A.N

“Just received a manuscript in which every dash was typed by the author as a space character with a strikethrough effect.”

- Someone whose suicide note will have the strangest hyphens in it. 

One day in 2006, New York social worker Dan Cohen realized that with today's devices, all of his favorite music—he's a fan of '60s rock—is at his fingertips, but he might no longer be able to listen to it if he winds up in a nursing home when he's older. When he called around to local assisted-living facilities, he found that none of them provided personal music players to their residents.

So, he began giving them iPods. Eventually, his project became Music & Memory, a nonprofit that helps seniors living in nursing homes get access to the songs of their youth. 

The man in this video is Henry, one of the nonprofit's beneficiaries. With advanced Alzheimer's, he can't recognize his daughter and barely speaks.

He's "inert, maybe depressed, non responsive" neurologist Oliver Sacks says in the clip. 

But after listening to an iPod loaded with songs by Cab Calloway, he comes to life, singing along and saying he's filled with "love and romance."

This isn't a treatment, per se—these people may never get permanently better. The goal is simply to connect them with a part of their past that still burns bright, even the world around them becomes increasingly dim.

"The music from their youth is still preserved, and that awakens them," Cohen said. "You're bypassing the failed short-term cognition, but their emotional state is still there."

The clip above is from the documentary Alive Inside, a story inspired by Cohen's work, which premiers at the Sundance Film Festival tomorrow.

Hey Cap’n & Crew,

Fairly straightforward question here. Sometimes my face can be a traitor…it turns bright red and gets really hot at any extreme emotion, particularly embarrassment. I am sure many people can relate!

So here’s the question: What would you suggest for scripts for when someone (99.9% of the time it’s an older man, at least old enough to be my father if not grandfather) gives a weird, flirty, unwanted compliment (for example, how beautiful I am or some such nonsense), triggering a red-face explosion, and then they comment on how they made me blush. Now I am not only red-faced with embarrassment but also with anger and helplessness. You just KNOW that they’re pleased as punch with themselves and see nothing wrong with flirting at an unwilling participant because hey, they’re old and married and male! No harm done, right?

If these were random men on the street, I’d have no problem ignoring them or coming back with a scathing retort. However, this most often happens when it’s a client, a family friend, a friend’s family member, or fellow hobbyists. Particularly with the clients, I can’t give them a death-glare like I really want to.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!
Red (Wishing I Was) Dead Revolver

Dear Red:

For any gregarious older dudes reading this, when you comment on the involuntary physical reaction of a young female acquaintance or colleague, we don’t find you adorably avuncular. We find you creepy and domineering. You shown yourself to be someone who uses a another person’s distress reaction as a perceived weakness that you can use to pick on them. Or as someone who deliberately tests and pushes boundaries to groom people for further manipulation. Some people wear their handles on the outside — it doesn’t mean you have to pull them.

So, Jolly Old Fellows, let’s go back in time to puberty, when a screen door shutting in a distant room could give you an instaboner.

Would it have been cool for people to point at it and comment on it and see if they could get it to happen more? Like, teachers, cafeteria staff, fellow students, people on the bus? Would you have enjoyed that particular attention?

Even if this is a highly specific  fantasy of yours, would you appreciate it if it happened all the time? Everywhere you went? From everyone you met? “Oh, hilarious, Jolly’s penis is acting up again. Everyone look! What’s the matter, don’t be so sensitive! We’re just joking, Jolly!“

Howabout as you aged? Like, in work meetings? Where maybe it affected people’s perception of your qualifications? “We are considering you for the promotion, but….awwwwww, buddy, I’m glad you’re excited, too!” “Well, we could have Jolly do the presentation, but not if he’s going to release the Kraken again like he did last time.” 

Or religious ceremonies? “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to join this man and this woman in…Oh Jolly, not again.” 

It would be pretty violating and patronizing to have someone assume a lot of stuff about you due to an involuntary physical reaction, right? So knock it off. When a person is blushing, give them space and don’t comment on it. It’s just their face being a face, it doesn’t need your “Well aren’t you a precious young LADY” commentary.

Back to you, Red. Snappy comebacks don’t defeat ingrained sexism and ageism on their own, and you have to walk a fine line with clients. I wonder if being super-boring and factual isn’t the answer.

• “Yes, my face does that sometimes. Now, about the pricing information…”
• “Yes, the capillaries in my face sometimes fill rapidly as an involuntary reaction to stimulus. So, about rehearsal….”
• “I DO know that tends to happen, and I definitely do not like it when people call attention to it. So, what were we talking about it?”
• “Yes, and it’s hiLARious.” (Think how Professor Snape would say this.)

Save “It’s a fight or flight reaction. Still deciding which,” for special occasions.

And look for patterns. Someone who realizes that their “joke” is not funny and backs off immediately when you don’t reply favorably probably made an honest mistake. Someone who looooooooves to make you blush and comments on it at every turn and makes it about how sensitive you are when you ask them to stop is someone you don’t want to be around, ever, because they are making creepy sexist power plays designed to maximize your discomfort. Ew.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Jia Tolentino

This piece at Jacobin, by Miya Tokumitsu, is a knockout:

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

[...] “Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is an unmerited privilege, a sign of that person’s socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and cosign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can self-righteously bestow DWYL as career advice to those covetous of her success. If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves — in fact, to loving ourselves — what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

Yet arduous, low-wage work is what ever more Americans do and will be doing. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two fastest-growing occupations projected until 2020 are “Personal Care Aide” and “Home Care Aide,” with average salaries of $19,640 per year and $20,560 per year in 2010, respectively.

