Cheers For Fears

My life is super happy and rad

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:31:00 -0500

and I still write about sad things sometimes because it seems like part of the point of writing is to do that. ok.

"Maybe there’s no way to create a coherent code of ethics in an institution designed to sanction some..."

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:58:44 -0500

“Maybe there’s no way to create a coherent code of ethics in an institution designed to sanction some types of killing and to condemn others. Maybe that moral dissonance makes its way into every decision, distorting the military’s approach to situations that have little connection to the battlefield and creating a world in which downloading porn is condemned but there’s little incentive to call a rape a rape — let alone support the survivors, prosecute the cases properly, or change the fact that one in five military women has been sexually assaulted. Even Panetta recognizes it’s an “outrage.””

- Four Generals, Four Scandals, and a Sprawling Rape Case - NYmag.com / The Cut (via annfriedman)

A friend of mine was raped while serving in Iraq. She reported it, there was a sham of an investigation, nothing happened to the guy, and she was ostracized within her unit (“At least I was able to hang on for an honorable discharge,” she says now, truly happy about this in a way that only a true soldier could be).

I talked to her last week, in part because she idolized David Petraeus and I wanted to know how she was feeling about the whole thing. She was pissed that a hero of hers would do something with even a remote possibility of creating a security breach (again, a soldier to the end, and a real stickler for rules in the best way). But the more she talked, the more it sounded like what she was actually upset about was that Petraeus’ consensual sex was getting so much attention while the military’s sexual assault epidemic (ONE IN FIVE women in the military have been assaulted!) is ignored completely. “Paula Broadwell seems to mean a whole lot more to them than I ever did,” she said.

It was hard to disagree.

(via megangreenwell)

Important addendum.

(via annfriedman)

Those who say they are leaving the country because Obama got re-elected are going to have a hard time finding another first-world country without universal healthcare.

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:17:08 -0500

rachelrantsandschtuff:

Look! I found y’all a map. The grey countries are the ones without universal healthcare.

Have fun!

The Chick Hearn Society: My 10 favorite Lakers of All-Time. #3

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:04:00 -0400

The Chick Hearn Society: My 10 favorite Lakers of All-Time. #3:

READ THIS EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT A SPORTS PERSON IT IS ABOUT LOVE AND NO BULLYING

thechickhearnsociety:

Lamar Odom

Lamar is very big for me for a couple of reasons. 1) Lamar married Armenian, smart. and b) Lamar was essentially the face of what the Lakers got in exchange for Shaq. Also, I believe Lamar to be the exact opposite of Kobe Bryant in every way. Lamar was open and self aware and…

amayajoinedtumblr: This is fantastic and so is...

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:07:58 -0400

amayajoinedtumblr:

This is fantastic and so is @guybranum

Completing the loop; I’ve shared this on every networking thing I use. Watch it, it is so so so good for you

The sun owns spring and summer, but it gave up fall and winter to the moon. The moon is what gathers...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 02:06:30 -0400

The sun owns spring and summer, but it gave up fall and winter to the moon.

The moon is what gathers light from light, and hands it over as a comfort to the dark.

There is more of moon, in the best of human nature, than of sun.

alisonagosti: The Glaucus atlanticus, also known as the Blue...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 23:12:49 -0400

alisonagosti:

The Glaucus atlanticus, also known as the Blue Sea Slug, Sea Swallow and Blue Dragon Sea Slug.

Brett Easton Ellis V. ...David Foster Wallace?

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 14:14:17 -0400

Subtitle, “And why it’s hilariously apt that he’s fighting with a dead man”

Maybe you heard Bret Easton Ellis went on a twitter-rant against David Foster “literally deceased” Wallace. If not, good for you. Let’s go to the park and smell things and kiss. If so, well:

I read a not altogether crappy article in Salon (link to follow) by a gentleman who has edited both authors, and has this to say:

““Infinite Jest” […] sounded the first notes of a quest for an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David’s generation and the ones that followed.

I find Bret Ellis’ scalding, cynical, brittle, savagely unillusioned worldview curiously refreshing. He is the Loki or Trickster of the literary world (or maybe the Lou Reed), poking sharp sticks in our eyes and daring us to figure out if he could possibly mean that. Deal with it. He’s incorrigible, he’s not a nice boy, he doesn’t care if you become a better person, he is not in any way seeking your approval. Good for him. Some brave college should ask him to do a commencement address.”

Here’s what I think.

