Post article was a rough read. I’m currently doing a wildlife biology degree and it’s not the most inclusive environment, and it’s so frightening to see how this is reflected in how women are treated in the field.
Agreed about the rough read.
But, it really is getting better! I’m in Botany, and have worked for National Parks for years. The science and interp parts of the nps tended to be bubbled off from the worst forms of harassment and to have much more gender parity anyway. I’m an outspken lady and actually have no terrible stories if my own. At the parks I’ve worked for, even the trails crews and fire crews have better parity/ take complaints seriously. So, take heart that it is still an organization that many women are proud to work for, even if they have some terrible employees and even worse middle management.
It depends so much on the park. I had a close friend who was pushed out of a park she otherwise loved because she couldn’t get anyone in her department or the dude’s department or management to take her complaints seriously. But I also have a friend who has been an interpreter for years with nothing but great things to say about her park. So is it getting better? Sure, in some places, but that doesn’t feel good enough to me.
It’s clearly not good enough that only some women have such shitty experiences, I’m sorry if I made it sound that way.
I want to apologize to everyone re: Night Manager since I tweeted to suggest that the woman should be played by Emma Thompson because I’m horrible at paying attention and read “English” instead of “Egyptian” but now it’s out There, on the Internet, and I can never take it back.
That aside, I would love to see Emma Thompson avenge Tom Hiddleston’s death in a movie. I feel like she would be both appropriately vengeful and super charming about it.
I would watch that. Emma Thompson’s existence gives me joy.
Wry, charming, and filled with the Wrath of an Angry God.
Can she wear the angel wings from Angels in America and the hair from Much Ado About Nothing?
I mean, I assume she does that most days anyway.
Oh, that’s a fair point. I agree.
I would watch that.
This has nothing to do with LR, but guys, are any other Dancing with the Stars/America’s Next Top Model/Switched at Birth fans super nervous for Nyle? I want him to do well, but I’m going to be freaking out until his dance is over.
Wait, Nyle from ANTM, who is TOO adorable for words, is on Dancing with the Stars? WHY?
He was great! He was tied for high score of the night <3
Phew! I thought he was fantastic on ANTM, so much more empathetic and aware than most contestants, and you could really see the self-confidence that came from having his feet firmly in Deaf culture. I mean, drop-dead gorgeous, too, of course, but I loved his willingness to exploit his own looks for the sake of raising awareness about Deafness.
I have a book that illustrates year-to-year women’s fashion through the entire 19th century and it is so cool to see the bustle get bigger and more preposterous as fashion technology evolved. Once they realized they could use boning to get the volume instead of fifty billion layers of petticoats, then all bets were off.
This sounds like a fantastic read. What’s the title?
English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth-Century: A Comprehensive Guide With 1,117 Illustrations
(Yes, they list the precise number of illustration in the title of the book.)
I love that the era of increasingly huge underpinnings was also the era of booming public transport (in London, anyway). Crinoline and bustle womanspreading FTW.
Just for instance.
Lovely Toastrons, over the past four days I finally watched all of Firefly/Serenity. I finally know what all the fuss is about.
You can enjoy the Internet on a new level now, since you can deploy, “I’ll be in my bunk,” at will.
I’ve been deploying it for ages but never knew if this was the exact etymology!
Do you feel an immediate need to talk about your favourite episode and/or character? Willing ear.
So now you know why everyone will always adore Jewel Staite. #kayleeforever
She is why I watched LA Complex on the CW (it wasn’t half bad!)
I am a leaf on the wind. :sniffles:
Awwww maaaaan…I was having such a good day!
(*leaves desk to sob quietly in the supply closet*)
One of my housemates, who actually has a long brown coat, has a license plate holder that says “Leaf on the wind: Wash is my copilot.” I feel like this is tempting fate.
Would not have guessed that Britney’s top two food requests were tuna luchables and edamame. I feel like at the very least she could have gone for, I don’t know, the make your own pizza lunchables and wasabi peas.
That said, points to her for working enough into her contract to have precedent for later appearances but not actually whining and enforcing much of it.
I was also perplexed by that, mostly because I do not remember tuna Lunchables being a thing? Someone chime in if you remember eating these as a child.
I don’t remember Luncahbles brand tuna lunches, but I definitely had Starkist brand tuna lunches. It was a little packet of tuna, mayo, relish, and crackers.
I was thinking that maybe it was a regional thing? Like, maybe tuna Lunchables were a thing in the South?
100% here for Tom Hiddleston lying sexily in a pool of blood. I’m still not over the Night Manager gifsets of his face all sad and bruised.
But have you seen his bum? Cause boy are you in for a treat.