And from the end: "DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. It shunts aside the labor of others and disguises our own labor to ourselves. It hides the fact that if we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it." Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Jacobin]

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by Kate Greathead

As a shy, late bloomer with a nervous twitch in my eye, I didn't particularly enjoy high school. I was consistently the last one to get a joke, with the exception of dirty jokes, which I usually didn’t get at all. This sense of being on a different wavelength from my peers led to a paranoid, left-out feeling—like nobody knew I existed, and at the same time, they were all laughing at me behind my back.

One night after dinner in tenth grade, my mom said there was something she wanted to “talk about.” My first thought was that my mom had seen one of those TALK TO YOUR KID ABOUT SEX commercials and I’d have to confess I’d never even kissed a boy, which I knew to be pathetic at my age. To my relief, it wasn’t sexual relations my mom wanted to discuss, but our last name. Which is Greathead. Spelled like it sounds: the word GREAT, then the word HEAD.

My mom said she knew it wasn’t the easiest last name to have and asked if I’d ever been teased. I proceeded to tell her about an incident I’d kept to myself for years (for fear of how much it might upset her as a parent). The summarized version is this: one time in middle school, my French teacher, Monsieur Chameron, had lost his temper at me and said: “If your last name is Greathead, then how come you're so stupid?”

It took me a moment to realize my mom’s silence wasn’t for loss of words, but because she was completely unimpressed by this story. When she finally spoke it was to ask: “And is that the only time… having the last name… has been an issue?”

The truth was no. There had been other issues, like when the track team had voted to make T-shirts with everyone's last names printed on the back, but the T-shirt company had refused to include mine. (They were a “family company,” they said). Another time a substitute teacher made us go around the room introducing ourselves and when it was my turn and I said, “Hello, I’m Kate Greathead,” the sub got very angry and threatened to send me to the office, and everyone laughed. Then there was the time someone had “defaced” a poster I’d made for the science fair by drawing an arrow between my first and last names pointing to the word GIVES, which had been scrawled over my diagram of photosynthesis. I could’ve cared less about the stupid poster, but the vice principal had made a big fuss and there had been an “investigation” to find the “responsible party.” No students were ever charged. There were a handful of similar incidents but I didn’t bother telling my mom about them because they didn’t make a lick of sense.

Or did they?

The next day at school I was in middle of gym class, trying to focus on serving a volleyball, when something clicked in my head and all of a sudden I realized that my last name meant something perverted. After class I found my best friend, Sam, who confirmed this to be the case. But what, exactly, specifically, did it mean?

“What do you think it means?” Sam asked.

My best guess: “The tip of a man’s penis?”

After 30 seconds of staring at me, similar to the way your doctor stares at you when you tell him you have a brain tumor, Sam filled me in on what the rest of the school had apparently known since 8th grade: Greathead means blow job. Processing this information was like finding out you’ve been going around your entire life with the words SUCK PENIS tattooed across your forehead—and no one was kind enough to tell you. Because they assumed you knew.

Their assumptions were wrong. Because as a shy, late bloomer, with a nervous eye twitch, I was not the most cunning linguist when it came to slang for oral sex. And, no, never once, not for a split second in my seventeen years on this planet had it occurred to me that my last name—that which was typed on my birth certificate, written in permanent marker on the label of my first yellow raincoat, scribbled in the skies of my Crayola landscapes, proudly penned in newly acquired script on the tops of my spelling tests, in the flaps of my favorite paperbacks, called out in classrooms, announced at piano recitals and track meets, printed in yearbooks, class rosters and postcards from the dentist, signed over and over and over in the margins of notebooks because you never know, one day you might be famous and need a pretty signature—in addition to signifying Which Kate?…This Kate!, was slang for… that act.

Growing up means having holes poked in the fabric of your childhood. These holes multiply and meet each other, forming bigger holes, which keep expanding; eventually there are only a few threads left, not enough to bear the weight of your innocence. So began the rest of my life as Kate Greathead. Spelled like it sounds: G-R-E-A-T-H-E-A-D.

Kate Greathead is a writer and a storyteller. She lives in Brooklyn.

26 Comments

by Jia Tolentino

The (redesigned) New York Times on an unforgivable human rights story from my home state:

The diagnosis was crushing and irrevocable. At 33, Marlise Munoz was brain-dead after collapsing on her kitchen floor in November from what appeared to be a blood clot in her lungs.

But as her parents and her husband prepared to say their final goodbyes in the intensive care unit at John Peter Smith Hospital here and to honor her wish not to be left on life support, they were stunned when a doctor told them the hospital was not going to comply with their instructions. Mrs. Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant, the doctor said, and Texas is one of more than two dozen states that prohibit, with varying degrees of strictness, medical officials from cutting off life support to a pregnant patient.

There is some confusion over whether the law applies to brain-dead patients as well as patients in a coma or vegetative state, but additional "confusion" stems from the fact that the hospital has also "declined to comment" on Munoz's condition. I'm shivering with rage! From Munoz's parents:

“It’s not a matter of pro-choice and pro-life,” said Mrs. Munoz’s mother, Lynne Machado, 60. “It’s about a matter of our daughter’s wishes not being honored by the state of Texas.” Mrs. Munoz’s father, Ernest Machado, 60, a former police officer and an Air Force veteran, put it even more bluntly. “All she is is a host for a fetus,” he said on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the hospital said, “Every day, we have patients and families who must make difficult decisions. Our position remains the same. We follow the law.”

At least 31 states have adopted laws restricting the ability of doctors to end life support for terminally ill pregnant women, regardless of the wishes of the patient or the family, according to a 2012 report from the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington. Texas is among 12 of those states with the most restrictive such laws, which require that life-support measures continue no matter how far along the pregnancy is.

