a strange arrangement

We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.

[pockets-blog]

Whenever someone says they don’t understand why diversity and representation on the screen is such a big deal, I tell them this story. When I was in grade three, I once spent an entire with my eyes opened as wide as possible. If I was directing the movie of my life, this is how it would be played out. The audience sees me from behind as I enter the school. The doors open and the unmistakable intro of Jumpin’ Jumpin by Destiny’s Child’s blasts through the speakers. The perspective then changes to mine and the audience sees the general populace of the school frozen in their activities with mouths agape. “Excuse me boys”, I say as I move gracefully and confidently through a group of my male class mates. I walk into the girl’s bathroom and up to a sink to wash my hands, the camera never quite catching my face. I look up into the mirror and there’s the reveal. Looking back is a small girl with, what can only be described as, a crazed expression on her face. Eyebrows raised so high they’re basically at my hair line and eyes so wide I look like I’m in a permanent state of shock. And I love it. Yes, it’s a little bit a tiresome having to strain all day, but if I can keep it up, no one will pull their eyelids back at me and most importantly, I can pretend that I fit in. Because the fact is, even though I moved to Australia when I was six and therefore only had about three years of consuming Western culture, somehow had already internalised Western beauty standards. My skin and hair would be harder to change but eyes, well, there’s an easy fix for that. 

[pockets-blog]

This is just to say

I will not

be accepting

the offer

of the job

which a smarter person

than me

would probably

have accepted

Forgive me

I like taking holidays

and being at home

and not at work

[pockets-blog]

We are only hair and bone and stinking breath, and the only thing we can hope for is a fellow creature who will lie beside us in the road, and stroke our flanks while we die.

Charlotte Wood, Animal People

[pockets-blog]

The turnings in life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or level railway-crossing.

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

[dictionaryofobscuresorrows]

the meantime

n. the moment of realization that your quintessential self isn’t going to show up, which forces the role to fall upon the understudy, the gawky kid for whom nothing is easy, who spent years mouthing their lines in the wings before being shoved into the glare of your life, which is already well into its second act.

[freezebaby-deactivated20140831]

[newyorker]

“Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost.”

Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Woolf’s interest in the unknown: http://nyr.kr/1iS38rK (via newyorker)

[minamargaux]

Street Garden

[theeconomist]

Revenge porn: “He said he would destroy me,” says Annmarie Chiarini, a lecturer from Maryland. In 2011, after a bitter break-up, her ex-boyfriend uploaded dozens of photos of her naked to a porn website, along with her contact details and the name of the school where she works. But how should the online publication of explicit images without their subjects’ consent be punished?

[ladylilyvanity]

[et--cetera]

These girls aren’t wounded so much as post-​wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They’re over it. I am not a melodramatic person. God help the woman who is. What I’ll call “post-​wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect: These women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-​wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-​wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: Don’t cry too loud; don’t play victim. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt. Post-​wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it; they refuse to hurt about it or to admit they hurt about it—​or else they are endlessly self-​aware about it, if they do allow themselves this hurting. The post-​wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-​pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-​wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-​pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-​absorption without self-​awareness.

Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” (via zombie-neuroscience)

[momamiaaa]

Jellyfish Lake in Palau. Apparently the jellies have lost their ability to sting because of lack of predators in the lake and you can swim with them!

[36974]

[pockets-blog]

Vulnerability is about uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. We have convinced ourselves that if we armor up every day — if we try to be perfect or know everything — then somehow we can minimize the things we fear feeling the most: disappointment, fear, shame, and unworthiness.

But...

[explore-blog]

You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen—it becomes distorted, and it’s been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if you’re lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say. When this happens, it’s quite a sobering reminder of your limitations as a writer. […] But that’s what art is for—for both reader and writer to overcome their respective limitations and encounter something true. It seems miraculous, doesn’t it? That somebody can articulate something clearly and beautifully that exists inside you, something shrouded in impenetrable fog. Great art reaches through the fog, towards this secret heart—and it shows it to you, holds it before you. It’s a revelatory, incredibly moving experience when this happens. You feel understood. You feel heard. That’s why we come to art—we feel less alone. We are less alone. You see, through art, that others have felt the way you have—and you feel better.

In his meditation on writing, novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, adds to history’s finest definitions of art and touches on the powerful notion of art as therapy.

Pair with the year’s best books on writing and creativity.

(via explore-blog)

[bookmania]

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (via twodollars)

[newblogisjacindaelena]