Literally the progression of my facial expressions during Episode 4 AKA Hiddleston’s boner gets him in big trouble. (Could possibly describe the entire show tbh)
I sometimes get worried about the amount of joy I get when I see Tom Hiddleston in terrible situations.
“YOU DID IT TO YOURSELF. YOUR PRETTY PRETTY SELF.”
There’s a reason hurt/comfort is a huge segment of fanfic and “hurts so pretty” is a common Tumblr and AO3 tag. I mean, I suppose you can still be worried, but you’re in good company?
I…
yes.
It’s probably the same amount of joy I get at seeing Sebastian Stan cry. Which is also sometimes wonderful, but damn does that boy just look beautiful broken!
My mother and I are convinced that he will die and the final episode will be the ladies avenging him. This way we get softly lit, wistful and oddly romantic shots of dead Pine AND BAMF females.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1932-aust…
I am always happy to remind the world about Australia’s Great Emu War.
This may be relevant to some of your interests: I got bored hearing about everybody’s March Madness brackets so I decided to do a March Madness about hot dudes. This is the latest set of matchups: https://vgum.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/homeless-mo…
BLESS YOU for this. The only kind of tournament that matters!
There are some very tough choices in there!
The gifs are very helpful. Yes, helpful is the adjective.
*praise hands emoji*
http://www.lentmadness.org/
My choir director is pretty sure that the final matchup is going to be Sojourner Truth vs. Julian of Norwich, which is a horrible Sophie’s Choice.
Why did you put John Cho and Paul Rudd in the same bracket and force me to decide, that is CRUEL.
The Meaghan O’Connell piece made me think about how happy I am that my mom raised me to think of parents as people, and not just as my parents.
I’ve had several situations with friends or acquaintances in which they expressed great surprise that their parents (gasp!shock!) made decisions or did things that were not in line with their children’s ideas of them.
… I don’t have any Leslie Knope gifs strong enough to respond to the piece on treatment of women in the park service.
This one is a good one.
VIENETTAAAAAAA. How I longed for you as a child. I must find you. I WILL FIND YOUUUUUUU.
My heart breaks a little every time I think about Britney Spears, and that Crossroads article sent me over the edge. The Starbucks trip was probably the only control she had.
Lots to chew on here, and kind of a relief to think about something besides Daredevil–I thought that season 2 was pretty good, and especially since Karen Page is pretty awesome (and a big improvement over how the character was treated in the comics), but so many damn ninjas–so:
– Yeah, female writers overwhelmingly getting the “but what about the children ” question is bullshit. I mean, what, are women supposed to police themselves against the possibility that someday, some kid will walk up to theirs on the playground with a vicious “your mama wrote about her sexuality in an honest and forthright manner” taunt?
– The bit about avenging Tom Hiddleston reminded me of Gail Simone’s Women in Refrigerators project (it hasn’t been updated for a while, but the point is still largely valid) and the contrast with the way that men in similar situations get treated, Dead Men Defrosted.
– Ditto for Michelle Obama staying in the public spotlight: “You don’t have to be president of the United States to do wonderful and marvelous things.” Indeed.
– SMH at that article about writing for Playboy; I mean, it was pretty obvious that Hefner & Co. found feminism to be an existential threat of sorts, just from the sort of things that the magazine published above and beyond the pictorials, but it’s another thing for them to have hired a woman to write on the subject and then to dish out such arrant bullshit. I really have to commend Braudy for sticking it out as long as she did.
– I’ve never seen Crossroads, but the revelation that it was based on Antigone reminds me of finding out that The Warriors was based on Anabasis.
– I have feelings about that snotty Instacart customer that Niela Orr had to deal with; I’m reminded of when I was a janitor and someone working late at the office building wanted me to come back later–they couldn’t say when, exactly, just “later”–and vacuum their office, after I’d moved on to another floor (I had several to tend to), because they couldn’t take a thirty-second break. On the other hand, I also still treasure the reassurance from a great-uncle that I shouldn’t be ashamed of working as a janitor because any job that needed doing was worth doing.
Michelle Obama staying in the public spotlight: “You don’t have to be president of the United States to do wonderful and marvelous things.” Indeed.
My kid, who is five, has recently revealed a Life Goal to get his face on “a dollar bill,” and we have talked about how some people with their faces on the currency were the president, and some were not. “You just have to do something important for the country,” I told him.
“But what IS it? What is the thing I have to do??????”
Be the subject of a hit musical?
He actually expressed a desire to be on the $10 bill !!! But then he decided he would like to share the $2 with Jefferson. I tried to get him to want to be on the $20 but he thinks (and I quote) “Hillary Clinton should share the twenty-dollar-bill with Jackson.”
