Kristina on the Internet.

I'm a multiplatform editor at the Los Angeles Times. This blog is a collection of things I'm reading and things I see around L.A. You can learn more about me on my website or on Twitter.

[k-bui]

[k-bui]

[k-bui]

I believe in a world where impossible things happen. Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature.

Carmen Maria Macahdo, “Her Body and Other Parties”

[k-bui]

I don't walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store. No checking her emails or calling her job to make sure she's actually there. No sitting in my car outside her house at dawn, to make sure she's alone when she leaves. This feels safe, and steadfast, and predictable. And secure. It's boring as shit. And it's easily the best thing I've ever felt.

Samantha Irby, “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life” 

[profeminist]

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Inside the word emergency is emerge; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.

Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”

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Seen walking along the Los Angeles River.

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When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

“A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read,” Ocean Vuong

[k-bui]

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

Ursula K. Le Guin

[k-bui]

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles. People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it. It's very easy to stand L.A., which is why it's almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained, to say nothing of lovers.

Eve Babitz, "Slow Days, Fast Company"

[k-bui]

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A languid Sunday, afternoon turning into evening, evening into night, night to morning.

“I just want to enjoy your nextness and nearness,” O says.

He puts his ear to my chest and listens to my heart and counts the beats.

“Sixty-two,” he says with a satisfied smile, and I can’t imagine anything more intimate.

[k-bui]

Seen in Boyle Heights.

[k-bui]

I'm so glad I was able to see Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss his new book, "The Refugees," at Skylight Books last night. He also read an essay he'd recently published: And I think of my son, nearly the age I was when I became a refugee, and while I do not want him to be afraid, I know he will be. What is important is that he have the strength to overcome his fear. And the way to overcome fear is to demand the America that should be, and can be, the America that dreams the best version of itself.

[k-bui]

Art is the artifact of the imagination, and the imagination is the best manifestation of immortality possessed by the human species, a collective tablet recording both human and inhuman deeds and desires.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, "Nothing Ever Dies"

[k-bui]

I also learned the word dendrochronology — analyzing the patterns of tree rings to know everything that has ever happened to a tree. This is how I love you. I am peeling back my skin, layer by layer, so you will finally know everything inside me.

Roxane Gay, "Difficult Women"

[k-bui]

Walking is nearly alone among all our human activities in its poise between doing something and doing nothing. It is not idleness, and yet as the legs move and the eyes gaze, the mind can roam with a kind of discipline and scope hardly possible in an armchair.

Rebecca Solnit, “Savage Dreams”