R.I.V.

(Rest In Vermont) The country-fied explorations of Taylor K. Long. Born in Seattle, aged in Brooklyn, reborn in Vermont.

[restinvermont]

There’s never an excuse for infidelity, but there can be good reasons, or at least reasons that demand a little empathy. And one of those reasons, I’ve learned, is when the relationship is neglected — when the people in it treat love as a default state, rather than a practice to be cultivated.

Charlotte Lieberman, “It’s Complicated”

[restinvermont]

I didn’t have to have my life together before becoming someone’s wife or mom. Maybe those things were the path toward the person I wanted to be, not a reward for becoming her.

Ashley Abramson, “It’s Complicated”

[restinvermont]

That’s really what falling in love is, isn’t it? Yearning to know more about a person, the amazement and delight as each layer is peeled back, the realization that you can never get enough of the one you love. Perhaps the death knell of love is not anger or even indifference; it’s losing the desire to know more about your partner.

Kerry Egan

[restinvermont]

Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

Alain de Botton

[restinvermont]

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Alain de Botton

[ofgrammatology]

If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: you've gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women and that the worst women writer can write a better man than the best male writer can write a good woman. And it’s just the minimum. Because the thing about the sort of heteronormative masculine privilege, whether it’s in Santo Domingo, or the United States, is you grow up your entire life being told that women aren't human beings, and that women have no independent subjectivity. And because you grow up with this, it’s this huge surprise when you go to college and realize that, 'Oh, women aren't people who does my shit and fucks me.' And I think that this a huge challenge for boys, because they want to pretend they can write girls. Every time I';m teaching boys to write, I read their women to them, and I’m like, 'Yo, you think this is good writing?' These motherfuckers attack each other over cliche lines but they won’t attack each other over these toxic representations of women that they have inherited; their sexist shorthand, they think that is observation. They think that their sexist distortions are insight. And if you’re in a writing program and you say to a guy that their characters are sexist, this guy, it's like you said they fucking love Hitler. They will fight tooth and nail because they want to preserve this really vicious sexism in the art because that is what they have been taught. And I think the first step is to admit that you, because of your privilege, have a very distorted sense of women’s subjectivity. And without an enormous amount of assistance, you’re not even going to get a D. I think with male writers the most that you can hope for is a D with an occasional C thrown in. Where the average women writer, when she writes men, she gets a B right off the bat, because they spent their whole life being taught that men have a subjectivity. In fact, part of the whole feminism revolution was saying, 'Me too, motherfuckers.' So women come with it built in because of the society. It’s the same way when people write about race. If you didn't grow up being a subaltern person in the United States, you might need help writing about race. Motherfuckers are like ‘I got a black boy friend,’ and their shit sounds like Klan Fiction 101. The most toxic formulas in our cultures are not pass down in political practice, they’re pass down in mundane narratives. It’s our fiction where the toxic virus of sexism, racism, homophobia, where it passes from one generation to the next, and the average artist will kill you before they remove those poisons. And if you want to be a good artist, it means writing, really, about the world. And when you write cliches, whether they are sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, that is a fucking cliche. And motherfuckers will kill you for their cliches about x, but they want their cliches about their race, class, queerness. They want it in there because they feel lost without it. So for me, this has always been the great challenge. As a writer, if you’re really trying to write something new, you must figure out, with the help of a community, how can you shed these fucking received formulas. They are received. You didn't come up with them. And why we need fellow artists is because they help us stay on track. They tell you, 'You know what? You’re a bit of a fucking homophobe.' You can’t write about the world with these simplistic distortions. They are cliches. People know art, always, because they are uncomfortable. Art discomforts. The trangressiveness of art has to deal with confronting people with the real. And sexism is a way to avoid the real, avoiding the reality of women. Homophobia is to avoid the real, the reality of queerness. All these things are the way we hide from encountering the real. But art, art is just about that.

- Junot Diaz speaking at Word Up Bookshop, 2012 (via ofgrammatology)

[restinvermont]

Saying 'She's so great, but let's imagine what she could be if she were/if she fought a man!' doesn't exactly illegitimize her, but it strips her of her accomplishments.

Greg Howard, "Ronda Rousey Isn't The Female Anyone; She's The First Ronda Rousey"

[restinvermont]

My sister, Catherine, told me recently about a conversation she'd had with a sweet neighbor who -- after watching Catherine spend an afternoon organizing a scavenger hunt for all the local kids -- said sadly, "You're such a better mother than I will ever be." At which point, my sister grabbed her friend's hands and said, "Please. Let's not do this to each other, okay?" No, seriously -- please. Let's not.

Elizabeth Gilbert, "The Best Thing You Can Do For Yourself -- And All The Women Around You"

[restinvermont]

"Maybe you can be my intern, and in turn, I'll show you how I cook up summer in the winter."

This song has gotten me through a lot of winters.

[restinvermont]

When you're from Seattle, it's acceptable to have pictures of dry fish skins in your calendar (via the Pike Place Fish calendar, courtesy of my mother).

[restinvermont]

I have a new office - with a window! - and this is the view.

[restinvermont]

I love McDonald’s double cheeseburgers and I don’t care if they’re made of pink slime and ammonia, I eat them all the time because they’re delicious.

Denis Johnson, a man after my own heart

[restinvermont]

"I went to Starbucks and there was a guy in there working. I don’t drink coffee, but he was in there putting together some mocha lattes or something. And he saw me and he was like, ‘Beast Mode, this for you! I’m going into Beast Mode!’ This guy was mixing up whatever coffee drinks he makes. I was just like, ‘Damn, this is a guy who’s taking his job and maximizing it to best of his potential.’ And I realized that’s exactly what Beast Mode is. It’s something off the field that can come out of just anybody or that is just in somebody."

Marshawn Lynch

[restinvermont]

On Craigslist in Boston, a case was selling for $250 — each four-pack of cans costing nearly as much as a barrel of crude oil.

Beer nerds are nuts.

[restinvermont]

“It’s like being in a good marriage: We’re continuously learning about each other every day,” defensive end Michael Bennett said. “Our feeling is, if someone says something to you, and you feel [bad] about it, it’s probably true. It’s one of those things where you get upset and then say, ‘Man, maybe he is right.’ ”

The Seattle Seahawks’ Edge: Airing Their Grievances

[restinvermont]

Went to Spotify to create a playlist of the music from Haruki Murakami's "After Dark," which I'm reading for book club right now - and there already was one. Small joys...

[restinvermont]

To further elaborate on this, my point is that if you're going to take a stand against any business or organization that has done terrible things to another human being by not spending your money or time there there, you're going to be hard-pressed to find alternatives. It's easy to criticize and point fingers, but sanctimony and moral superiority's a double-edged sword, because exploitation runs so far and so wide that no one is perfect. How many people were outraged by the leak of the celebrity nudes, but then watched the Ray Rice video on TMZ, one of the all-time most deplorable websites with regards to privacy? (No, I didn't watch it. I don't need to, or want to.)

That doesn't make that exploitation or abuse okay, but because of that, avoidance is not acceptable to me. We shouldn't be changing for them - we should be demanding that they change for us. Maybe I'm an optimist, but I don't buy the "one rotten egg spoils the whole barrel" argument. There are decent people in this world, they just don't sell clicks.