No, Jackson should just be gone.
I KNOW! I was trying to push him in that direction. But he would not be swayed!
He also wants to “make them change that rule” that says that only dead people can be depicted on the currency, because he really wants to spend money with his face on it.
He could always become Caesar?
Speaking of Daredevil, i hope you will find this amusing:
I dreamed last night that I was in the second season of Daredevil, and that season one had ended with Matt Murdock losing an arm in a fight. Season two opened with him having developed a cocaine addiction and insisting he was still going to protect the city as Daredevil all alone in spite of me and Foggy trying to convince him to let us help. Eventually I chased Matt down in a hallway, knocked him down, sat on his chest and just screamed at him “WOULD YOU JUST LET US CREATE A SUPPORT NETWORK FOR YOU? ALSO GO TO THERAPY JESUS CHRIST GO TO THERAPY.”
So if you want to know how I would react to self-sacrificing superheroes, it is by sitting on them and yelling at them to get therapy.
( I still haven’t seen the last two episodes of the first season, so as far as I know my dream is canon.)
This is actually very close to what happened to DC Comics character Roy Harper, aka Speedy (unfortunate name for someone who ended up as an addict), Arsenal, and Red Arrow, in a plot line before they rebooted their entire universe. His poison was heroin, and at one point he hallucinates that a dead cat that he found in an alley was his recently-deceased daughter, which led to a number of parodies, including this one (guest-starring Ray Smuckles from Achewood):
A friend informed me of this as well! I’ve barely heard of Speedy, so I like how my subconscious just decided to add an actual comic book plot to my dream.
I work at a prestigious university, and sometimes an unfamiliar person comes into our office looking for me, and I cannot even tell you the overwhelming relief I feel when the unfamiliar person turns out to be, like, the delivery guy or the janitor instead of a faculty member. Every time I have ever interacted with a campus employee doing physical labor, it has been a pleasant experience, and most of the times I have interacted with faculty in my professional capacity have been terrifying and deeply unpleasant experiences. Love and respect to the janitors!
Does anyone have experience with making animated gifs? I made my first ones last night using gifcam and gimp. I really need to refine my technique because they turned out pretty grainy, but when I google for directions most of the tutorials are too cursory. Don’t just throw out “yeah you need to unoptimize before you start deleting frames or else you’ll be left with garbage” and not explain what any of that means, or be like “yeah we added some new features to gifcam, they’re called this, that, and the other thing” without going into what those things mean and why I would want to use them!
So, uhh. Does anyone know any good beginner-level tutorials?
I’ve only ever done it with photoshop where you import frames as layers and then animate the layers.
Seconding doing it in Photoshop, imagine Gimp could do the same but I find it very tricky to navigate.
I am super proud of this one I made for my newsletter that shows gummi worm manufacturing. Not sure exactly what tutorial I used but this one looks pretty solid.
Good luck!
Thanks! I’m actually making the gifs using gifcam (at the moment my only interest is in making gifs of Portia de Rossi in Better off Ted), but I couldn’t figure out how to use the resize function so I’ve been resizing them in GIMP. They end up looking very grainy, though, and I really want to do Portia de Rossi justice.
I can provide no help, but wanted to wish you the best of luck in this very important endeavor.
Very important
Such a noble act! I hope you can sort away through it.
*Heads off to rewatch all the Better Off Ted*
That gummi worm gif is mesmerizing…
RIght?! There’s a whole gummi How It’s Made you should probably watch.
doing anything at all in GIMP is the kind of shit they cut out of Saw movies for being too nauseating. Adobe has CS2 free for download, and while they didn’t get too graceful at animation until CS4 or so there’s a ton of tutorials on it online
I have Photoshop Elements 6, but get an error message when I try to open the gif file. I’ll try downloading CS2, but I’m not sure how well it’ll run on Windows 10.
Oh if you’re importing an animation both of those are before Photoshop properly incorporated Imageready, which is what breaks down each frame of the gif into layers. CS2 provides both, as separate programs.
if you’re getting a straight up ‘can’t open it’ error, the file’s corrupted, though
Yeah, I’ve figured out how to open the gif in ImageReady and then edit in photoshop. I hadn’t realized Elements was going to present the same problem. CS2 seems like it’s going to do it for me. Thanks for the link!
——– Original message ——–
Not wrong about yearning for a reversal in Night Manager. At least Hiddleston’s woman handler also wants justice for the Egyptian woman.
The piece on women writers helped me put into words how I felt about a recent situation.
