Sorry, sorry. I know. That was mean. Here it is, right here. I would have posted it sooner, but I was camping. With a giant jar of Mai Tais in the cooler. Mmmm.
I don't know how to explain what's so good about this cocktail. I'm not even really a cocktail person, being a die-hard IPA-loving beer drinker. But these drinks. . . I don't know.
You will have to buy some weird kinds of booze, if you don't already have it. I felt nervous about posting this, and then remembered that it's because I used to food-blog for Disney.
Nobody hasn't loved them.
They're really subtle, even though they're crazy strong; you can't even figure out what's in them, if you don't know. Everyone guesses pineapple. Or cherry something. I think it's the almond mixed with the citrus. Crazy. Happy summer. xo
I've been juicing something like 6 limes to get a cup of lime juice.
Mac's Mai Tais This is a copycat recipe that I recreated from the ingredients listed in the Mac's Shack cocktail menu, which says only, "Flor de Cana rum, orange curacao, amaretto & lime." I added simple syrup because the drink seemed both too tart and too strong without it. When I made these for a bunch of people, I used a 1-cup measure as the part, and mixed it all in a 1-quart mason jar. If you're making a single drink, you're probably looking at. . . what? Maybe 2 ounces for a part? Did I just turn your summer cocktail-making into a weird math problem?
1 part golden rum (I used Flor de Cana, because of being obedient) 1 part fresh-squeezed lime juice 1 part amaretto 1/2 part orange curacao 1/2 part (more or less) simple syrup (equal amounts of sugar and water, heated together until the sugar dissolves)
Mix together and serve over ice. Garnish with a fresh cherry, if you like.
Jeremiah Heaton was playing with his daughter in their Abingdon, Va., home last winter when she asked whether she could be a real princess.
Heaton, a father of three who works in the mining industry, didn’t want to make any false promises to Emily, then 6, who was “big on being a princess.” But he still said yes. “As a parent you sometimes go down paths you never thought you would,” Heaton said.
Within months, Heaton was journeying through the desolate southern stretches of Egypt and into an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert. There, on June 16 — Emily’s seventh birthday — he planted a blue flag with four stars and a crown on a rocky hill. The area, a sandy expanse sitting along the Sudanese border, morphed from what locals call Bir Tawil into what Heaton and his family call the “Kingdom of North Sudan.”
There, Heaton is the self-described king and Emily is his princess.
Heaton, a failed Congressional candidate, insists that his claim is "legitimate" and says that the key difference between his act of monstrous self-aggrandizement and all the others that have determined the history of modern land ownership on Earth is "that those historical cases of imperialism were acts of war while his was an act of love." [WP]
The New York Times conducted an exhaustive, damning investigation of Hobart and William Smith Colleges' handling of one single sexual assault complaint, and pretty much every paragraph contains something as plainly horrifying as this:
Although federal officials estimate that up to 20 percent of college students will be sexually assaulted in school, Mr. Tantillo said he rarely heard of such reports at Hobart and William Smith. “I guess that’s your job to find out why,” he told a reporter.
Two miles west of downtown Savannah, Georgia, sits a historical marker in the center of a small plot of a fenced in city park. The triangular park measures not more than a fifth of an acre. The surrounding neighborhood is one of the most distressed and depressed sections of the city.
The marker reads:
Kristopher Monroe
The marker was dedicated on March 3, 2008, 149 years after the slave auction occurred, and at the commemoration ceremony then-mayor Otis Johnson—only the second African-American to hold that office—offered up a short speech honoring the enslaved men and women whose labor helped build the oldest city in the state of Georgia. At the ceremony a local man handed out dirt from Nigeria to be sprinkled around the marker and Mayor Johnson poured water over the dirt to consecrate the ground.
And that's it for the city's commemoration of the event known as the Weeping Time. Contrast that with the towering monument to the Confederate dead that has stood for over a century smack in the center of one of the city's largest public parks.
The Weeping Time acquired its name colloquially, by the slaves and their descendants, because of reports that the sky opened up and poured down rain for the full two days of the auction. It was said that the heavens were weeping for the inhumanity that was being committed.
The event wasn't just notable because of the size of the auction. In 1859 the country was on the verge of a national bloodbath, and the historic threads that weave through the story of the Weeping Time are so far-reaching and remarkable, it's perplexing that more hasn't been written or remembered about this time.
* * *
Pierce Mease Butler, the owner of the slaves who were sold, inherited his wealth from his grandfather, Major Pierce Butler, one of the largest slaveholders in the country in his time. One of the signatories of the U.S. Constitution, Major Butler was the author of the Fugitive Slave Clause and was instrumental in getting it included under Article Four of the Constitution.
When Major Butler died, most of his estate and holdings were passed on to Pierce M. Butler and his brother John, including two sprawling island plantations on the coast of south Georgia, one that produced rice and one cotton, and more than 900 slaves who worked the plantations.
Pierce M. Butler was a profligate steward of his inheritance, regularly engaging in risky speculations and accruing a considerable amount of gambling debt over the years due to his compulsive card playing. It was these two factors that necessitated the appointment of a group of trustees who, in 1856, seized control of his financial assets in an effort to return him to solvency. Over the next few years the trustees proceeded to sell off various Butler properties.
By 1859 the trustees were still unable to extricate Pierce Butler from his debts, and it was decided that the “movable property” on the Georgia plantations would be split between Pierce and his brother John, and the half of the slaves that were allotted to Pierce would be sold at auction to relieve his remaining financial obligations. A small fraction of those obligations were the quarterly payments Pierce Butler was required to pay to his then-estranged ex-wife Frances Anne Kemble as part of their divorce agreement 10 years prior.
In one of the many ironies, Fanny Kemble, as she was called, was an avowed and outspoken abolitionist and had made much of the fact during the time she was married to Pierce Butler. This difference was a constant source of contention throughout their tumultuous 15-year marriage and ultimately contributed to its dissolution. At the time they were wed in 1834, Fanny claimed she knew nothing of how the Butler wealth was acquired, but it soon became apparent after a trip to visit the plantations in 1838-39 what the true nature of the Butler inheritance was.
Fanny Kemble was a revered Shakespearean actress from London on tour when she met Butler in Philadelphia. Kemble was, by all accounts, a strong-willed and independently minded woman of her own making, tendencies Butler aimed to tame. Nevertheless, they were married two years after Butler's unremitting courtship and Kemble reestablished herself in America.
Once Kemble found out about Butler's Georgia plantations, she begged him to take her down to witness first hand what she'd previously only heard and read about in her native England. Despite his better judgement, Butler brought Kemble with him in late 1838 to visit the plantations and what Kemble found was every bit as callous and horrible as she'd imagined. Kemble cataloged her stay in her diaries, which were eventually published some years later as Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (1838-1839) and to this day it's considered one of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of slavery during that period.