Even if Ellis’s antisocial content is insincere, his aggressive insincerity is antisocial, and society is in trouble. Which he wouldn’t notice, since, as a white male, he occupies the single most protected and privileged demographic on the planet. When this self-secure antisocial behavior is cast as toughness or stoicism, I want to puke out my reasoning brain so it can’t flood me with indignant cries of “who are you to even talk about toughness? Who are you to decide what constitutes a joke? Do you think your toughness made you liberal with dark humor, or was it only your relative unfamiliarity with dark experiences?” Darkness is not theoretical, or “conceptual,” to unprotected and marginalized people—and its exploitation doesn’t tickle, it hurts. Did you know that a tickling sensation is the way nerve endings register low-level pain? And maybe what’s low level for a white man isn’t low level for a person who has had actual threats directed at them.

I don’t want to say that Wallace is the antithesis of this, but at least he made an effort, and tried to lend his gifts to compassion. I’m afraid if you want the actual antithesis, you might have to read some Toni Morrison or something. You might have to embrace some affect, learn to feel again, since the more protected you are, the more of life is numbness, and the further you’ll go for just a tickle.

Okay.

If you want to read the other article: (http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_know_why_bret_easton_ellis_hates_david_foster_wallace/)

girlsgonegoldberg: bohemea: Anjelica Huston & Liza...

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:17:57 -0400

girlsgonegoldberg:

bohemea:

Anjelica Huston & Liza Minnelli, 1975

DREAMS

I want to farm with them

Holy crap. Lindsay Ames also got me my first cooking job,...

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:03:58 -0400

Holy crap. Lindsay Ames also got me my first cooking job, because she is a magic all-purpose lady wizard

laurenashleybishop:

davetotheross:

Lindsay Ames is way too good at stuff.

ames is my hero

One thing about where I grew up

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 01:31:00 -0400

Next to my driveway, there was a cherry tree with magenta flowers. I picked them in bunches. Closer to the street towered a fern tree; that reminded me of dinosaur-times. There were two hulking pines near the front door of the house, and grass wouldn’t grow in their shade. I would sweep the hard dirt of needles and soil dust until it was bare and all but shone. That made it one of my outdoor homes, in games with the neighbor girl, Kirsten.

The branches of those pines grew out straight and horizontal. They could support your weight, especially when you weighed 80 pounds or less. It was hardly climbing to make your way up to roof height, hands sticky with half-dried sap. You did not make the mistake of de-sapping your hands by licking them, not after your first try, because the taste was like burnt sugar, soap and earthworms.

The neighbors had thievable flowers. On the right, the Grothes’ towering forsythia, which had to be torn off the shaking bush with both hands. On the left, the revolving-door house—it couldn’t seem to keep a family in it—which had a tree whose whole top mass looked like pink cotton candy in tons of little tufts. These flowers were so soft they should have been collected, and slept on. Every time a new family moved in, I became newly nervous about jumping up and down in their yard, grabbing a branch, pulling it down, and tearing off twigfulls of flowers. None of the residents ever said anything, which was good. They’d have an easier time keeping me away from a tree loaded to sagging with wrapped Christmas presents.

Daffodils behind the Mackin’s house, pussywillows by our cul de sac’s big shared mailbox. And on the way to school there was a full block of crabapple trees. The fallen fruit drew bees in solid numbers; the apples were inedible, and melted into vinegar on the sidewalk.

And everywhere, there were wildflowers, of course. Lots of weeds, skunk weed, umbrella weeds, weeds with flowers. Dandelions. Buttercups that left a yellow grease-smear on your skin if you rubbed them. Pale star-shaped flowers—not a quarter inch across, and perfect, like dollhouse miniatures of stargazer lilies. Solid and spotted violets swarmed, free from pots or gardens.

Probably best though, were the tiger lilies. In the summer the Maryland thunderstorms—we’d lost more than one tree to lightning—flooded the creek into a powerful torrent, and the banks would spring out with thousands of angry orange tiger lilies that you had to walk through the woods to get to. The woods’ near wall was at our yard’s edge, and immediately upon entering there’d be nowhere to stand. Walking through the pathless woods was stomping and tearing through. The lilies abutted the trees and then grew so thick that there was nowhere to stand while you picked them. I was still a girl’s girl, and I loved to come home with anything that could be arranged in a vase.