Legal and ethical experts, meanwhile, said they were puzzled by the conflicting accounts of her condition. Brain death, an absence of neurological activity, can be readily determined, they said. It is legally death, even if other bodily functions can be maintained.

Texas: Not Doing Great.

[NYTimes]

15 Comments

by Emma Carmichael

Sharon Jones and her Dap-Kings were forced to delay the release of Give the People What They Want when the lead singer was diagnosed with cancer in early 2013, but the album's coming out a week from today. Here's the video for "Stranger To My Happiness," which features a typically jubilant Sharon over a typically oldschool track. Welcome back, lady. (The album's also available for streaming at NPR's First Listen.) [Stereogum]

2 Comments

"A polar bear peers up from beneath the melting sea ice on Hudson Bay as the setting midnight sun glows red from the smoke of distant fires during a record-breaking spell of hot weather," writes Paul Souders, who submitted this winning picture to the 2013 National Geographic Photo Contest. "The Manitoba population of polar bears, the southernmost in the world, is particularly threatened by a warming climate and reduced sea ice."

See all the winning images »
Download contest wallpapers »

She: “We lack context.”

He: “You know, Em, words aren’t everything.”

He then cut so much of who she was from their story she became a literary prop on which he could hang his coat. “This is perfect.” he sighed happily into the quiet, his collar hanging precariously from the hook she had become.

This soup is the very best thing I ate in December, which is saying a lot for a month that involved the purchase of at least 4 pounds of butter. And it didn’t involve any of them. I know, I know — that’s crazy talk.

We had a last-minute dinner party in December, last minute enough that I basically ran to the store that morning and bought everything then cooked straight through until dinner. This is not my style. I’m a dinner party planner; rushing makes my skin crawl. But if there could be an upside to it, it would be that by planning the morning-of, necessary adjustments could be made due to the facts that 1. It was snowing very hard outside, thus, soup was in order. 2. A vegetarian friend (that’s not so strict that cheese is off the menu) was able to make so my beloved chicken stock was out for a base, but I wanted something equally magnanimous.

... Read the rest of parmesan broth with kale and white beans on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to parmesan broth with kale and white beans | 220 comments to date | see more: Announcements, Appetizer, Beans, Italian, Kale, Photo, Soup

by Jia Tolentino

Via Anne Helen Petersen, here is the funniest thing I saw all weekend. The Guardian explains these "hidden mother" photos at length:

[To take a baby picture] a 19th-century parent would have to dress the baby in a starchy gown, transport it and perhaps its siblings to the nearest photographer's (or ambrotypist's) studio as early in the morning as possible, climb several flights of stairs to the skylit attic, arrange the family group against the studio backdrop, get everyone to remain completely still for 30 seconds or so, part with a large chunk of money, and then wait several days for the copies to be finished, before sending them round to family and friends as calling cards, or pasting them into albums.

The main problem was the length of the exposure. However bright the photographer's studio, it took up to half a minute for an image to register on wet collodion. Getting an adult to sit completely still for half a minute is a challenge, but getting a wakeful baby to do so is near-impossible. The photographer could position anyone old enough to sit on a chair by placing an electric chair-style head clamp behind them, but the only way of photographing a baby was for the mother to hold it.

Hidden mothers > baby selfies, no?

0 Comments

by Heather Havrilesky

Dear Polly,

I feel sick just writing this, and I don't want to lose something good, so here goes:

I'm a 34-year-old single mother of a beautiful, sweet, and healthy three-year-old boy. I never imagined having kids, but accidentally became pregnant three months into a destructive relationship. I kept the child and eventually got rid of the man (with the help of a domestic violence counselor and a restraining order), which was a healthy decision.

You see, healthy decisions are not my forte. With a few exceptions, I usually date the damaged bad boy, the alcoholic who needs rescuing, or the tortured artist. I scrapped all that when I had my son, and haven't dated since removing baby daddy from my life 2 years ago. Until recently. 

Five months ago, I met a man at my sister's wedding (one of the groomsmen), and we connected. Talked all night, laughing like crazy, connected. We hugged briefly at the end of the evening and we both felt it was worth pursuing. He lives 1400 miles away from me, and we began an email correspondence, sharing our relationship history, likes and dislikes, and getting to know each other. We have a lot in common. We fell in love. We made plans for him to relocate to my city and move in together. We decided all this before spending a great deal of physical time with each other. He's visited once a month for the past five months, and the trips have gone from elated, nervous excitedness to awkward arguing and annoyance. He is sensitive, kind, attentive, and doting. He is so very patient and loving with my child. Because of these traits, I find myself feeling less attracted to him physically. He seems meek. It is truly something sick. I have a hard time looking at him on occasion, because every little quiver, every timid step, every noise he makes while eating makes my skin crawl. He follows me around and paws at me. He is far less experienced than I am in the bedroom, and yet I do not know how to let him know what I like, because he is not keeping up with me in that department.

I don't have a lot going on, aside from an unsatisfying job, my son, and my love of animals. I don't have the financial resources to pursue hobbies or interests, and this man offers stability. I love him, but I'm not sure why I'm so uncontrollably moody around him, and why he has turned me off. He is so gentle—the gentle man I always thought I wanted, because underneath it all I'm gentle, too—but I'm pushing away and I don't know if I love myself enough to make this work. I have tried talking to him about this and he just apologizes and says he feels out of his element. He picks up on my annoyance which makes him feel uncomfortable, which triggers a neediness, which I find unattractive. I don't want my son to have a bad boy for a father figure, but I don't want to resent my lover over petty things. Are these petty things? Is love about being able to be annoyed by someone, and loving them anyway? I tell myself that I have a good man—and I don't want to lose him—but how can I really snap out of this? I feel terrible, ungrateful, and confused.