(Kemble's journals weren't published until 1863—in the middle of America's Civil War—due to custody issues with Butler over their two daughters. Butler had “forbade” the publication of the journals during their marriage, but once their daughters were “of age” Kemble felt free to let her account of that time be known to the world. Her journals ended up playing a significant role in the anti-slavery debate raging at the time.)
Kemble was long out of the picture by the time the Butler slave auction took place (they were divorced in 1849). But the most virulent phase of great slavery debate was only just getting under way. Just a few months before the Butler auction, the now infamous slave ship the Wanderer had landed at Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia with more than 400 illegal slaves brought directly from the Congo. This was one of the last documented slave ships to arrive in North American and it created a roiling controversy. The transport of slaves from Africa had long been outlawed, but the pro-slavery “fire-eater” Charles Lamar, owner of the Wanderer, had disguised his ship as a luxury cruise liner and brought back a hull-full of “human chattel,” thumbing his nose at federal law. Records indicate that nearly 80 slaves perished on the voyage.
Lamar and his crew were awaiting trial at the time of the Butler slave auction, but the sentiment in the south was such that they were all eventually found not guilty and set free with impunity. This was the atmosphere surrounding what would be the largest slave auction ever on American soil.
* * *
The notorious slave trader Joseph Bryan was enlisted to conduct the Butler slave auction and it was originally scheduled to take place in Savannah's Johnson Square, directly in the city's center, where Bryan's slave holding pens and brokerage was. But it was soon determined there wouldn't be enough room to accommodate the buyers they expected, so the location was moved to the Ten Broeck Race Course two-and-a-quarter miles west of downtown.
For weeks before the auction, Bryan took out ads in papers across the south advertising the sale. It became the talk of the town and speculators from as far as Louisiana and Virginia came to Savannah to ply their bids. One of the ads that ran in the weeks before the auction in the Savannah Daily Morning News read:
It was said that the hotels and bars were all full to capacity in the days leading up to the auction and the city was abuzz with discussion about the great sale. Among the crowd was an undercover journalist from the north, Mortimer Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks. Thomson had been sent to Savannah by the New York Tribune editor and noted reformer, Horace Greeley, to report on the sale.
Thomson posed as a potential buyer to get close to the action and judging by the reaction in the South once his piece was published, it was a wise decision for him to travel incognito. After “Great Auction Sale of Slaves at Savannah, Georgia” came out in the Tribune, it was republished in Philadelphia and London and caused an international stir. Threats on his life from public officials in the South were issued. They claimed the piece was an anti-slavery hit-job by northern abolitionists. In fact that's exactly what it was.
The Ten Broeck Race Course superimposed over a 2007 aerial view of the site (Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson)
Thomson extensively recounted the events of the auction in damning detail for his article (years later reissued as a sequel to Kemble's journal). He explains how, upon arrival, the slaves were stuffed into the horse and carriage stalls at the race track. As he writes, “Into these sheds they were huddled pell-mell, without any more attention to their comfort than was necessary to prevent their becoming ill and unsalable... On the faces of all was an expression of heavy grief.” He goes on to note that some of the slaves appeared to have resigned themselves to the “hard stroke of fortune” that was their fate as human property, while others “sat brooking moodily over their sorrows, their chins resting on their hands, their eyes staring vacantly, and their bodies rocking to and fro, with a restless motion that was never stilled.”
When Thomson recounts the auction, he holds nothing back. By its very nature, the sale of human beings is a disgraceful affair and he describes the slave speculators as a motley lot, poking and prodding the “chattel,” pinching their muscles and checking the insides of their mouths like livestock, all while joking and making lurid comments at some of the female slaves. He goes into detail about a few of those who were sold, including a man named Jeffrey who attempts to entreat his buyer to purchase a woman named Dorcas, his fiancee, only to eventually be rebuffed when the buyer finds out he would have to purchase her whole family to acquire her.
Thomson also tells of a woman named Daphne who comes up for auction wrapped in a shawl with her infant to keep the “chill air and driving rain” from them. Thomson describes the scene as men crowd around her, jeering and yelling to the auctioneer. “What do you keep your nigger covered up for? Pull off her blanket.” Another chides, “Who's going to bid on that nigger, if you keep her covered up? Let's see her face.” The men gather closer with remarks “emphasized with profanity, and mingled with sayings too indecent and obscene to be even hinted at...”
Thomson spends some 20-odd pages relating the events of the auction and its aftermath, including Pierce Butler showing up and extending a gloved hand to a few of his favorite slaves, and after the auction, giving each of those sold $1 in freshly minted coins, as if that were consolation to the families who had spent generations on his plantations and were ripped apart on those two days. It's a shattering portrait of the realities of the slave trade, and deserves far more exposure than it's had since it was first published, as do Kemble's journals.
* * *
The city of Savannah should be commended for recognizing this monumental event with a historic marker, but one small plaque in a remote West Savannah park doesn't nearly do justice to the memory of the people who were bought and sold so many years ago. Our country—particularly the south—is full of these hidden histories and if we as citizens don't labor to remember these admittedly ugly episodes of our past, we're doing not just ourselves a disservice, but we're desecrating the memory of the enslaved people who helped build this country.
The Ten Broeck Race Course has since been obliterated and there's now a lumber company on most of its former site. An elementary school sits on one corner of the former racetrack, but there's not a single trace left of the old course and it's probably safe to assume that very few, if any, of the children who attend classes there even know what happened on those grounds a century and a half ago.
An admitted pot smoker, President Obama couldn't help flashing a smile after being offered a hit of marijuana during a visit to a bar in Denver. Colorado is one of the two U.S. states (Washington being the other) that now allow recreational pot smoking under state law.
It's not uncommon for a poacher or hunter to receive harsh criticism and public shaming, but does it count when the animal in question goes WAY beyond the endangered species list?
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I’ve written poems off and on, mostly off, over the course of more than two decades, and I’ve published them in Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, and maybe ten other respectable literary magazines. I work at a corporation, not in academia, and I don’t pretend to know much about how these journals operate.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a bunch of poems about industry, the Midwest, and the exploitation of labor and natural resources. After a few rounds of submissions, I didn’t get a bite. Knowing my subject matter was not stereotypically feminine, I decided to submit under a male pseudonym.
It wouldn’t be the first time I used a pen name. When I got my first contract for a romance novel, I did a quick Google search of my given name before signing. As plain and ordinary as it is, I share it with a beloved vintage porn star. Not wanting to draft off of someone else’s success, I made up a new name on the spot, inspired by my love for a Vampire Weekend song. In an oblique and ineffectual attempt to promote my books, I blogged a lot as Bryn Donovan, and now it’s my default for online writing.
To choose an alias for poetry, I turned to a baby name book that included the most common stereotypes about each name. I chose a male name that many people associated with creativity and paired it with an ordinary surname.