I guess a few weeks ago Kim Kardashian posted some explicit pictures of herself online. I assume this happened because my newsfeed on Facebook blew up with people posting things (in mock open letters to her) saying that ‘you’re a mother now, have more respect for yourself and your kid.’ Normally, I don’t care what Kim Kardashian does and I blissfully go through many days forgetting that she is even on this planet. But something about how my usually feminist friends were chiding her made me feel a bit weird. And that article helped me nail it on the head.
Apparently people seemed to think that, for Kim, being a mother should make her into the kind of person who doesn’t post sexy pictures online, even though she did so before she had kids and seems to enjoy doing it. But I know that those same people would defend their own and others right to, say, wear a bikini even though they’re ‘moms now’.
I guess it just highlighted to me how fraught women’s sexuality still is.
Women can be a sexual object or a nurturing mother. It’s impossible to be both a nurturing mother and a sexual being. #fact
DAREDEVIL WAS SO GOOD AND IT’S ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT. May or may not have spent all yesterday afternoon rewatching the last four episodes and writing 2,000 words of Frank/Karen hurt-comfort fic.
SAME! Also on the Frank/Karen, that is not a ship I was expecting to ship but here we are!
Same. I think it’s partly because Karen and Matt, try as the actors might, don’t really have the most exciting chemistry.
True. They were definitely cute, but I wasn’t exactly glued to the screen during their scenes.
yessssssss to Frank/Karen I thought I was the only one
Enjoy! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Frank%20Castle*s…
squee
That Breyers Viennetta? My mom and I used to get either one of those or one of those Pepperidge Farm refrigerated white cakes and share them about once a week. I was the youngest of 4 by about 4 years, so most of my high school years it was just the two of us. There was kind of an understood “It’s absolutely absurd that the two of us eat these in one sitting, but I won’t tell if you don’t”.
Something else NOPEworthy…
Six-year-old Madisyn Moore handcuffed and put under a flight of stairs after getting caught stealing candy from her teacher’s desk. Needless to say, her mama was outraged, and I hope she gets all the money when she sues, and that the shitty grownup who abused little Madisyn gets dropkicked out of that school forever.
The worst thing about this is that you have to know that for every parent who busts their ass to get restitution for what no one should have done to their kid in the first place, and every kid who feels able to tell a parent what happened, there are so many more who can’t or won’t. There’s no way that security guard has never done this before.
What the hell. I wonder if that guard is armed? Because that’s definitely someone with judgment good enough to be wielding lethal force.
I hope not, but then again…
WTF??? That is criminal.
What blows my mind is that it seems like none of the other adults at that school–teachers, janitors, anyone–stopped him, or tried to alert administrators to what was going on. At the risk of sounding self-righteous, I would have done something, fuck the bystander effect. That girl is six-years-old, how much impulse control could she possibly have?
This line from the Playboy article is amazing: “When Yoko Ono brought John Lennon to one meeting, women shouted back and forth until he fled.” <3
I have never seen Crossroads, despite being just the right demograpic when it was released, apparently. However, have any other people read the YA book by Britney Spears and her mother? It’s called A Mother’s Gift, is very saccharine and trashy, and I reread it multiple times as a teenager.
For some reason my brother had it in his apartment when I visited him in London! I don’t remember very much about it, though.
Toasts, today is the 30th anniversary of my mum doing all the work to deliver me unto the world! I am 30! People keep going ‘haha, it’s all downhill from here’ which is kind of annoying. But I am all ‘whatever, I spent last weekend at a music festival dancing with my parents until 1 am; you can call time on your sad little lives if you want, but I’m just getting started.’
I am also at work, which is bullshit, but there is cake, which is significantly less bullshit. Yaaaaaaaaaay.
So maybe too late and also more OT worthy but I have an interview at 8am tomorrow morning which I am currently freaking out about. It’s the STAR technique that I rock at when chatting to people at parties and then completely freeze on at interviews – too much detail too early, too self-conscious about fitting the answer into the structure. So instead of working out how to get to the interview or sorting interview clothes or looking at the JD and tweaking work stories to fit, I am reading through all of the internet and trying to ignore my stomach churning.
And then I feel really stupid that I am nearly 42, was headhunted for this role, have lots of relevant experience, and my gut feeling is still that I will Be Found Out.
So any tips for tricking yourself into not hating interviews? Because I would really like to get this job.
How’d it go? I’m sure you were great. Fingers crossed for happy news soon! The waiting part is always horrible.
"teach the people how to say goodbye" dear God i am bawling
i used to spend afternoons after school at my mother's office, and stealing fistfuls of sugar cubes was the greatest rush of pleasure my child self could experience