Diana Daum

YA novelist, D.C. bureaucrat, progressive, and pop culture obsessive.

[dianadaum]

Can you make a list of good things writing does for you? How it makes you feel? A short list for me, for example, would be: • Helps me clarify my thoughts and feelings • Keeps me company when I feel bored or alone • Gives me a sense of accomplishment when I finish a project, or even just for the day Look at your list. Do you want to lose access to all those positive things? Make your writing about no one else but yourself. Do not write for an imagined audience. Do not write for a distant panel of judges. When you sit down to write, every day, announce to yourself something like (but less corny, obviously), “I am writing this for the love of writing.” You could even put it on the top of the page. You could even write it 100 times in a row. Until you believe it again.

Jami Attenberg

[dianadaum]

The Democratic Party is deeply flawed, and like so many others in this big unruly tent, I will continue to criticize and interrogate it. I will also continue to push it to be better, to have more moral clarity, and to refuse the status quo. But when I looked at the other members of the tent on display Tuesday night, I felt real solidarity for the first time in years. The Dems might always be in disarray: sloppy, unwieldy, corny, off message. But the alternative — and the homogeneity, compromise, and willful blindness that accompanies it — doesn’t feel like the future. It feels, overwhelmingly, irrefutably, like the past we’ve already left behind.

Anne Helen Petersen

[dianadaum]

All of us are out here dating trying to find someone whose parents fucked them up in a compatible way with our fuck up. We're all looking for compatible fuck ups.

Jared Fried on ‎A Beautiful Podcast to Fall In Love

[dianadaum]

Every person I talked to was now two people, the one who was nice to me because I was thin, and the person who had been mean to me when I was fat. I was also two people: the fat person who felt like everyone was better than me, and who was so scared to walk across a room, or even stand up, and now, the thin person, who did not know how to manage the exhilaration of suddenly not feeling that way, and of sometimes even feeling superior to people.

Sarah Miller

[dianadaum]

Your life will not change if you keep pretending that you are a passenger in it.

Captain Awkward

[dianadaum]

She’s also bluntly unromantic, which may come as a shock to fans who swooned over the ideal of a boyfriend she created. She divorced when her children were young, around the same time she started writing novels, and she’s never had interest in marrying again. “I make up the perfect guy. There’s a reason it’s hard to find him: because they don’t exist, honey,” she said while heating store-bought soup in the immaculately clean ranch house where she’s emphatically happy to live alone.

“Lurlene McDaniel has made a career of making people cry”

[dianadaum]

I think, as adult women, we’re always walking with our younger selves. I feel like I’m always answering to her, about whether I’m being as brave as I could be, or as big as I could be, or as ambitious as I could be.

Greta Gerwig

[dianadaum]

You could say I identified with Lloyd because he’s a journalist, but I think I mostly identified with him because he’s an adult human in a society where we’re told, from a young age, that the best way to fix something is to work harder. We swallow existential questions, and the despair or wonder that blooms from them, and work. Fear of losing a job, fear of losing a parent, fear of being a bad parent — instead of sitting with those feelings, again, we work. Because work means money, and money brings a modicum of stability, and relief, however temporary, from that same fear. Work doesn’t actually give us peace or solve our problems. But for a lot of us, it’s what we’re good at and what we know, which is far more comforting than staring at the abyss of what we don’t.

Anne Helen Petersen, “Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul”

[legogradstudent]

Ordering an irresponsible number of items via online shopping, the grad student temporarily distracts himself from his feelings of emptiness.

[dianadaum]

I finished my Ph.D. four years ago (HOW HAS IT BEEN THAT LONG? I JUST DID THE MATH AND I AM SHOOK) but this is the most relatable Lego Grad Student I’ve ever seen.

[lastnightsreading]

Sharlene Teo at  Columbia Global Center, Paris, 11/13/19

[dianadaum]

Zuckerberg (she wanted to be known as “Zuck,” but it sounded too much like “suck,” which launched a thousand bad blow-job jokes) attempted to create an app that would allow her to rank boys at Harvard. She wanted to rank them on their integrity, honesty, and kindness, so there was no market for it. Unable to get funding, she gave up and took a programming job at Google instead. She was the best programmer in her class, but, still, rumor has it that she got the job because they needed more women.

Ginny Hogan, “Origin Stories of Tech Companies if Their Founders Had Been Women”

[dianadaum]

Our relationship, like many, has a sell-by date, so we sell it. We quietly disappear from one another’s lives, and we nurse the little paper cuts left behind by our friendship. I leave feeling strangely used. I felt like a friend that, as my grandfather would say, was picked “strictly from hunger”: the only woman he felt he could talk to without wanting to bed. A woman too fat to be hurt. I was good enough to be a clumsy emotional midwife, but not good enough to keep. My role in his life had been purely functional: an emotional release, but never a true friend.

Your Fat Friend, “The Quiet Harm of #TransformationTuesday”

[dianadaum]

To my other friends, I described her as someone you couldn’t count on to remember a birthday but the one I’d call if I needed a black-market kidney. What I meant was that she was someone to write about, and that was what I wanted most of all.

Natalie Beach, “I Was Caroline Calloway”

[dianadaum]

Who looks satisfied, relaxed, unhurried, self-possessed? Cut a wide swath around them, they are not marriage-able. Who looks jittery, anxious, paranoid, half-conscious, confused? Sidle up to these humans, for they are exactly the long-suffering types who crave marital companionship and all of the sadomasochistic hedge mazes it entails.

Ask Molly, “How to Get Married Immediately”

[dianadaum]

Avoid men for now, but when you do see them, be the client. Show up and remain unimpressed. If you must partake at all, demand the Elite Platinum Frequent Cryer tier of service, which includes access to the VIP Emotionally Inconsistent Lounge where members are either cackling and playing hearts or they’re railing endlessly about their heartless parents while filling a wastebasket with snotty tissues.

Ask Molly, “Stark Contrasts”

[dianadaum]

Now, generally speaking, I don’t always buy all of this noise around emotional vampires, which often doubles as a way of painting similarly clueless aliens as soulless ghouls intent on feeding on your life force and leaving you to die. I also don’t think it’s smart to view men whose damage might just match your damage as inherent predators or sworn enemies. But when you’re treated like a sack of neuroses cleverly disguised by tits, when you’ve turned against your own gifts because some damaged dipshit told you the good things about you were Very Bad, it’s pretty goddamn hard not to write off 80% of the population for being blood-thirsty monsters. Just try to understand the forces working on you at all times. It pays to be safe and a little paranoid, but it also pays to notice that most people are just squish and confusion inside, with less evil in the mix than you think.

Ask Molly, “Stark Contrasts”

[dianadaum]

You’ve overcorrected your supposedly bad personality. You probably relied on a bunch of much older assholes with bad personalities to tell you what was wrong with you. Even though they never took a serious look at their own enormous flaws, they were happy to list yours, and their lists were made up of 80% projections of their own flaws and damage, and 20% pissy little insults motivated by the fact that you wouldn’t fuck them. Nevertheless, you took this bad information to heart. These dicks told you to build a fucking fence around your personality, and you did it.

Ask Molly, “Stark Contrasts”