Thanks for listening.

Annoyed

Dear Annoyed,

You are accustomed to being ignored, dismissed, and listened to only in the most cursory fashion, so this man who adores you, listens closely, and tries very hard to please seems unlovable. He seems unlovable because he makes you aware of yourself. When you're chasing a guy who's distracted, uninterested, dismissive, you are blissfully unaware of yourself, lost in the chase, trying to get him to love you. When someone loves you as you are, you don't have the same luxury of not showing up completely.

On top of it all, you hate yourself for feeling repulsed by him. You feel rotten and shitty and ungrateful. And there he is, being sweet to your kid! If it weren't for your boy, or the fact that he might support you, you might've given up by now.

You fell in love, which was easy. He is an easy person to love. Now you have to accept that he's not a dick, he's not made of magical dickhead fairy dust like the guys who disappear, who can't listen, who don't give a fuck about you. If you forced those so-called bad boys to stay, to be present, to help, they would seem lame, too. They would get wilty and weak upon closer inspection—they'd look much, much worse than your boyfriend, in fact. They just don't slow down enough for you to get a close look at them.

You're tortured by the notion that this guy will make you crazy forever, with his twitchy, timid, self-conscious shit. You know who else looks exactly like that? You do, when you're chasing a guy. You may think that you don't, but you're wrong. Neediness makes people look deflated and not so sexy.

Right around the time I got engaged to my husband, he started to look like the geekiest man alive to me. We went on a trip to Spain, and day after day we would drink beers together in beautiful places, and I'd think, "I'm going to spend the rest of my life listening to this twerp talk." He got terrible haircuts back then. He didn't know how to dress. When he said something he wasn't sure about, his mouth would do this weird downward-twitch thing on one side. It was the physical signal of him second-guessing himself. It was not cute.

He thought I was awesome, but I knew that I was sick inside, not good enough to be loved by him. I would scare him off and he would find some gorgeous, loving woman who was much, much better for him than me, and I would spend the rest of my life alone. All of my friends would say, "Through some miracle THAT MAN was crazy about you and you fucked it up? You really want to be alone don’t you?" They'd never listen to me complain about love again.

After trying to scare him off and hating myself for it, I finally confessed that I had lots of negative feelings and almost-cold feet. "I love you and I want to be with you, but I feel really guilty because I hate your hair. I hate the pants you wear. You're handsome and your pants are just awful. It's criminal, almost, how you cover up your pretty looks. And that thing you do with your mouth. Ugh. I know, I'm an asshole. I feel so shitty about what an asshole I am."

Instead of getting angry, it made him laugh. "I do wear bad pants," he said. So we talked about his twitchy mouth after that. I made it very clear that I wanted us to be together, that he didn't have to change anything but I DID have to talk about this stuff, not because he was bad, but because I didn't know how to show up and be in a relationship with a mortal human being without ripping them to shreds in my poisonous, unlovable brain.

Luckily, my husband understands the poisonous brain thing. He has an appreciation for complexity, for inner conflict, for the fact that you can say something terrible and admit to feeling things you don't want to feel and that doesn't change your love or your values or your commitments.

I don't know this for sure, but I'm going to bet that if you make your love and your values and your commitments clear, your boyfriend will understand about the other dark feelings that are plaguing you. You need to be clear about what you want, emotionally and sexually. If you don't want to be pawed, you have to say that. Men love a woman doing the dishes. Why? They can go fuck themselves. I don't want action when I'm washing shit.

In my opinion, great relationships between smart, complicated people are only possible when total honesty is in the mix. You won't accept this generous man in your life until you accept your own flaws enough to make them clear to him. You're judgmental and fault-finding. So am I. But you value generosity and gentleness. And you'll learn to tolerate neediness, even as it reminds you of yourself in ways that are uncomfortable.

This is a phase. You're getting serious. People have cold feet when they get serious. There is a difference between FUCK THIS, I HATE THIS RELATIONSHIP cold feet, and "Oh God, he's humming that song again, he is such a repugnant dork. I want Idris Elba instead!" Just because you have an overactive, brutal head doesn't mean that your heart wants him gone. I think your heart knows he matches you. The matching might be awkward and uncomfortable for you right now, but it's real. He is not an escape, like a "bad boy" is. He is right here, right now, human, normal, flawed.

If you can be open about your preferences and turn-offs, and be heard, if you can express yourself and ask him not to stigmatize or pathologize the things you desire, and if you can do the same for him somehow, then your relationship will grow past this. Visits are weird and intense—similar to spending two weeks in Spain with someone, thinking too much about every stupid little thing that they do. I think you have to be as honest as you can in order to get past this. You have to include your self-loathing, which is a huge part of this. You have to include your guilt, and your attraction, and your distaste. You have to say which things you want to go differently.

Maybe his timidity and pawing will always feel wrong. I want to caution you strongly to give yourself and him a chance before you take something small and use it as an excuse to bail. The sex, also, is all jammed up by your lack of acceptance—of him and of yourself. The sex might be amazing once there's more honesty in the mix. You can't possibly predict the outcome there without more time, and less poisonous, detached, confused thinking.

The stakes feel high. You aren't used to being loved. You don't really like being the one with more power, the one who's being chased. You'd frankly prefer to be the chaser. I'll bet your boyfriend prefers to be the chaser, too, and kind of likes that role. Maybe that's something to talk about together.

