@chaaaarlotte - Tumblr Blog

Hey tumblr. Long time, no see.

Every few months, I have to work an overnight shift which inevitably leads to me staying up as late as I can the night before. This time, that pre-overnight late night preoccupation has led me here.

Since you last heard from me, some things have happened. I finished grad school. I cut off all my hair. I became an aunt. Did some traveling. Turned 30. I adopted a cat. He’s orange. I moved a couple times. Still call Chicago home for now. I started to tell you that Rachael and I moved in together but then I realized I hadn't even met her last time I was ‘round this corner of the internet so that would mean very little to this rightfully unengaged audience but hey, we did.

Things are good. I am happy.

Please enjoy this photo of me at Badlands National Park, and say hello should you feel so inclined.

#hi #or something #badlands national park

naomicollet

Edward Hopper

2am, listening to Cat Power, writing something decidedly non-academic for the first time in months HEY SUMMER LET’S GET CRAZY

#cat power #the greatest

New digs

npr

Men who worked on oil rigs lived by certain rules. They were tough. They worked under any conditions. They didn’t ask questions. It was this way as far back as Tommy Chreene, who started working on rigs in the Gulf of Mexico back when he was 14, can remember.

Back then, it wasn’t unusual to see someone die on an oil rig. Chreene remembers the death of one man who had just finished a shift. He was standing before an enormous pipe that the workers twisted into the ground and held in place with a handle. The man kicked the handle, and the tension on the pipe released. It caught the man’s ankle as it whipped around.

“In about three seconds, it spun him around about 80 times,” Chreene says. A few feet from the man was a post, and “his head was hitting that post like a rotten tomato.”

They got 15 minutes to mourn after watching their friend and colleague die, but that was it. “I mean, that hole cost a lot of money,” he says. “We got to go to work.”

Even though the men faced the risk of death every day, Chreene says they never showed any vulnerability. This made the work even more perilous, because the men didn’t ask for help, didn’t admit if they weren’t up to a certain job.

Invisibilia: How Learning To Be Vulnerable Can Make Life Safer

Photos: Edmund D. Fountain for NPR and Phil Carter/Courtesy of Shell

chaaaarlotte

Invisibilia is so, so good and I am so, so glad it is back.

Yesterday, I spent my entire shift sitting in front of a computer with nothing to do. Between the hours of 4 and 9pm, I answered the phone only 6 times but watched this Vine approximately 7 million.

Can’t stop daydreaming about a new apartment (1 month away), starting my internship (3 months away), getting a tattoo (??? away), finishing my master’s (13 months away), quitting my job (at least a year away) and moving to Seattle or New Orleans or Denver or... (same)

Some of it gives me a lot of anxiety in a excited/nervous knot-in-my-stomach kind of way and I should probably (definitely) be living more in the present but sometimes that is very difficult.

What are y’all daydreaming about lately?

librarysciences

Walk me home.

a-joyfuljourney

Six years ago today, I made the greatest, most irresponsible decision of my life. Happy anniversary, monster! (at Vanderbilt University)

good

Meet the Ovarian Psycos, an all-women bike crew running gentrifiers out of their LA neighborhood.

chaaaarlotte

Very into everything about this.

roaring-softly

Final thing for Mindy, a favorite essay by Nora Ephron!

lettering by tyler feder

chaaaarlotte

Tomorrow (or, today?) I have to work from 8pm to 5am so I forced myself into vampire life tonight, and I did that by watching Everything is Copy, the Nora Ephron documentary on HBO. It’s really great. This woman is a hero, a national treasure, a force to be reckoned with. She makes me want to challenge everything I know and to know everything that challenges me. She makes me want to write. She makes me want to be in love, and not necessarily with a person but with a life. In an essay about what she’ll miss when she dies, she listed “the concept of waffles.” She gets me.

I’m going to bed now but you should read some Ephron. Or watch the doc. Or just watch Sleepless in Seattle.

npr

NPR Ed’s first web comic is about a great art teacher who believes art can teach his students how to build their dreams, and change the world.

A Great Teacher, Illustrated

Illustrations: LA Johnson/NPR

chaaaarlotte

❤️

I mean no disrespect to the people of Cleveland, who I'm sure are a fine people and a spiritual people, but Cleveland ain't ever gonna be Memphis.

Sam Phillips

#basketball rock and roll crossover sass

yes.

I mean, yes.

I’m going back through my tumblr (like a goddamn narcissist) and came across this post, which was made three years ago, almost to the day. It’s incredible how you can find yourself again in ways you never imagined, not because you thought them impossible but because you never even entertained the idea.

Nothing is infinite, not even loss.