In my next two submission rounds, I got three poems accepted. “Wow,” a friend joked. “That penis makes you very talented.”
Statistically, it meant nothing. These were different journals. I’m only one person, and everyone’s luck ebbs and flows. If the name did make a difference, it might have been because it made me sound younger and cooler.
A couple of writers I knew disapproved, believing I was selling women short as a whole. I understand the sentiment, but I am such a minor player in the tiny realm of poetry publishing that I can’t imagine it matters.
Using a male pseudonym changed how I communicated. My cover letters for poetry submissions had never been chatty, but now they became ever so subtly less warm, more guy-like. When an editor asked for a change, I simply pointed out that the poem was written in iambic heptameter, and the proposed edit would throw off the meter. The poem was published without changes.
The most powerful effect of my nom de peen, though, was that it changed how I viewed my own writing.
I should explain a little first. My mother, a nursery school teacher who got married at the age of nineteen, raised me to be a feminist. From the time I was little, she would lecture me: “Don’t you ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do anything.”
I’m a seasoned creative professional now, accustomed to putting forward her own ideas. Unlike lots of people I know, particularly women, I don’t suffer from so-called impostor syndrome or consciously doubt my own talent.
Basically, I am the last person in the world I would expect to internalize sexism. And yet.
When I first printed out my poems under the new name and read them over, I experienced them in a whole new way. The lines felt more important, more universal. They had Things to Say about America. Yes, I thought. This guy knows what he’s talking about.
How did this happen? What part of me had managed to hold onto the idea that my vagina made my writing more trivial? I imagine that living in a world where men are usually the leaders in government, the preachers in church, the authors on the class syllabus, the CEOs of the companies, the voiceovers of the movie previews and the heroes of the movies, and so on, had made me subconsciously equate maleness with gravitas.
I might stick to the guy name for all of my poems. Even a modest uptick in acceptances means a lot to me. And while I may write about more “feminine” subjects in the future, I suspect a male poet gets extra credit for sensitivity and empathy, while people take these qualities for granted in a woman.
But the pride my alias gives me about my own writing is the real reason I don’t want to let it go. And with that I'm left dealing with the fact that for so long I thought I was free from sexism, but all along it was dwelling on a deeper level than I could have imagined.
Bryn Donovan is a professional greeting card writer, a poet, and the author of two romance novels and three children’s books. She lives with her husband and two neurotic dogs in Kansas City.
I’m writing with a deceptively simple question. How can I be vulnerable? Some pertinent background: I’m an academic, working in a field that requires me to live in very remote places for extended periods of time. I find my work incredibly engaging and rewarding, and I know I’m lucky in this regard. Still, the life of an academic (particularly a traveling academic) is often isolating. I don’t have a place to call home. My family is deeply dysfunctional; although I love my parents and siblings, our relationships are fraught and I have never felt unconditionally loved by my parents. I was diagnosed as a child with OCD, and spent a great deal of my youth feeling broken and inadequate (a feeling my parents intensified by approaching my disorder punitively). From a young age, I learned that I couldn’t count on anyone to take care of me except myself. This stubborn independence has served me well in my chosen field, but it has complicated my relationships. I have wonderful friends scattered across the world, but the distance adds to the wall I have built around myself; I have a hard time truly letting people in.
My romantic relationships have also been complicated–sometimes I settle for men who aren’t a good fit, just because I know I can rely on them. Other times, I ruin relationships because of my raw neediness for love, which leads my partners to take me for granted and belittle me. My current boyfriend is in many ways a great fit—fiercely intelligent, bitingly funny, supportive of the demands of my career—but he thinks of me as "clingy," and this terrifies me. I don’t know if I’m happy in our relationship.
Recently, I underwent a medical crisis that required me to return to the States for treatment. Alone and incapacitated in a city where I knew no one, I had to confront the ways in which I have isolated myself. It’s a paradox: I never hesitate to be there for friends when they’re in crisis, but I can’t be honest about my own insecurities. I feel so grotesquely needy, but I can’t ask for help. I recognize that my desire to be selfless and untouchable is actually selfish—I would be a better friend, a better partner, a better person, if I could be more vulnerable. But how do I do that without morphing into the whiny, broken person I’m so afraid of becoming? How do I balance the demands of my career with my desire for a permanent home and a lifelong relationship? If I give up my work, I fear I’ll let go of my sense of purpose in life.
Thank you so much for any insight you have to this dilemma. I know my question is nebulous and hard to answer, but I always value your insight.
Hard Shell, Soft Chewy Center
Dear HSSCC,
I'm so glad you wrote to me, because I've been pondering the paradox of survival vs. vulnerability a lot lately. I look at my two young daughters, twirling in their dresses and giggling and making friends and just generally frolicking with the bubbly rainbow unicorns (when they're not threatening to kill each other with their bare hands), and part of me wants them to be tough, tough, TOUGH more than anything else. I want them to be strong enough and resilient enough to tell all naysayers and girl-haters to fuck themselves. I want them to do exactly what they love with their lives without questioning themselves and wondering what everyone thinks of them every step of the way.
I was tough, thanks to the fact that my parents were pretty focused on toughness. I was extremely sensitive underneath the toughness, of course, but no one needed to know that. I had bluster, swagger and a devil-may-care attitude. I knew I was unique and funny and full of ideas—or at least I knew how to pretend that I was confident in these things.
But the coping methods that get us through a rocky childhood among unyielding parents and critical siblings, the tools that help us survive those Lord of the Flies teen years, the strategies we use to secure graduate degrees and good jobs, the tricks we employ to attract funny, confident, successful men are not always the same things that bring us true happiness and satisfaction in life. They might help up to age 30, but after that, toughness and bluster and overconfidence can seriously hamper hopes for intimacy and stability and long-term satisfaction.
"IS THIS SOME ANTI-FEMINIST DON'T BE BOSSY BULLSHIT YOU'RE ABOUT TO FEED ME?"
Fuck no. All I want to say is this: You are a false advertisement. You appear to be a carefree, independent, globe-trotting academic—the living, breathing dream of every flinchy motherfucker on earth. You seem tough and engaged in what you do—and why shouldn't you? You ARE tough. You ARE fully engaged with your work. You DO love your life.
But you're also something else. You're also soft and squishy and you hate that part of yourself. When the softness comes out, there's anger there. You're ashamed. You serve up your softness with shame because that's what you were taught to do when you were little. "This is not how you make friends, I know that. This is how you make people hate you," you say, in tears. "I know I'm gross. I know you don't want this."
But it's not JUST that you're serving up softness with a grimace and saying, "YOU WILL HATE THE TASTE OF THIS, LET ME APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE." No. It's also that you're always in the company of some dude who doesn't like vulnerability. You date guys who see vulnerability—which is the very heart and soul of who you are—as weakness. You are with a guy who takes the very best of you, the rawest and most sincere essence of you, and he says, "I don't like this clingy thing you do. I know your history with your parents. I can understand why my indifference feels like rejection. But I don't care. This clingy thing is inconvenient to me, so you should stomp it into submission."