Trust me, though, that this phase doesn't last forever. If you have a career, if you have friends, if you have a full life, you don't sit around chopping apart your partner's flaws around the clock. You say that you don't have a lot going on, except for your son and him. You need to work on yourself, and make your life more complete, so that you don't make him such an area of extreme focus. Some of your discontent lies there. If you simply allow him to support you without bettering yourself, neither one of you will be happy.

But if you use the stability he's brought to your life to make your life more full and complete outside of him, then these tiny little things that seem tragic now will just seem like tiny little things down the road. Insecure tics are nothing, when they're accompanied by generosity and kindness and attraction. Once everything is out in the open? That's the beginning. It either works or it falls apart from there. You'll never even get to the starting line if you don't express what you need.

At the very end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this exact process begins: Two people who love and hate each other enter this crazy space of shoving it all in each other's faces. I'm sure lots of terrible couples have stayed together a little longer after seeing that movie. But to me, it's one of the most beautiful scenes, one of the truest and rarest expressions of real love that's ever been created. Because when you let someone into your life, there is ugliness and shock and fear and repulsion there. No one likes to admit that. You wonder if you'll be dragged down, dragged into someone else's flaws and messes. You wonder if their weaknesses will take over, if you'll spend the rest of your life tortured by their other-ness, their teensy tiny sounds and smells that fill up your space and sometimes seem to fuck with your good life. For a while, you hate the other person and you hate you and you hate the two of you, together. So inadequate, so insecure, so flinty and pushy and messy and wrong.

To me the moment of truth comes when you say it out loud: Look at me, hating you. Look at you, hating me. Look at us, how gorgeously our flaws match. How gorgeously we collide. Sometimes you have the strength to say these things, and the other person says (or, more often, implies): "No, I don't want you like this. I don't want the truth. I don't accept that I'm a mess. And I don't want to be with someone who is." And also: "Why are you crying? What did I do to deserve this shit?" And also: "If you loved me more, you wouldn't mention that I smell bad, or make weird noises, EVER." I've been there. There's this opportunity for connection, for acceptance, and the other person says FUCK THAT AND FUCK YOU.

Lots of people, LOTS AND LOTS OF FUCKING PEOPLE, really, truly don't want to connect. They just want to do what they do without being challenged or being forced to show up. They want to talk about the easy stuff, keep it light, ignore the trouble, keep the peace, don't look too hard at anything, and don't get too honest. There's another tier, above that: The people who want intimacy, but only on THEIR terms. They want access to an open person, sure, so they can turn that person on and off, like a faucet. Great when they happen to want you, not so great when you need something from them and they can't handle being needed.

But there are a few people who can show up. If they see that you want them to show up, they can show up. If you're present, they will find a way to be present, too. I think that's what you have in this man, even if you aren't quite there yet yourself. You're going to have to work to catch up with him. You should not see him as inferior. You're the one who needs to open your heart more. Because the moment that you look at another human being, and all of his flaws stand out so clearly, and you feel love, love, love? That's a moment of transcendence. That's real love. It's not chasing. It's not dickhead-fairy-dust-created magic. It's not swaggery sureness and photogenic sex. Real love is two flawed people, laughing together at all of their flaws, their gorgeously matched flaws.

Admit your anger and repulsion. These pesky little irritations are nothing. When you tell him the truth about what you're struggling with, if you do it with love and with the intention of accepting him, chances are good that he'll understand, and you'll be released from this shame you're feeling. Once that shame and guilt stops blocking everything else, you might find it easier to feel love for him again.

This is just where you are right now. It's ok that you're here. There are lots of reasons you're here. It's not your fault. You aren't used to this kind of love. This is brand new.

You may be on the verge of experiencing mutual acceptance and real commitment for the first time, and it feels scary. If you're very open and honest and vulnerable right now, though, you'll gain so much. Because real mutual acceptance doesn't mature into compromise or settling. Real acceptance blooms into a kind of mutual celebration of who you each are, separately and together. It's a celebration of the limitless possibilities of two people who are not afraid to honor each other's gently used souls. As Mary says in Eternal Sunshine, "Adults are this mess of sadness and phobias." You are flawed. He is flawed. Together, you are flawed. Together, you are amazing.

Polly

Do you wonder why you fall in love with every woman you see who shows you the least bit of attention? Write to Polly and she either will or will not yell at you!

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.

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by Emma Carmichael

Vanity Fair published a long report on the NuvaRing in the latest issue, and they've put up an online summary that includes some horrifying figures and anecdotes about the female contraceptive, which has allegedly caused blood cots in "thousands" of users:

As NuvaRing’s manufacturer, Merck, which made $623 million in NuvaRing sales in 2012, is facing roughly 3,500 lawsuits against it, Brenner asks why, despite evidence of serious risk, this potentially lethal contraceptive remains on the market. Would a young woman use NuvaRing, Brenner asks, if she knew that the F.D.A. had determined that there was a 56 percent increased risk of blood clots when it was compared with birth-control pills using earlier forms of progestin? Karen Langhart, the mother of Erika Langhart, a 24-year-old who died of a pulmonary embolism on Thanksgiving Day 2011 after using NuvaRing for approximately four years, tells Brenner, “I want to warn every mother and every daughter: do not use the product that killed my child.”

And from a 2009 Mother Jones report on the same issue:

NuvaRing actually contains a lower hormone dose than most oral contraceptives, a fact its ads emphasize. But while birth control pills lose up to half their hormones in the digestive tract, the ring's dose is absorbed directly into the blood. Its package insert says there are no data on whether this route makes NuvaRing any riskier than taking pills. But that, say lawyers suing the company, is because Organon never studied the question before it marketed the ring. Nor did the FDA demand it—the agency based its approval largely on studies involving pills.

