Where's my mojo @balancinginstilettos - Tumblr Blog

About last night.

Friday! The day of possibilities! Don’t we all love Mister Friday? Turns out, if you are new/newish mom, the answer is no. For you’ll haul your sorry ass from work to home on a Friday evening, prepare dinner for your bub, then get the said bub to sleep by 9 PM and be home bound for the rest of the night. Fridyay? I say, Fridnay. While I was stuck in a humongous traffic snarl (triggered by the one…

View On WordPress

#baking #cheesecake #weekend

explore-blog

The Rabbit Box – a most unusual and breathtaking vintage children’s book for grownups about the mystery of life and the magic of love. Dive in here.

iraffiruse

wetheurban

Self-Portraits, Noell S. Oszvald

With a shadowy and highly conceptual aesthetic, like the images of dreams upon awakening, Hungarian photographer Noell S. Oszvald presents powerful, surreal self-portraits rich in sentiment and composition.

Keep reading

wetheurban

Texts From Your Existentialist

Our new favorite Instagram account (and its accompanying Tumblr), Texts From Your Existentialist, takes advantage of the absurdity of modern life by pairing modern art and film stills with text bubbles containing Nietzschean quips.

Keep reading

Being a mom is pretty special, watching your own mom and your daughter together is even more special. #vscocam

#vscocam

standardmoves

balancinginstilettos

Boy does this look good!

Bear Squat with Twist

3 sets of 15 reps

Dawn Feinberg

Start in plank pose, top of a push up. Start to bend the knees, bringing the shins parallel to the floor, hovering the knees above the floor. Engage through the core and press into the balls of the feet and lift the hips up and twist over to the left, dropping and hovering the left hip towards the floor. Keep the shoulders squared toward the top of the mat, the twist is through the core. Lift back up through center, twist, drop and hover the right hip. That was one rep. Continue this move, going for 15 to 20 reps. Rest and repeat.

Good for core and oblique strength and toning

Standard Moves presented by PUMA

yourmothershouldknow

Valentino Couture Spring 2015

balancinginstilettos

Wow wow wow.

kateoplis

“Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits.”

Tina Fey

100 Years of Body Ideals | More

newyorker

A sketchbook by Roz Chast, in this week’s issue.

balancinginstilettos

Of fitness fads and razor sharp wit!

salon

Chosen People –The term “Chosen People” typically refers to the Hebrew Bible and the ugly idea that God has given certain tribes a Promised Land (even though it is already occupied by other people). But in reality many sects endorse some version of this concept. The New Testament identifies Christians as the chosen ones. Calvinists talk about “God’s elect,” believing that they themselves are the special few who were chosen before the beginning of time. Jehovah’s witnesses believe that 144,000 souls will get a special place in the afterlife. In many cultures certain privileged and powerful bloodlines were thought to be descended directly from gods (in contrast to everyone else).

Heretics – Heretics, kafir, or infidels (to use the medieval Catholic term) are not just outsiders, they are morally suspect and often seen as less than fully human. In the Torah, slaves taken from among outsiders don’t merit the same protections as Hebrew slaves. Those who don’t believe in a god are corrupt, doers of abominable deeds. “There is none [among them] who does good,” says the Psalmist.

Holy War – If war can be holy, anything goes. The medieval Roman Catholic Church conducted a twenty year campaign of extermination against heretical Cathar Christians in the south of France, promising their land and possessions to real Christians who signed on as crusaders. Sunni and Shia Muslims have slaughtered each other for centuries. The Hebrew scriptures recount battle after battle in which their war God, Yahweh, helps them to not only defeat but also exterminate the shepherding cultures that occupy their “Promised Land.” As in later holy wars, like the modern rise of ISIS, divine sanction let them kill the elderly and children, burn orchards, and take virgin females as sexual slaves—all while retaining a sense of moral superiority.

Blasphemy – Blasphemy is the notion that some ideas are inviolable, off limits to criticism, satire, debate, or even question. By definition, criticism of these ideas is an outrage, and it is precisely this emotion–outrage–that the crime of blasphemy evokes in believers. The Bible prescribes death for blasphemers; the Quran does not, but death-to-blasphemers became part of Shariah during medieval times.

Glorified suffering – Picture secret societies of monks flogging their own backs. The image that comes to mind is probably from Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code, but the idea isn’t one he made up. A core premise of Christianity is that righteous torture—if it’s just intense and prolonged enough–can somehow fix the damage done by evil, sinful behavior. Millions of crucifixes litter the world as testaments to this belief.

Genital mutilation – Primitive people have used scarification and other body modifications to define tribal membership for as long as history records. But genital mutilation allowed our ancestors several additional perks—if you want to call them that. Infant circumcision in Judaism serves as a sign of tribal membership, but circumcision also serves to test the commitment of adult converts. In one Bible story, a chieftain agrees to convert and submit his clan to the procedure as a show of commitment to a peace treaty. (While the men lie incapacitated, the whole town is then slain by the Israelites.)

Blood sacrifice – In the list of religion’s worst ideas, this is the only one that appears to be in its final stages. Only Hindus continue toritually hack and slaughter sacrificial animals on a mass scale.

Hell – Whether we are talking about Christianity, Islam or Buddhism, an afterlife filled with demons, monsters, and eternal torture was the worst suffering the Iron Age minds could conceive and medieval minds could elaborate. Invented, perhaps, as a means to satisfy the human desire for justice, the concept of Hell quickly devolved into a tool for coercing behavior and belief.

Karma – Like hell, the concept of karma offers a selfish incentive for good behavior—it’ll come back at you later—but it has enormous costs. Chief among these is a tremendous weight of cultural passivity in the face of harm and suffering. Secondarily, the idea of karma sanctifies the broad human practice of blaming the victim.

Eternal Life – To our weary and unwashed ancestors, the idea of gem encrusted walls, streets of gold, the fountain of youth, or an eternity of angelic chorus (or sex with virgins) may have seemed like sheer bliss. But it doesn’t take much analysis to realize how quickly eternal paradise would become hellish—an endless repetition of never changing groundhog days (because how could they change if they were perfect).

Male Ownership of Female Fertility – The notion of women as brood mares or children as assets likely didn’t originate with religion, but the idea that women were created for this purpose, that if a woman should die of childbearing “she was made to do it,” most certainly did. Traditional religions variously assert that men have a god-ordained right to give women in marriage, take them in war, exclude them from heaven, and kill them if the origins of their offspring can’t be assured.

Bibliolatry (aka Book Worship) – Preliterate people handed down their best guesses about gods and goodness by way of oral tradition, and they made objects of stone and wood, idols, to channel their devotion. Their notions of what was good and what was Real and how to live in moral community with each other were free to evolve as culture and technology changed. But the advent of the written word changed that. As our Iron Age ancestors recorded and compiled their ideas into sacred texts, these texts allowed their understanding of gods and goodness to become static. The sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam forbid idol worship, but over time the texts themselves became idols, and many modern believers practice—essentially—book worship, also known as bibliolatry.

salon

God is seldom great.

sofsocialgood

Find out why 2014 was a banner year for sexism in the media. Watch this video created by the Representation Project, the organization behind the award winning film “Miss Representation.”

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Where's my mojo