And isn't that exactly what your parents told you to do?
Forget him. I'm not saying he's a bad guy. He wanted a tough academic lady who'd never whimper to him. But that's not who you are. If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: You can't resolve not to be clingy. You have to feel understood and supported, and then you’ll—quite naturally—be less emotionally needy, because you'll trust that the guy you're with is there for you, and can accept every part of you, come hell or high water.
Sure, you could take a stand. You could say, "No, I'm not clingy. I'm a human being with emotions and needs. You can either show up and be a good boyfriend, or you can hit the road." Sometimes a guy will wake up and take notice when you make it clear that showing up isn't optional. But if he doesn’t do that, you really should think about moving on. Working on your vulnerability with someone who secretly (or not-so-secretly) hates vulnerability really, really doesn't work.
This isn't about him, anyway. This is about your relationship with yourself. It's also about how you relate to your female friends. You may have to work on those two parts of your life before you can successfully pursue romantic love or a long-term emotional commitment. Basically, you need to practice sounding like a whiny, broken person without getting angry at yourself for it. You have to be this way and accept it and allow it and stop hating it. That's the first step. You have to let the ugly, needy shit in and let it exist without spreading your fear and loathing all over it. You have to make room for cryface and learn to see it as beautiful.
That can be tough to do on your own. I'd get a therapist, and cry to her. Her, not him. Because I'm pretty sure from what you wrote that your intimacy issues start with women and will be healed more quickly/effectively in the presence of a woman. If you're thinking "Oh no, I'd really rather have a male therapist!"? That might actually be your love of toughness and denial and pushing down all softness talking.
Ok, so whiny, broken cryface in the presence of a therapist is not insanely groundbreaking, but it's a start. What you have to do after that is whip out the broken cryface in the company of a good female friend. This means you have to select one friend, explain to her that you need to try to be more vulnerable even though it feels totally weird, and warn her that you may call her JUST TO CRY sometimes. Yes. Embarrassing. But important. It helps. It's good for you and good for your friend, too.
Do you have a friend who could handle this? If you don't, then stick with the therapist for now.
Personally, this was a big deal for me. I never would've found and accepted a guy who's smart and funny and ok with softness and vulnerability if I hadn't learned to cry to a friend of mine first. Crying to a close female friend is a way of saying, "See, this is me. I know it's not incredibly fun and entertaining but it's not repugnant and hideous and shitty either. I'm just a person, leaning on another person. This is what people do, and they shouldn't have to feel ashamed or terrible when they do it."
When I was younger, I thought my purpose was to entertain people. I thought I was boring other people if I couldn't entertain them. If I talked about emotions, it had to be a joke. Just being NEUTRAL, having nothing to say, being a person in the room, was unacceptable. I was the charming gabby one who kept everything afloat. And being sad? No one wanted that.
I used to have nightmares about being a hideous monster surrounded by regular people who felt sure I would eat them. No matter what I said, everyone would run away from me, screaming. Being myself meant scaring the shit out of other people. Expressing my emotions was as bad as chasing people and eating them whole. I believed, as you do, that I WAS SO GROTESQUELY NEEDY.
For a while when I was in my late 20s, I wrote songs about this, about monsters who clean up well and pretend to be normal, but who can never truly be loved. One song had the line "I want you more than I want myself." I think that's where you always land when you're not showing your true self. You work really fucking hard and you focus on the other person and you entertain and charm and keep the conversation flowing, and you don't even care if you lose yourself along the way. Maybe that's the point. You either date guys who are indifferent, and that makes you clingy, or you date guys who aren't all that impressive—because maybe then they won't leave you?—and you get clingy anyway. You work hard to put the not-that-great guys on a pedestal. The focus is on them, so you don't have to feel your own feelings or think your own thoughts. But the more you focus on them, the more you imagine that they're about to reject you, just like everyone else has. Or as I described it in my monster song, I'd sit around "[f]eeling small, watching your shadows of doubt play on the wall."
Breaking this habit is an enormous and daunting task. Even if you reject the flinchy dudes, that doesn't mean you're suddenly going to accept a sincere dude who pays close attention to you. Who wants someone to meet the monster? Anyone who accepts the monster must be kind of a dork and a loser, right?
The bottom line is that it's very sad, to feel so angry at YOUR VERY SOUL. To rip your soft, chewy center out and hide it under the floorboards? That goes against everything pure and real and good in the world. So we have to take that monster and turn it into a gentle lamb—not by changing the monster, but changing our perception of her. First YOU have to love the monster. Invite the monster in, let it cry. Embrace the cryface.
I know, it's embarrassing and blech, so uncool. This world fucking hates honest, soft, open, emoting women. HATES HATES HATES us. We are the giant oozing sores of the universe. Why? Why do we prefer people with blank Frankenstein expressions, or worse, painted-on professional smiles, and loathe the cryface?
Why do we hate weakness so much?
All I can tell you is that embracing cryface has made my life so much better. The tears flow over the craziest stuff—singing competitions, sad songs, the endings of good essays and great books.
Also, fuck the word "clingy." Does he want a girlfriend or not? If you're not calling him around the clock and freaking out, he shouldn't give you a hard time about looking for a tiny shred of emotional sustenance from THE PERSON YOU ARE IN AN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH. Jesus Christ. There are so many NEW ways for Mr. Flinchy to be evasive and freakish these days. There are new advanced levels of Fuck and Run being played out there, there are new insanely high scores being racked up in the game of Sexual Assassin, enabled by dating sites and social media. Sexual predators who don't mind playing faintly human-like versions of themselves online have it pretty goddamn good these days.
And it's sad. Because somehow, a lot of people think that their emptiness is going to be filled by tricking a lot of people into sleeping with them. Or they assume that real, shared intimacy is just an elaborate trap set by needy, empty women. It's hard not to wonder if we aren't hollowing ourselves out, taking the lowest common denominator among us and telling ourselves stories about how they represent everyone else. But luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. Luminous fucking beings with soft, gorgeous feelings that, if they're invited in, will blossom into something rich and layered and inspiring. So let's not paint ourselves as monsters who cling.
Once you invite the soft, emotional part of you to live with the rest of you instead of being banished to the closet around the clock, once you accept and allow space for that part of you, you will naturally reshuffle your priorities. You can't THINK your way to a solution here, either with your boyfriend or with your dilemmas about balancing your career with your need for a long-term home.
It's a long process. See a therapist. Lean on a close friend, and if that's not possible, work on making your friendships closer. You CAN count on other people. You need to learn to see that, to know it. But mostly, you need to believe that your whiny, broken self is also your best self. It's hard to believe that. It feels almost absurd. But that's where it all begins, somehow. It begins with loving that whiny, broken self, until it's not whiny or broken at all, it's just REAL. You have to love what's real. YOU have to do it first, before anyone else can do it, to show yourself that it's possible.