I've used the NuvaRing for close to five years. Anyone else out there second-guessing their commitment to this method?

[Vanity Fair, Mother Jones]

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I'm still making vintage Christmas ornament wreaths for the South Wedge Holiday Craft Bazaar. This is a favorite, love the colors.

This one includes a chalkboard ornament that you can customize with your own message. I have this wreath-making down to a process now. The hardest part is picking out the ornaments for a color scheme.

I made two more baublesicles too. Red and gold this time.

by Jodie Shupac

I went to laughter yoga the other night, I guess because I live in a big city and sometimes wear stretchy pants in the street and pretty regularly force-feed myself kale.

Regular yoga is no longer the cure-all for your out-of-balance, toxins-infested mind-body; the cure-all is laughter yoga. Basically, laughter yoga is the new method for scrubbing out our dirty bodies and changing our brain chemistry and banishing sadness and stress from everyone. Forever.

The idea is that laughing is good for you (science says so, after all), and that pretending to laugh can be just as good for your health and wellbeing as actual laughing. So that’s what you do, in laughter yoga. You pretend—force yourself, even—to laugh. For an hour.

Here is what I learned at laughter yoga.

1. There is no yoga in laughter yoga.

I think I have a pretty forgiving definition of what yoga is (like, taking deep breaths when you’re trying not to punch people on the subway is clearly yoga), but standing in the dimly-lit “party room” of someone’s condo with a handful of kooky middle-aged ladies (respect), and forcing yourself to cackle maniacally at literally nothing for a full hour is just unsettling. It’s like the humiliating improv unit in high school drama class, but this time you paid money for it and everyone is 30 years older. My chakras are still unaligned.

3. I am a bad person.

The only times during class that I let forth genuine, from-the-belly guffaws (and not the unsettling alien cackles and donkey brays that apparently emerge when I’m forced to laugh nonstop for 60 minutes straight), were when I made eye contact with the friend I’d come to class with. We were made to mime throwing milkshakes at people, and we lost it. We were asked to yuk it up over an imaginary Visa bill, and I caught her eye and went into convulsions.

This laughter felt less curative and more of the where-are-we-make-it-stop-let’s-never speak-of-this-again variety, but it was therapeutic nonetheless.

3. I am incapable of hiding my inner darkness.

I thought I’d done an OK good job of concealing my black thoughts, but on the way home from class my friend was like, “I kept looking over at you and thinking, ‘Jodie so wants to kill herself right now.’”

4. I’m uncomfortable with catharsis.

Toward the end of the class, we had to clutch at either real or pretend physical ailments and hobble around laughing. The idea to embrace a fuck you, you don’t own me approach to pain.

I watched an eccentric older lady, five-foot-nothing, beset with wrinkles and quite round, shriek with laughter as she pressed her hands to her stooped, ostensibly aching back. My eyes welled up. I was suddenly struck by the profound beauty of it all, which was followed by a sense of empowerment.

And then, swiftly, shame.

Namaste.

 

Photo via ffscsw/flickr.

Jodie Shupac is a reluctant millennial. More importantly, she's a freelance writer who lives in Toronto.

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by Jia Tolentino

Are you ready for this? I wasn't. But I'm also not ready to face the reality that Christmas is in two weeks and I don't have presents for anyone yet. Rather than sensibly consider the very near future, let's strap ourselves down for a second and think about the past with this 62-year-old Christmas issue of Woman's Day, which shall guide us through the holiday season like an old-timey lantern fueled not with kerosene but with medium-grade crack.

So how does the holiday spirit look in 1951? First, like a G.E. clock called "The Clansman":

And a thirty-year-old dude carrying a Santa bag full of cigarettes, who's two seconds away from taking that beard off and doing that towel-slap thing with it:

What's with the man stuff, Woman's Day? The editors make up for it with a feature whose title will, many decades later, prove itself evergreen:

Here, "Susan Bennett Holmes," a sentient wig adrift in a sea of quaaludes, wishes you "a very Merry Christmas—in three dimensions!" This copy reaches Donald Barthelme levels of duplicity, formal anarchy and verbal collage. "What is a broken necklace to thee and us?" "Our old straw hat never broke itself into little grass rugs—even in our mind." The piece ends on the unpunctuated word "miniature," refusing to finish itself either elsewhere on the page or in the magazine, because the wig and her editors do not give a fuck.

The same thread of syntactical and thematic derangement shows up in the six short stories featured in this issue (the abundance of fiction being one of the most foreign aspects of these old magazines, and one of the reasons I love to read them and imagine a career built selling my frivolous words in a totally different format). One story is called "Cassandra's Christmas" and has the tagline In just a few seconds, she turned from an aristocrat among mice to an artist among people. It begins with the upper-class rodent Cassandra in a department store elevator, ashamed of being seen with the cleaning woman (a "Mrs. Barkowitz") and praying that no one else mistakes her for Mickey Mouse. Another short story in the issue is called "The Mend Spot":

If that teaser line looks insensible, try these guys on from the body: For an Immy is such a one as never was, such a one for brewing a big, wild broth in a man as has no equal in the world. The sound of the slim stem snapping in the black wind of passion comes back time and time again. An Immy is an experience, all right. Those words don't make any sense, which is the theme of our Ladymag Christmas.

Back to holiday-themed service journalism. You've probably got friends coming over at some point in the next couple of weeks, right? You're probably going to have to make some food for them? In a classic example of female-on-female microaggression, the editors of Woman's Day prescribe caution. They are not sure about your "hamburg."