But with all these flowers, for me, did not come a place to roll like a happy dog or spring lovers. The flowers were themselves perilous, having untold mites and tunneling bees and tough stubborn stalks and stems. The woods began thirty feet behind my house, and they were both treacherous and potent. You might find strawberries back there but you’d definitely find wolf spiders, and you could train a tangled grove into an idyllic suite—a cave with vines and trees for walls—but the next summer you’d never recognize it. There’d be no hint that human children had exerted their wills here, nine hours a day every day for a week, unless perhaps you found plastic trinkets hung for the intention of decorating house. Somehow we had amassed a collection of a dozen or so plastic L.A. Gear sneaker tags on little chains; the tags had rhinestones on them and were pretty enough to hang from twigs, to show that this was civilization.

But like I said, we couldn’t maintain it against the floating dirt, and the rain, and the moving vines, and when we came back even the tags were underfoot, under leaves and twigs and a film of crusted dirt, as though someone had purposefully come in, undone, and redone our work—on the woods’ behalf.

Winter was odd in that way. The neighborhood kids did not organize in the same numbers to keep the woods at bay. We all had school and it got dark at four o’clock or so, and the woods were dry and scratchy then; more hostile, less balanced. The bugs were gone but so were the leaves. Sometimes after school, or on a weekend, I’d make a solo mission back to a summer haunt, find it a hot mess, and spend an hour or two neatening up as best I could. I’d head indoors feeling I’d accomplished something, cleared some clutter, reasserted some of the shapes of the space, and cleaned house in a more meaningful way than my parents did. Having done so I would agitate for my parents to come out and see, just as I would after having cleaned my bedroom unprompted, but with greater pride of authorship in the forest-room.

We—Kirsten and I—were comprehensive on our attempts to make these rooms real homes. We definitely made a toilet out of a cement mixing bucket, and tucked it to the side. We perched on fallen logs and ate leaves: oak and maple and walnut and whatever looked fresh and wasn’t poison ivy. We found the funny yard-onions that grew with the regular grass, looking like scallions, and which might even have been escapees from some garden, and we smelled them and then pierced their slender juicy white bulbs (with their tufty goatees of roots) with our fingernails until our hands smelled rancid. I would bite one once in a while, permitting the hated onion flavor to spread thin and invasive in my mouth, because it had come out of the ground, growing freely, and there was a value to that. Meanwhile, I would never have eaten real, on-purpose, garden onions, because onions were disgusting.

My dad kept a limited garden, compared to Mr. Grothe’s hand-built terraces full of flowering bushes, all purposefully landscaped. My dad grew tomatoes. And bell peppers, and a little zucchini. The strawberries we picked up at Home Depot didn’t like the dirt in the thin strip that lay alongside our house. Or maybe they didn’t like the Maryland weather, but they always ended up white, sour; snappish and tiny. Even so, birds or squirrels or mice were always at the albino berries, leaving little dirty craters.

But it was good, we were proud of all the fledgling plants and of our huge swarthy Dad, in shorts and brown shoes and garden gloves, who knelt and sweated and made food happen, in the fridge or in the dirt. I brought him 32-oz plastic cups (collectors cups from Oriole Stadium) full of ultra-iced water. The condensation on the cup helped wash the dry dirt from his hands.

* * *

I spent summer days outside, and kept the woods in line, and made things out of clay from the creek, until Kirsten got to junior high and quit playing outside. Around then I start to remember a lot more TV shows. Cartoons and Nickelodeon. Staying in, making cookies with my little sister. Summer was still fun, but the woods started to seem dirtier and dirtier; either from lack of child-maintenance, or because my tolerance declined. By now, as far as I know, it’s only the LA Gear tags out there, holding down the fort.

Old Man Weldon: My Friend And Fellow Comedian Adam Wrote Something...

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:36:39 -0400

Old Man Weldon: My Friend And Fellow Comedian Adam Wrote Something...:

oldmanweldon:

…about the health care law. Of course, a very dumb discussion occurred between some comics on Twitter, because we’re comics and it’s twitter. But I didn’t engage, because even I need to take the occasional hyperbolic flame war off, and also because I give a shit about social and economic justice….

American Aquarium Drinker: Alright.

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:42:13 -0400

American Aquarium Drinker: Alright.:

well done

daveholmes:

I’m reading the NYTimes’ coverage of the Aurora shootings, and this quote jumped out at me:

Luke O’Dell of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a Colorado group on the other side of the debate over gun control, took a nearly opposite view. “Potentially, if there had been a law-abiding citizen who…

I ruv roo electricband sleaterkitty: sleepy sleater-kitty are...