Your toughness will not dissolve into thin air and leave you powerless. You will still be an adaptive animal. But you will no longer be an invention, imaginary, pretend. You will no longer need disguises. You will no longer accept excuses. And later down the road, you will be supported and loved for what's real for the first time, and it will feel incredible.
Polly
Are you a brittle, hard candy shell but want to be smooth and infinitely flexible and resilient like Laffy Taffy? Write to Polly and discuss!
Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.
Have any go to design firm websites that you regularly check for inspiration? Putting together your design portfolio can be challenging, to say the least. This month we’ve curated a list of top notch design firm websites – to showcase how the best in the biz sell their designs. From space age-themed Airnauts to branding/digital agency Brooklyn United, this edition of top websites reveals how designers continue to break molds and set trends. Plus, if you’re looking for a site to test web fonts, check out TypeWonder – or take a peek at the Typographic Pocket Guide for easy access to type lessons.
Described as a space where engineers, designers and thinkers work together, the site for Airnauts sets a cool, space-age theme with the color tones and abstract motion graphics.
Underbelly is a design group with focus on UX, development and branding. They have created a fun yet professional site leveraging the whale symbol as part of their brand.
A great way to access (and learn from) the online brand asset pages of a variety of companies. There is also a nice little search feature using “command + F”.
The site for this digital and brand agency makes an impact when you visit it through a distinct color scheme, rotating type, large photos and unfolding tiles of text and images.
TypeWonder allows you to quickly test web fonts for any site. Simply type in the URL, choose the font and watch it populate the site with the new fonts. You can easily toggle between the old site and other fonts.
This site leaves an immediate impression on the user because of the high quality food imagery and animations. Details like rolling over the plate toggles between ingredients and final presentation.
Lidia Varesco Racoma’s collection of found typography in her Chicago neighborhood and beyond. Her goal is to encourage people to discover and be inspired by typography found in everyday life.
The redesign for the Harvard Law Review website by Upstatement is a great example of well-considered typography to present content. They don’t use any images other than a series of 50 alternating background patterns.
Remember to submit a site you think should be included in this list of top design websites next month.
OHEMGEE, e, I could hire an evil clown to stalk someone for a week???
Our wedding anniversary was a few days ago and I was going to hire an evil clown to stalk Victor for a week to celebrate it (that’s a real thing) but then I got a cold (which is currently trying to suffocate me), and also I was fairly certain that Victor’s automatic instinct would be to bludgeon the clown to death with his own shoes. Instead we decided to just postpone our anniversary so that I can properly surprise Victor with a suitcase full of monkeys or something when he’s not expecting it.
We’ve officially been married now for 18 years, so if our marriage was a person it could be tried and convicted as an adult. I’m fairly sure our marriage is now more mature than we are.
It seems weird to think we’ve been married for 18 years. Sometimes it feels like we’ve only been married for 10 years because I’ve slept a lot so it seems like some years shouldn’t count, and sometimes it feels likes we’ve been married for forty years because some years are so much bigger than they should be. But 18 seems right.
Old enough to make bad choices. Young enough to still enjoy them.
18 seems about perfect.
PS. Sometimes people complain that I seldom post pictures of Victor and it’s hard to argue with that because if you search for google images of Victor you end up with stuff like this. So I’m remedying that with a not-particularly-flattering but very candid picture of me and Victor, which shows why we never get taken seriously at neighborhood watch meetings.
You can’t tell, but he’s totally laughing too. Or he’s really mad. Or maybe it’s someone else entirely. It’s hard to tell, really. That man is a damn enigma.
PPS. I’m on a lot of cold meds. This might be obvious.
In Gone Girl: The Movie, a very confused Ben Affleck is Nick, Rosamund Pike is Amy, and NHP is Desi. The promotional posters seem to be taking a cue from True Detective fanaticism: spread the clues early and indiscriminately. David Fincher's take on Gillian Flynn's novel is due out in October.
By the way, the original video was taken around 3 years ago, but the kindergarten has only just released it this year when the kids graduated, and it's released with the parents' permission, according to Taiwanese news.
After several years away from the Shore, Kate Achille recently returned to her roots in Monmouth County. The resident marketing and creative lead for The Devon Group, Kate joined the agency in 2012. A history buff with a Master’s degree in Historical Studies, her work as a historian appears in the recently published Encyclopedia of Military Science. She is also a certified Pilates instructor who spends her spare time taking on new adventures, playing with her dog and working on her 90-year-old house. Today Kate shares with us a guide for the small, seaside hamlet of Asbury Park, NJ she calls home. –Stephanie
The new issue of Lapham's Quarterly is Youth-themed and features, among many other delights, a beautifully unhinged 1876 diary entry from a teenage girl named Maria Bashkirtseva:
I was rude to Auntie, and then I went out on the terrace. I stopped out in the garden till dusk. How lovely the twilight is with the sea and space for background, and these luxuriant plants and thick-foliaged trees! And then, by way of contrast, the bamboos and palms. The fountain, the grotto with its little waterfall trickling from rock to rock before falling into the basin. All around, the bushy trees give the spot a look of peacefulness and mystery, which makes one lazy and sets one dreaming.
Why does water always make one dreamy?
I stopped in the garden and looked at a stone vase in which a lovely canna was just unfolding. I thought how pretty my white dress and leafy crown must look in that entrancing garden.
Is that all I am ever to do in life—dress myself carefully, put leaves in my hair, and think about the effect?
Her closing line: "What do I want? Oh, you know well enough. I want glory." [LQ]
Today I learned that, beyond the success Buffy the Vampire Slayer entailed for Joss Whedon—late of Avengers-directing fame—it has a nerdly milestone of its own.
According to Charles Arthur in his book Digital Wars, the first use of to google on television appeared in Buffy. On October 15, 2002, in the fourth episode of the show’s final season, the character Willow turns to the eponymous slayer and asks, “Have you googled her yet?”
According to Arthur, just a few months later, all 60 members of a committee selected by the American Dialect Society voted to google 2002’s most useful new word. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary would soon note the coinage. By 2006, Google’s lawyers—fearful of seeing the company’s name brand watered down to the trademark mushiness of kleenex—wrote a post for the company blog outlining when and when not to google should be used.
“We’d like to make clear that you should please only use ‘Google’ when you’re actually referring to Google Inc. and our services,” it said.
It’s funny, because while Google hastened to decrease its name’s use, rival search engines have tried to increase their own. For many years, Microsoft paid for characters on the show Gossip Girl not only to paw Windows phones and tablets, but also to say “Bing it.”
Neither company's efforts succeeded. According to a recent EBay-run poll, more than 80 percent of American web users age 18 to 45 say “google it” when they mean “search for it online.” Almost 2 percent say “ask Jeeves.” And not enough people said “bing it,” evidently, for the survey to even report.
