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Edna O’Brien, ‘The Country Girl’

It is the only time that I am thankful for being a woman, that time of evening when I draw the curtains, take off my old clothes, and prepare to go out. Minute by minute the excitement grows. I brush my hair under the light and the colors are autumn leaves in the sun. I shadow my eyelids with black stuff and am astonished by the look of mystery it gives to my eyes. I hate being a woman. Vain and shallow and superficial. Tell a woman that you love her and she’ll ask you to write it down so that she can show it to her friends. But I am happy at that time of night. I feel tender toward the world, I pet the wallpaper as if it were white rose petals flushed pink at the edges; I pick up my old, tired shoes and they are silver flowers that some man has laid outside my door. I kissed myself in the mirror and ran out of the room, happy and hurried and suitably mad.

#ednaobrien

myszko

Jeffrey Eugenides interviews Zadie Smith for The New York Times

chatpo

As if certainty were a good thing!

palmandlaser

Erno Tromp, from JCA Annual 5 (1984)

thnkfilm

reallifemagazine

Clamshell compact e-reader, It Follows.

frankocean

I read in the paper that my brothers are being thrown from rooftops blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs for violating sharia law. I heard the crowds stone these fallen men if they move after they hit the ground. I heard it’s in the name of God. I heard my pastor speak for God too, quoting scripture from his book. Words like abomination popped off my skin like hot grease as he went on to describe a lake of fire that God wanted me in. I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month. I heard the gunman feigned dead among all the people he killed. I heard the news say he was one of us. I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a faggot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty. That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t. Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else. Many don’t see anything wrong with passing down the same old values that send thousands of kids into suicidal depression each year. So we say pride and we express love for who and what we are. Because who else will in earnest? I daydream on the idea that maybe all this barbarism and all these transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here. Reality by comparison looks grey, as in neither black nor white but also bleak. We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?

pnw-chaplain

A study on masculinity and aggression from the University of South Florida found that innocuous – yet feminine – tasks could produce profound anxiety in men. As part of the study, a group of men were asked to perform a stereotypically feminine act – braiding hair in this case - while a control group braided rope. Following the act, the men were given the option to either solve a puzzle or punch a heavy bag. Not surprisingly, the men who performed the task that threatened their masculinity were far more likely to punch the bag; again, violence serving as a way to reestablish their masculine identity. A follow-up had both groups punch the bag after braiding either hair or rope; the men who braided the hair punched the bag much harder. A third experiment, all the participants braided hair, but were split into two groups: those who got to punch the bag afterwards and those who didn’t. The men who were prevented from punching the bag started to show acute signs of anxiety and distress from not being able to reconfirm their masculinity.

Doctor Nerdlove, “When Masculinity Fails Men” (via aldoushuxley)

this is terrifying

(via transylvanian-concubine)

fashion-and-film

Sex and the City (1999)

aegisshim

as i get deeper into my 20s i identify more and more as a carrie

chatpo

Just wait til you're 30, baby. As I age my respect for this show deepens, since it is above all about women having deep friendships they refuse to give up on in their 30s. Bless.

aliveandfullofjoy

Well, I’m deeply frustrated all the time. All my plays usually follow a two-year-period of deep frustration and not-writing and there’s usually an aha moment that surfaces gurgling from the pit of despair I’ve fallen into and unlocks the play for me after I’ve convinced myself that I will never write a play again. But I had an aha moment, I guess in my late 20s, when I stopped thinking about What Kind of Play I Wanted to Write and What Kind of Writer I Wanted to Be. I just gave up. I accepted the fact that I’m a little stupid. That I don’t know exactly what I want to say. That I don’t know what kind of theatre I want to make. That I don’t know how to classify it. I stopped thinking strategically. I stopped trying to prove to people that I was smart through my writing. I stopped trying to write stuff that I thought other people would like. And all that followed a long period of bad writing and deep, deep frustration with the fact that my talent couldn’t live up to my taste. I mean, it still doesn’t.

Annie Baker (via aliveandfullofjoy)