Look man it’s taken me almost 30 years to figure out a fraction of who I am and maybe that’s an indicator of how slowly I learn or maybe that’s just how long it takes for us to rid ourselves of the toxic sludge adults filled our cups with as children but I will fill my own damn cup from here on out
Don’t let anyone make you feel like time is running out. You’ve got so much time to learn and change and grow and wither and rebirth reparent and repair yourself from all the wounds you survived and learn how to thrive for the first time
everyone is deleting the caption to this but this work is called “perfect lovers” by the gay artist felix gonzalez-torres. the piece is about the illness and death of his HIV-positive partner ross laycock:
For Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), he synchronized two industrial clocks placed side by side. Inevitably, because batteries fail and things tend toward entropy, the clocks would slowly begin to advance at differing rates, out of sync, having moved, however briefly, perfectly together. (x)
“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain time in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time.
We are synchronized, now and forever.
I love you.”
(Gonzalez-Torres, 1988)
Working remotely for the last year has revealed just how much of office culture is accidental, arbitrary, and sexist.
Think back to the office you used to work from. Who unloaded the dishwasher, stocked the snacks, circulated the get well cards, made the coffee, bought the birthday cakes?
Did she get paid for it? And did the man who never did any of those things get paid 20% less than she did? No, because that would be insane, right? Because a mother works for free, right?
There’s another term for the “extras” Merrill mentions. Researchers call them “non-promotable tasks.”
“Across field and laboratory studies, we found that women volunteer for these ‘non-promotable’ tasks more than men,” Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart wrote in Harvard Business Review wrote a couple years back, “that women are more frequently asked to take such tasks on; and that when asked, they are more likely to say yes.” (Lots of other research bears this out.)
When women agree to these tasks, it takes a toll on their career prospects. (If they say no, the researchers point out, it also hurts them — that’s why the solution has to be for “management to find ways to distribute tasks more equitably.”) From the paper:
Relative to men, women are more likely to volunteer, more likely to be asked to volunteer, and more likely to accept direct requests to volunteer. These results suggest that the allocation of tasks with low promotability may differ even when there are no gender differences in ability and preferences. The resulting differences in task allocations can create barriers to the advancement of women in organizations and in society as a whole.
And though managers claim to value women’s helpfulness, it doesn’t actually, um, help them all that much when it comes to performance reviews. Kate Weisshaar, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center, summed up some of her recent research for me:
In a study I conducted with Shelley Correll, Alison Wynn, and JoAnne Delfino Wehner, we examined gendered language in performance evaluations and their association with ratings at a Fortune 500 company. We found that women were more likely than men to have “helpful” or community-oriented behaviors mentioned in their performance evaluations. Yet, being perceived as highly helpful was not associated with receiving the highest performance rating (for men or women). We suggest that women are “viewed” as having more communal or community-oriented qualities, but these qualities are not valued highly for top performance outcomes.
I’m not even going to lie, up until this instant I thought something was wrong with me (maybe that i was the ‘ugly kind of fat’?) because I didn’t think plus sized models were retouched so much. I know that sounds stupid, but I have never considered the reality that even the models of fat women are heavily doctored.
not only are plus size models heavily retouched, but they also have to wear padding to make their curves curvier so that we hate ourselves for not having exaggerated curves on our beautiful lumpy bodies.
This is super important and belongs on my fashion blog. Don’t you ever feel ashamed, because your fat doesn’t look like the model fat! It’s the fashion industries fault for not being able to dress actual people!
“When God gives a promise, He always tries our faith. Just as the roots of trees take firmer hold when they are contending with the wind, so faith takes a firmer hold when it struggles with adverse appearances.”
my grandma embroidered little flowers on her clothes like i do and she taught me how to cook asparagus so it actually tasted good and she wrote about grief so simply that i could make sense of it when i was a child that had just lost a grandfather and sometimes i wonder how much of me is made of her and how much of me is my uncle and how much is my best friend and how much is my little sister. i wonder how much of them is me.
A few years back, I got really interested in this topic. I read a book by a man named Douglas Hofstadter, who’s the director for the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. One of the foremost American researchers of the science of cognition, Hofstadter has written a lot of books, but the one I’m most familiar with is called I Am a Strange Loop. Strange Loop’s focus is on determining how, exactly, does consciousness—individuality, thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, desires, a sense of personhood—arise from inert and unthinking molecules? After all, atoms don’t have personalities. But yet people, who are only atoms all told, somehow do.
The crux of his argument is that humans are self-referential feedback loops. We take in information from the world and incorporate it into how we react the next time we receive information. A whole section of Strange Loop is dedicated to Hofstadter’s concern with the memory of his late wife, Carol. She died suddenly and he was left wondering what parts of her, if any, can “survive” in his memory. And he eventually concluded that every human is a combination and response to all the other humans they’ve ever interacted with:
As long as you remember someone—a dead friend, a relative, a beloved pet—your experiences with them, the way their personalities influenced you, in turn affect the way YOU act and interact with others. Personhood is a self-replicating concept. Your actions ripple out in ways that can never be fully seen or understood. In a vast, cosmic sort of way, no one ever really dies–they live on in their friends :-)
“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).”
I really need to stop making to do lists when I’m energized and feeling well. It’s really starting to wear on my mental health when I’m not getting things done because I’m in pain.
Trialogo series By Gonzalo Orquin will finally be shown in New York after the Vatican threatened to sue the artist at the showing in Rome
’An art gallery in Rome last year covered up the exhibition of photographs showing same-sex couples kissing in churches, following the legal threat by the Vatican.’