Sixty-two-year-old Joe Ellis officially retired from the National Institutes of Health in June 2012. Yet he still shows up at the federal agency's Bethesda, Md., campus roughly two days a week. When he's there, Ellis tackles long-term projects or mentors younger colleagues, but never for more than 20 hours a week.
Call it partial retirement, consulting at one's longtime workplace, or even a grand experiment in trying to hold onto key workers at a federal agency. No matter the name, Ellis's gig is part of a revolutionary federal program designed to retain older, experienced workers and keep them on the job longer than they normally would have stayed.
It's a novel idea to want to keep around older (read: expensive) workers at this particular moment in our economic history. News headlines might suggest otherwise, as many workers in their 50s and 60s have trouble plugging back into the labor market following a layoff, or as Silicon Valley (and its funding machine) often seems to favor wunderkinds over anyone with graying hair and a family.
NIH's program to keep retirees on part time has existed for years, but it did not really take off until the late 2000s, says Julie Berko, Director of NIH's Workforce Relations Division. At that time, the agency needed specialized help in its grant and contracts department—the kind of expertise better left to agency veterans than random contractors or freelancers. With an influx of economic-stimulus cash, NIH managers and human-resources professionals started contacting recent retirees or those on the cusp of leaving to see if they would consider staying on part time.
The conditions? Retirees could not work more than 20 hours a week. Part of that time needed to go toward mentoring younger staff. The program paid people for their time, while still allowing them to collect their federal annuity benefits. Finally, the part-time retirees were meant to stay on at the agency for only three additional years.
Now about 80 of NIH's roughly 20,000 workers participate in the program. For the retirees and the agency, the logistics seem to work out well. Ellis still works on major projects and advises people from his former department. That's boon to the agency because he worked there for about 34 years.
At the same time, he no longer has to manage hundreds of workers, as he did at his final post as the director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, which is responsible for the agency's grants policy. "The advantage to me is that I lost my management responsibility," he says. "That is a major reliever of stress." Working part time also gives him the space to spend more time at home and with his family—two of the major reasons he wanted to retire originally.
For the agency, Ellis represents years of well-honed, specific expertise in grants—a key part of the success of any scientific agency devoted to funding research and various labs. "The biggest piece is that we get to retain talent that would otherwise be leaving," says Philip Lenowitz, the agency's former deputy director of the Office of Human Resources, who also participates in the part-time retiree work program. The program also allows NIH workers to ease into retirement. "It's a way to find out how to transition from not putting on a suit and tie every day," Lenowitz adds.
AARP recognized NIH as the best employer in 2013 for workers over the age of 50. Part of that distinction comes from this type of part-time work program for retirees. But the agency also offers other perks to support its older workforce (the average employee's age at NIH is 48) that include an on-site gym, retirement planning seminars, telecommuting, flexible schedules, and back-up emergency care for elderly parents. It is part of a broad menu to help baby-boomer or senior-citizen scientists and administrators stay on the job for as long as they like and can. "I do think people tend to work here longer," Berko says. "People at the NIH are very interested in staying around to chase the next scientific discovery."
In the coming years, working longer will also become a key hallmark of retirement for most Americans. People live longer now than ever before and will need to work more to fund their golden years. AARP advises its members not only to save more but also to work for additional years to ensure they maintain their standard of living as they age. "As we saw in the recession, working longer is not always an option for all workers," says Gary Koenig, vice president of economic and consumer security within AARP's Public Policy Institute.
Yet, if older workers can remain on the job for two to five more years and not draw down on their savings, it can add a huge financial boost to their retirement, says Olivia Mitchell, a professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you delay claiming Social Security until you're 70, the payments go up by three-quarters," she says. Instead of freaking people out about an impending retirement crisis, Mitchell says she simply prefers to tell people to work for more years. The NIH is one place that encourages it.
Last week, Pantene, the shampoo brand, released an ad about the gendered use of language. "Why are women always apologizing?" the commercial asks. It goes on to showcase women saying "I'm sorry" for everyday activities—asking questions, making points during meetings—as mournful music plays in the background.
The ad has been viewed on YouTube, so far, more than 2 million times. It has also proven surprisingly un-controversial. Here are some of the headlines—from news stories and think pieces—that announced the ad when it came out:
This is Lean In logic, essentially, as sponsored by shampoo. Stop doing X, ladies! Because it makes men see you as Y. The #ShineStrong ad, it's worth noting—shine as in your hair, and also, presumably, as inyour spirit—is a follow-up to Pantene's 2013 "Labels Against Women" ad, which bemoaned the familiar double standards ("boss" vs. "bossy"! "persuasive" vs. "pushy"!) women face at work and beyond.
The irony that seemed to be lost on the brand in its sequel spot is that "apologetic" is yet another label, yet another double standard that sticks, stubbornly, to women—the assumption in all the stickiness being, of course, that apologizing is inherently pathetic. Lean in, the ad suggests, shinily, to your own entitlement. Apologetic excess, in Pantene's presentation of the office/the home/the world, is yet another thing—besides being too timid, besides being too accommodating, besides being too concerned with the smoothness of our faces and the shininess of our hair—that women should be apologizing for.
Or, well ... not apologizing. But also not not-apologizing? Sorrynotsorry? Sorry for not being sorry? Sorry for not saying sorry? Something like that. It is incredibly confusing. (Sorry.) What we we have come to, the shampoo brand has helpfully reminded us, is an apologia for apologies for apologias for ... I don't even know: a weird whirligig of contrition that spins along indefinitely, fueled by the forces of power dynamics and gendered behavior and probably The Patriarchy, because always The Patriarchy, and everything blurs, and then everyone feels bad about the blurring, and then everyone feels bad about feeling bad about the blurring, and we whirl and we whirl and it's a whole sorry mess.
One of the major problems with all this—besides the one embedded in the insistent equation of apology with weakness, and stubbornness with strength—is that "sorry" is, at this point, pretty much meaningless. As a word, "sorry" has entered that puckish pantheon of Terms That Seem to Say a Lot but Actually Say Very Little. "Innovation" is one of those terms. So is, if you believe the purveyors of the most existentially troubling social network yet invented, "yo." So is that classic of text messages and chats the Internet over: "LOL." Which no longer indicates "laughing out loud" so much as it indicates ... well, anything you want it to. "LOL" could mean "just kidding." Or "your joke was funny (but not 'haha' funny)." Or just "I'm happy." Or just "I'm hungry."
Which: LOL.