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:45:49 -0400

I ruv roo electricband

sleaterkitty:

sleepy sleater-kitty

are you even kidding me right now?

Love letter 2 Virginia Woolf

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 04:29:00 -0400

I can understand why Virginia Woolf would have chosen a river to sink into.

I think of Lily sitting at a dinner table surrounded by competing voices.

considering to herself the placement of a tree, in a painting no one but herself cared to create.

Deciding to move the tree “rather more to the middle,” though they all were talking, and had wants of each other, and of her, and none of them knew or cared about the tree.

Hard work, to fight for a tree that only exists for you, to decide where to fix it, what spot to fix it to, while you’re surrounded by such relentless movement.

Movement, voices, and the

teams of teeming thoughtless

agreement rushing each other along,

swirling each other forward in

a faithful flood.

Now resist it all.

And stand still in the flood, or move contrary to the motion, or move rather to the middle and fix yourself there.

While they speak and plan, you’ll make plans for your tree; it is your tree.

How long can you plan alone for a tree before you need rest too badly to continue?

A fifty-years’ flood would wear out a tree, let alone a woman, even a woman of extraordinary vision! Virginia! She filled her pockets with rocks, yes? And walked into the moving water, and sank, and stayed.

I don’t approve.

I’m pained, I miss her, we need each other. I’m pained she’s gone,

but I understand.

We have to speak, to hear each other.

We have to make a grove, and stretch our tender roots, and stay.

The trees in the everglades share a root structure, and live

inundated that way.

They slow even the water with their stillness.

They feel the ground together.

They stay in touch, staying still like that.

a fight

Tue, 01 May 2012 21:02:55 -0400

a fight

I made a music video with my cat you should pay attention to...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:04:41 -0500

I made a music video with my cat you should pay attention to what we’re doing

My dad’s making eggs.Me: If you cracked open one of those eggs and a baby chick fell out dead,...

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:41:00 -0400

My dad’s making eggs.

Me: If you cracked open one of those eggs and a baby chick fell out dead, would you start to cry?
My dad: Only after I stopped screaming.

Someone should take a cross section of things I say to my mom and things I say to my cat, and...

Tue, 03 May 2011 20:25:00 -0400

Someone should take a cross section of things I say to my mom and things I say to my cat, and compare to see who I’m nicer to. I think you’ll find I’m fairly forgiving of having my bed peed on, provided you “please quit fucking looking at me like that”

K, lets talk.

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 23:34:09 -0400

Wuss Me (head in my hands) : I can’t be cool ALL the time.

Hardass Me: Can’t or WON’T??
(banks a crushed beer can off Wuss Me’s forehead and into the wastebasket)

Wuss Me (head in hands): That was recyclable.

Cheers For Fears

My life is super happy and rad

"Maybe there’s no way to create a coherent code of ethics in an institution designed to sanction some..."

Those who say they are leaving the country because Obama got re-elected are going to have a hard time finding another first-world country without universal healthcare.

The Chick Hearn Society: My 10 favorite Lakers of All-Time. #3

amayajoinedtumblr: This is fantastic and so is...

The sun owns spring and summer, but it gave up fall and winter to the moon. The moon is what gathers...

alisonagosti: The Glaucus atlanticus, also known as the Blue...

Brett Easton Ellis V. ...David Foster Wallace?

girlsgonegoldberg: bohemea: Anjelica Huston & Liza...

Holy crap. Lindsay Ames also got me my first cooking job,...

One thing about where I grew up

Old Man Weldon: My Friend And Fellow Comedian Adam Wrote Something...

American Aquarium Drinker: Alright.

I ruv roo electricband sleaterkitty: sleepy sleater-kitty are...

Love letter 2 Virginia Woolf

a fight

I made a music video with my cat you should pay attention to...

My dad’s making eggs.Me: If you cracked open one of those eggs and a baby chick fell out dead,...

Someone should take a cross section of things I say to my mom and things I say to my cat, and...

K, lets talk.

Wuss Me (head in my hands) : I can’t be cool ALL the time. Hardass Me: Can’t or WON’T??(banks a crushed beer can off Wuss Me’s forehead and into the wastebasket)Wuss Me (head in hands): That was recyclable.

Wuss Me (head in my hands) : I can’t be cool ALL the time.

Hardass Me: Can’t or WON’T??
(banks a crushed beer can off Wuss Me’s forehead and into the wastebasket)

Wuss Me (head in hands): That was recyclable.