This piece is as terrible as it looks, so we won't spend any more time on "Haydn S. Pearson," who is blessedly not around today to defend this article on Twitter by self-identifying as a feminist. Preying neatly on the insecurities engendered by our Haydn ("No 'E,'" spat Haydn at the country club hostess. "I told you that on the damn telephone"), the magazine is also careful to provide you with a little Hamburg Help. First up:

Dried Beef and Beanburgers. Oh, you already ate all your dried beef for the week? Try a Walnut Squareburger.

Note the intriguing technique here, in which the burger meat actually serves as the buns for the stuffing, which is itself the squareburger. But if you're scared off hamburg for the time being, why not try a "Cranberry Come-On"?

Here we invoke the anthropological imagination necessary to understand a world in which the best signifier of aspirational holiday eating was a tray of wobbling cranberry chodes. This page is like a Magic Eye image, in which the shape that emerges is a weird penis and some weird stuff to do with it. We've got tart flavors, gay dishes, the right "bite," a "Hawaiian Fruit Ring." I do not accept the Cranberry Come-On; into the trash can it goes! Wait, what happened to the trash can?

It's been touched by Christmas. Nice try, Brit. Oh no, here we go again:

"How to Make with Ordinary Wire Coat Hanger THIS HOLIDAY DOOR DECORATION." Best editors in the game. Shout out to Step #5, which is "Hang on door and await admiring comments from everyone." Double shout out to the Wrigley's ad at the bottom. "When folks drop in on you, frantically hand out gum sticks. Try it. Try it. Try it." Triple shout out to that classic MFA-realism phrasing: Nothing tastes so good, lasts so long.

I appreciate, actually, the fact that this woman's magazine is like "Make a coat hanger into a tree shape. Look at you, fancy lady!" Better a coat hanger than a $400 coat to make your fruit-shape body into a different fruit-shape body. Here is another thing you can do with a coat hanger:

"He can be made in a few hours with a dollar's worth of plastic, a piece of muslin, a wire coat hanger, some enamel, and a billion-year pact with Satan." Begone, floppy devil.

But isn't there something charming about the ultra-basic nature of these crafts? In its first mass-consumerist flowering, the search for personally rewarding DIY projects to compensate for the lack of female professional mobility is pleasingly humble and make-do. Another way Woman's Day thinks you can be fancy?

Wax your picture frames. Wax your book ends. Wax your tie racks and purses and children's toys "especially." Would you rather wax every surface in your house or every surface on your body? Direct your answers and your complaints about the eternal bind of womanhood to "Margaret Scott Johnson's Wax Consumer Service Department," reachable at "Johnson's Wax, Racine, Wisconsin."

Or just cut to the heart of Christmas, which is "stuff you'll never use again." Distract your house guests from your shitty beanburgers with a touch of the Semi-Homemade:

Here is Epsie's suggestion for Guest Soap:

We are back in the land beyond meaning. Guest soap/ below/ Cut cubes from cake/ Stick on stars/ Tie in red veiling that doubles as overnight hair net. Epsie, really, what guest is going to be like "Thank you so much, I actually forgot to bring my hair net, this soap-scummy bullshit perfectly fits my needs."

Guests don't need all that, anyway! You're already giving them shelter, so fuck a soap cube, open the wine. But you know who really does need a present or two? Your kids. Here, Woman's Day advises that you recoup your Silly Bandz expenditures in child labor:

Gifts so easy even a child could make them! But what is a "tin-can rolling block" made of?

Empty baby meat cans and red nail polish. I cropped out the instructions because I fear the eyes of the NSA. Hey, what else can kids make?

She asked me what I wished for on my wish list/ I asked my school-age child to do a bunch of stuff involving razor blades.

R-A-Z-O-R-B-L-A-D-E-S.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Previously: "Mouthwatering Recipes from the March 1950 Issue of McCall's"

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Mike and I love taking the kids to openings at the museum where he works. We do it a couple times a year, and it's always a blast. The kids are very well behaved and excellent company, and it's great that they get to do something that is unique to our family.

At this opening last week, the museum had a photobooth kiosk by the dessert table, so we took our picture a couple of times. It didn't have much of a timer before the camera went off, and I kept having weird faces. I think here I'm saying, "Oh, shoot, was everyone ready?"

I’m working on a big side project right now and it has required me to buy a lot of extra groceries. You know how I hate to see food go to waste, so I took a look at the ingredients on hand and came up with these tasty little tacos to use up my leftovers. All I had to buy was the zucchini. I’d call that a WIN.

I initially set out to make these tacos vegan, but then I realized that I had some monterrey jack cheese in my fridge, too. I have to admit, once I put that jack on there it took the tacos from “good” to “NOM x 100″. Seriously. Even though the tacos already had the creamy avocado slices, something about the monterrey jack cheese just really set them off. These tacos are “stuff your face” good.

The avocado was undoubtably the most expensive item here. I already had it on hand, so it wasn’t a loss for me. If I didn’t already have it, the monterrey jack cheese would have been more than enough to replace it. So, keep that in mind if your budget is extra tight (and whose isn’t?).

Oh, and if you don’t have the spices on hand to make the homemade taco seasoning, you can use one store bought taco seasoning packet in its place (although you won’t need the extra garlic powder listed below).

Roasted Corn and Zucchini Tacos

 

 

Step by Step Photos

Corn and zucchini is one of my favorite vegetable combos. The corn is sweet and the zucchinis get kind of creamy when roasted. YUM. I used 8 oz. (half of the bag) of corn and two medium zucchinis.

It’s really important to chop the zucchini into pieces that are similar in size to the corn, so that they roast at the same speed. The easiest way to do this is to cut the zucchini in half lengthwise, so that it has a flat edge to lay on. Cut the zucchini lengthwise a couple more times to make matchsticks, then cut across the matchsticks into small pieces.