Anyway, "sorry" is similar: It is semantically supple. It can be meaningful, but only in a particular context. It can indicate, depending on the circumstances in which it's deployed, deep regret—I'm sorry I lied, I'm sorry I cheated, I'm sorry I ate your plums—but it could also indicate contrition of a much more casual variety. I'm sorry I bumped into you. I'm sorry I yelled at you, but the skinny latte I ordered had obviously been made with whole milk. As Ani Vrabel recently wrote in The Huffington Post,
At some point, I began using "sorry" as a synonym for "excuse me." It came to mean, "I didn't see you there and you startled me!" and "I have a question" and "I'm carrying so many things that I'm taking up more space on the subway than usual." It rarely meant, "I made a poor decision or did something wrong and it impacted you negatively. I recognize this and feel bad about it and would like to make things better between us."
Which brings us, as discussions of such things so often will, to Erving Goffman. In his Relations in Public, the oft-cited sociologist defined several key elements of the apology in, as he put it, "its fullest form." These were: "expression of embarrassment or chagrin; clarification that one knows what conduct has been expected and sympathizes with the application of negative sanction; verbal rejection, repudiation, and disavowal of the wrong way of behaving along with vilification of the self that so behaved."
This—a seminal sense of "sorry," from a seminal sociologist—has informed our thinking on apologies pretty much since Goffman proposed it. Relations in Public suggested a kind of doubleness to the act of apology. The apology was on the one hand, Goffman wrote, an admission of guilt; it was, on the other, an affirmation of the social rules that occasioned the guilt in the first place. And that duality has, in turn, pervaded our sense of what apologizing is all about. It's a kind of Cartesian fallacy, stubborn and sticky and translated to the world of contrition.
So here, again, is the problem (and here is also why I mentioned Goffman and Descartes, for which #sorrynotsorry): Many critics of the culture of sorry, and many critics of the women who participate in the culture of sorry, seem to be reading my casual apologies—and yours, maybe—in the Goffmanian way. They assume that when I apologize for my clumsiness or my lateness or my plum-eating (they were delicious, by the way), I am tacitly admitting to some kind of profound character flaw. They assume that my sorry is symptomatic. That it is, you know, A Confidence Thing.
It is not. I assure you. My casual apology—I'll just speak for myself here—is not a castigation, of myself or my self-worth or my gender; it is not necessarily—as a Jezebel article, presuming to speak for all of us, put it last year—an indication of "our guilt complexes and inner Pollyannas."
Yet combine Goffman's influence with contrition's LOL factor—the sly slitheriness of "sorry"—and you end up with ... confusion. Sorry amounts of it, actually. Goffman's guilt-infused view of the apology—"chagrin"! "negative sanction!"—simply doesn't ring true in a world that finds casual apologists running rampant on city buses and in supermarkets and at every intersection of a world that is moving and messy. It certainly doesn't ring true to me. I bumped into you on the sidewalk this morning; I'm sorry to have done that, but I am not—despite and because of my respect for you and our shared humanity—"embarrassed or chagrined" about it. I ran 10 minutes late for our coffee; I wish I'd been on time, but I'll save the hairshirt for, you know, another day.
This is all to say that our assumptions about What Apologies Mean are often completely misaligned with the way we actually use apologies in our day-to-day lives. And, more to the point, with the way women use apologies in our day-to-day lives. As Jessica Bennett, who works with the Lean In initiative, put it in a Time essay about the Pantene ad:
Sorry is a crutch — a tyrannical lady-crutch. It’s a space filler, a hedge, a way to politely ask for something without offending, to appear “soft” while making a demand. It falls in the same category as “I hate to ask” or “I know this is a stupid question” or another version of “No offense, but” or ending your statements with a question. It’s bled into our text messages (“sorrrrrryy!!!!!!”), our emails (“SO SORRY for the delay”), our emoji (you know, the bashful “eeek” face), and our workplaces. Even the rise of “sorry-not-sorry” — a joke, and hashtag, that implies I’m saying sorry but I don’t really mean it — is couched in apology. (Can’t we even own the apology–or the insult?!)
You could read this as it's intended—as evidence that, as the essay's headline argues, "Women Really Need to Stop Apologizing"—but you could also read it as evidence of the nuance wrapped up in our sorriness. "Maybe 'sorry' wouldn’t sound 'defensive or unsure,'" The New York Timesput it yesterday, "if everybody understood it simply as a nice gesture rather than as an actual mea culpa."
Which brings us back to Pantene and its ad. In 1997, long after it occurred to women to want shiny hair and shortly after it occurred to them to apologize for that, Deborah Levi wrote an NYU Law Review article called "The Role of Apology in Mediation." In it, she proposed what she called "a typology of apology," a breakout of the different forms of contrition people rely on in their day-to-day negotiations with each other. She identified four: "tactical" (acknowledging the other person's suffering in order to gain credibility and influence the other person's bargaining behavior); "explanation" (attempting to excuse the offender's behavior and render it understandable to the other party); "formalistic" (capitulating to an authority figure); and "happy-ending" (accepting responsibility for the bad behavior and expressing regret for it).
We could add others. There are many others. There's the (in)famous non-apology apology. There's the sarcastic apology. Most importantly, though, there's the gestural apology that the Times alludes to—and that the Pantene ad condemns. The low-stakes "sorry" that indicates not contrition, but ... cooperation. The kind that acknowledges that people, being people, will screw up. The kind that hopes that people, being people, will forgive. The kind that isn't freighted with power or gender or blame, but that simply helps the world to whirl a little more smoothly.
A 17-year-old babysitter in Whatcom County, Washington orchestrated a false home invasion along with her 16-year-old boyfriend and another male suspect. After getting 4-year-old Abby out of the house so her friends could do the deed, the babysitter made up a story about two armed black men breaking into the Ferndale home. She went on to say that one of the men looked like Cody Oakes, the next door neighbor.
Oakes, an operations manager for JP Morgan, was arrested and questioned before Abby broke the case open by telling police they had the wrong skin color, the robbers were white. The case began to unravel from there, and the babysitter confessed.
Abby, despite her detective skills, says she would “love to be a doctor.”
You guys, I've found the best swimsuit brand. I was super hype when Surania Swimwear contacted me. You can literally custom design your entire bathing suit. I actually made 3 separate suits. This 2 piece high waisted floral suit, a pink color blocked 2 piece, and a 1 piece forest green suit with a low dropped back. You can custom choose the print, colors, and even the cut of the suit. The best part about it is you can put in the exact measurements of your body so it fits perfectly. My body is smaller on the top than bottom so I end up having to purchase a medium top and large bottom. I don't have to worry about all that when I order from them. I went to Point Pleasant Beach in NJ and shot these pictures. It is absolutely gorgeous here. It's my new favorite beach. They also have a doughnut shop called "Top That Donut" where you can make your own donutsssss!! Anyways, you guys will probably spend hours on Surania custom making your bathing suits like I did when I first found out about them! Have fun and enjoy Summer!
One full week of summer vacation down, please nobody tell me how many there are still to go.
