December 2011
189 posts
8 tags
5 tags
5 tags
“…Miss Erika stands with her hand on my back as we watch from the wings,...”
– Julie Marie Wade, “Call Me Fritz” (from Brevity magazine)
I’m working on my own brevity, and I keep coming back to Julie Marie Wade’s essay. So good.
3 tags
Now That Books Mean Nothing →
52books:
by Nell Boeschenstein:
It’s not easy or appropriate to tell people who love you and who are trying to help you that what they are doing is not helping, that books are not what you want or need, that what you want and need right now are flowers, letters—notes, even—stupid movies, something that might help you feel pretty, emails that contain funny anecdotes from the outside world. That...
6 tags
4 tags
1 tag
Typically when someone says feminists are always...
3 tags
“Jo’s ambition was to do something very splendid; what it was she had no...”
– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
This time, I identify so much with Jo (don’t we all?) that it’s enough to carry me through when I get tired of the rest of them being so meek and mild.
6 tags
10 tags
5 tags
7 tags
“Hummingbirds have huge hearts and need colossal amounts of energy to fuel their...”
– Diane Ackerman, “Mute Dancers: How to Watch a Hummingbird,” collected in In Short
I loved Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras”—which also incorporated the hummingbird—and now I wonder which essay came first. Both are beautiful in their own regard. Ah,...
3 tags
“Nothing in this universe happens just once…Nothing. Infinity goes in both...”
– Temperance Brennan, Bones (season 1, episode 17, “The Skull in the Desert”)
6 tags
8 tags
4 tags
4 tags
6 tags
“The goal of life is to make the world
precious, or at least one thing in it.”
– Catie Rosemurgy, “Miss Peach Imagines She Is an Aging British Rock Star and Considers What Is Essential in Life While Responding to a Beautiful Woman Who Has Just Said ‘I Love You,’” from The Stranger Manual
7 tags
7 tags
6 tags
4 tags
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Bootstrapping... →
Fascinating, informative, and makes me want to cry given my own situation. Rachel Wagner writes:
Without food stamps, housing assistance, subsidized student loans, and Medicaid, there is no way I could have made it through graduate school. Today all of those programs are under threat. To kill those supports is to kill the dream entirely for some people, and to be another voice telling smart...
3 tags
6 tags
4 tags
7 tags
6 tags
6 tags
5 tags
9 tags
3 tags
7 tags
5 tags
4 tags
“Intelligence doesn’t determine what you do so much as how effectively you...”
– Temperance Brennan, Bones (season 1, episode 11, “The Woman in the Car”)
7 tags
3 tags
Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays)
As a Christmas gift to me, one of my fillings (unrelated to the possible root canal) fell out either last night or this morning. Maybe I should start listening to my dentist when he says both of my parents have terrible teeth and I need to step it up in prevention. Ugh.
6 tags
6 tags
5 tags
8 tags
2 tags
My uncle has the hots for Courtney and is quizzing me about who she’s dating.
2 tags
My father is coaching my nine-year-old niece on...
“Just remember, Grandpa would make an excellent women’s basketball agent.”
2 tags
A compliment about my hair and a disparaging...
That’s how my dad rolls. No compliments are ever just compliments.
6 tags
8 tags
7 tags
6 tags
“The final important event after all this awkward foreplay [in turkey mating] is...”
– Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
This chapter (“Hungry Month”), for me, was the “money shot” in reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, for Barbara Kingsolver finally manages to combine all of her cheesiness (“geez, we don’t get cable out here”)...
4 tags
2 tags
Reblog if you don't have pants on
Oh why the fuck not. I don’t have pants on. Sorry I’m not sorry. Happy Holidays.
4 tags