Place the diced zucchini and corn in a bowl and add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and one batch of taco seasoning (or one taco seasoning packet), plus 1/4 tsp garlic powder. My taco seasoning recipe doesn’t include garlic powder because I usually use fresh garlic in my recipes, but this time I didn’t, so I supplemented with a little garlic powder. My tacos seasoning also doesn’t contain a lot of salt, so you may want to add a little after the vegetables roast.

Stir it all up really, really good, so that everything is coated in oil and spices. Spread this mixture out evenly over a baking sheet covered with foil. Pop it into an oven that is preheated to 400 degrees and let it roast for 25 minutes or just until the veggies look a little soft and shriveled.

Like this. The steam is still rising off of the delicious veggies… MMmmm. While the corn and zucchini are roasting, you can rinse and drain the black beans. Let them drain really well, so that your tacos don’t get soggy.

Add the well drained black beans and stir to combine. Taste the mixture and add a little salt if it seems bland (homemade taco seasoning doesn’t contain a lot of salt, but if you’re using a store bought packet it probably has plenty).

Now it’s time to build the tacos. You’ll want to toast the tortillas in a dry skillet briefly to get that raw taste out. Just put them in a hot skillet until they get a little stiff, but still pliable enough to wrap a taco. Add a scoop of corn-zucchini mixture, a slice of avocado, a few sprigs of cilantro, and a pinch of shredded monterrey jack cheese.

If you happen to have a lime sitting around (like I did), you can squeeze a little lime juice on there, too. I didn’t think it increased the deliciousness enough to actually include it in the recipe, though.

Tacos are little bundles of love. 

Do the taco dance!

The post Roasted Corn and Zucchini Tacos appeared first on Budget Bytes.

by Jia Tolentino

The unflinching, prodigious Andrea Elliott New York Times story on child homelessness in NYC is generating a lot of talk already and I bet you've all seen it already, but in case you haven't, here it is. The story is centered on an 11-year-old girl:

Her name, Dasani, speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. It hinted at a different, upwardly mobile clientele, a set of newcomers who over the next decade would transform the borough.

Dasani’s own neighborhood, Fort Greene, is now one of gentrification’s gems. Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.

It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

It's a long one (five parts; it might eat the remainder of your workday), but it's the length and the level of detail and nuance in the reporting that do justice for the dizzying subject. [NYTimes]

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Ever feel totally out of your depth? Like you’re due to be discovered for the “fraud” that you are? This is “impostor syndrome” — where we constantly feel like everyone around us has their act together and we don’t. The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman:

Achieve promotions, or win accolades, and you’ll just have more cause to feel like a fake. Enhance your knowledge, and as you expand the perimeter of what you know, you’ll be exposed to more and more of what you don’t. Impostorism, as Pacific Standard magazine put it recently, “is, for many people, a natural symptom of gaining expertise”. Move up the ranks and if your field’s even vaguely meritocratic, you’ll encounter more talented people to compare yourself negatively against. It never stops. “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find [me] out now,’” as some low-profile underachiever named Maya Angelou once said.

The solution, says Burkeman, is that our higher-ups should talk about their insecurities more. Admittedly, that’s a hard ask, so in the mean time just remember that everyone feels like an impostor, it’s not just you. 

Read the rest of his essay here.

“While my hubby, son, and I were playing Minecraft, my 2.5 year old daughter was playing in the playroom behind me.  After a while I noticed the absence of noise, turned around, and found this sight.  She had fallen asleep in the last position she had been playing in which happened to be laid out on top of my Corgi.  The dog is not very intelligent and just laid there with a 35 lb toddler on top of her for what must have been 20 minutes or more.  After snapping the pic I took the baby to her own bed and the dog acted like nothing happened.”

(submitted by Anna)

We’re very excited. Today Amazon launched Kindle MatchBook, which lets you upgrade your previous Amazon.com print-edition book purchases for select titles to the corresponding ebook versions. The upgrade pricing varies. Some titles have free upgrades, while others are priced as high as $2.99.

This is a great way to reduce the physical space required for storing books you currently own. Having your books in an ebook format also allows you to reference them while on-the-go.

A relatively small number of titles are currently available for upgrade, but more are sure to be released in the coming months.

If you don’t already own an ebook reader, our current pick is the new Kindle Paperwhite. The new next-gen backlight is very easy on the eyes.

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One of the highlights was taking the four dogs to this great park with a creek running through it where they could be off-leash. It was really beautiful.

I've got good news and bad news. Well, not bad -- more like disappointing. Let's start with that.

I entered this smoked sausage pizza in a contest recently. I didn't win. Now, I believe it was due in part to some seemingly suspicious last-minute rule-changing, but we won't go there. Because ninjas are gracious non-winners.

Now for the good news: Not winning the contest means I'm free to share all the how-to details of this pizza recipe with you!

So I may not have won but you certainly did.

Every Friday night is pizza night at Casa de Ninj. I know this is not very original but I can say that we have observed this tradition every Friday that we have been home for over 12 years.

Part of the fun of pizza night for me is that I don't plan it in advance, as I do with all our other weeknight meals. I simply make up the topping combination each week, based on what I have on hand. It's an end-of-the-week creative challenge I give to myself. One of my favorite tricks is taking some leftovers from the week and turning them into a pizza. Yep, almost anything you ate earlier in the week can be turned into a pizza (including salad!).

If you're skeptical about my leftovers, don't worry -- they aren't included in this smoked sausage pizza with caramelized onion sauce (although there is practically a salad sitting on top, with all the arugula that I add).

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