My big job — the corporate freelance-y consultantish one that I mentioned every now and then, a job I really, really loved — was paused abruptly in early March, and ever since I've been in a sort of limbo with it. They want me back, they keep promising to give me hours again, but probably not until next month. And "next month" has since gone from meaning "early April" to "mid-May" to "June-ish" to "let's talk in July." I've done a bunch of short-term projects in that time, and have several excellent leads on other long-term work, but right now I guess I'm still technically in between gigs and I'm not really a fan.
(None of this work is Amalah-related, by the way, just to try to wave off the inevitable GET A REAL JOB, YOU DUMB BLOOGER comments. I do freelance marketing/copywriting/editing/corporate-blog-creating/stuffs. All very boring and "real" and I rarely ever write about poop. I work pretty steadily and it's been the best fit for our family's crazy schedule, vs. a 9-5 office job, but it can definitely be ebb/flow and feast/famine. It's been super great and I'm not complaining, except for all the complaining I'm about to do, sorry.)
I am mostly not a fan of the current arrangement because — well, besides the whole money thing — it means I have all three children at home with me, with no summer camps or babysitting. I didn't want to commit to paying for any of that until I had some significant work lined up, foolishing believing that I could get the small amount of work I DO have done in a normal about of time, while also not completely sucking at being a good mom who does fun things and remembers to feed her children.
The plan was that I'd work half days. The kids would amuse themselves/each other for a few hours and by lunch time I'd call it a day and focus on them the rest of the afternoon. Take them to the pool or playground or just run errands together, or set up the sprinkler outside while I cleaned the house and started dinner and all that Responsible Adult Bullshit. I'm fairly confident I'll be swamped by the time school starts, so I dreamily dreamed that having one part-time summer would be a good thing, something I'd look back fondly on, when I got to be more SAHM than WAHM for a little while, or WOHM, if that's what ends up happening again. (GET A REAL JOB, BLOBBER.)
Okay, it's only been a week, but I can pretty safely declare that I am a world-class failure, the absolute worst, all is lost and we're basically doomed forever.
I tragically underestimated how much longer it would take me to do anything — even just answering emails, some basic proofreading, pounding out five measly semi-amusing paragraphs here and there — with the kids around and constantly interrupting me. I had to re-write my resume from scratch last week (whoops) and it took me four days. FOUR DAYS! I'm trying to work on a book idea and so far it's basically seven pages and fourteen hundred Post-It notes.
And the FIGHTING. Oh my God, the fighting. It's endless. It's irritating. And so, so stupid, I can't even take any of the shrieking INJUSTICE IS HAPPENING TO MEEEEEE! seriously.
(99% of the time the solution to the problem is for one child to go play somewere, ANYWHERE else in the house. Go play in your room! Or the playroom! Or outside! Or, I don't know, just move seven feet to your left and you're technically in the dining room and your brother will no longer be distracting you or breathing your air. But no. Every day, after finishing World War VII over elbow space at the breakfast table, they all camp out and declare zone defense in the living room, fighting over custody of specific couch cushions and floor space, and even the once-peaceful Lego bag has become a non-stop source of HE'S USING A PIECE I WANTED AND WE ONLY HAVE SEVERAL HUNDRED SIMILAR OPTIONS BUT THAT PIECE WAS SPECIAL BECAUSE I JUST NOW DECLARED IT TO BE THE SPECIAL PIECE OF FIRE POWER SPECIALNESS MOOOOOOOMMMMMMM.)
(Also, if someone could tell me where my children keep finding Play-Doh, I'd appreciate it. I've thrown out a half-dozen cans of old Play-Doh in the past week, and yet every time I come downstairs there's another fine coating of dried-out Play-Doh bits all over the place. I vaccuum it up, it reappears while I'm in the bathroom. Someone has a secret expired Play-Doh hoard-stash somewhere and as God is my witness, I am going to find it and I am going to set it on fire.)
So I'm thinking maybe it will help if I swap the day around? Get up and do the kid-focused stuff in the morning, then tire everybody out and hopefully Ike will take the occasional nap (because ho ho, guess what he's decided to stop doing since turning three) and maybe Noah and Ezra won't ramp up the stir crazy level as much when I need to get work done? I don't know. I tend to not be able to settle down and enjoy them until I've knocked out deadlines and gotten on top of email first thing in the day, and worry I'd spend the whole morning glued to my phone and fixating on my to-do list.
You'd think I'd be able to figure this stuff out by now, since I've been juggling various numbers of kids and various hours of work from home for close to EIGHT YEARS, but alas I
***
That sentence was just interrupted by Noah, informing me that Ike had made a "big mess" with "food things." Indeed, he'd opened a spice container of yellow mustard seeds and dumped the contents all over the floor. Because why not! That looks fun. At least it wasn't Play-Doh? Progress?
I hereby declare this summer to be the Summer of the Vaccuum Cleaner. It's getting mad play, y'all.
Anyway, it's lunchtime and I'm going to stick with my promise to step away from the computer and go...I don't know. Invent a game called Mom Sprays Children With Garden Hose, or Hey Everybody Let's Learn To Clean Bathrooms, or Why Don't We Go Ring Doorbells Until We Find Someone Else Who Doesn't Have Summer Camp This Week.
NASA scientist and Pluto advocate Alan Stern challenged Neil deGrasse Tyson to a debate about teeny Pluto's planetary status, and Tyson declined.
"As a general rule, I don't debate people," Tyson wrote. "Done it once or twice before, but abandoned the effort. What's behind it is that I don't have opinions that I require other people to have. So debates don't interest me for this reason."
WHAT'S BEHIND IT IS THAT I DON'T HAVE OPINIONS THAT I REQUIRE OTHER PEOPLE TO HAVE.
Previously, Tyson refused to debate conservative pastor Joel Osteen ("I don't debate people's belief systems") and put CNN on blast for doing too much gotta-hear-both-sides. The thing is, Neil "Science Is Trending" deGrasse Tyson definitely has opinions (one could also say alignments with scientific consensus) that he basically requires you to have, but you're just gonna have to get on his level on your own. Neil deGrasse Tyson has never read internet comments. Neil deGrasse Tyson grabs cups from the Starbucks pickup counter that says "Niall" and "Neal," and he shrugs calmly and goes on with his day. The gawd Neil deGrasse Tyson will not be flapped, he's unflappable. [NBC, via]
From the Washington Post:
I’ve written poems off and on, mostly off, over the course of more than two decades, and I’ve published them in Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, and maybe ten other respectable literary magazines. I work at a corporation, not in academia, and I don’t pretend to know much about how these journals operate.
Dear Polly,
The new issue of Lapham's Quarterly is Youth-themed and features, among many other delights, a beautifully unhinged 1876 diary entry from a teenage girl named Maria Bashkirtseva:
NASA scientist and Pluto advocate Alan Stern challenged Neil deGrasse Tyson to a debate about teeny Pluto's planetary status, and Tyson declined.