Amber

HBO

Over the course of its four seasons, HBO’s Veep has become infamous for its devastatingly brilliant insults. Showrunner Armando Iannucci’s early works, The Thick of It and In the Loop, were harbingers of things to come, and his tongue has only gotten sharper on his American series.

While the hilarious cruelty flies thick and has many targets, no one is more derided than Jonah Ryan, the smarmy White House liaison turned Vice Presidential aide. Completely lacking in self-awareness and hated by all, Jonah often bears the brunt of his associates’ wrath. However, this is not a Jerry/Gary/Larry/Terry from Parks and Recreation situation; Jonah deserves any and all vitriol that comes his way. Such as…

“I don’t have time to ignore you.” — Amy Brookheimer

Amy often has to pick up the slack from her coworkers’ incompetence, so shutting down Jonah’s idiocy right away is key.

“What I’m saying, you f*cking ape, is that you are a useless waste of f*cking carbon. I’ve been trying to cynically use you, but you’re so f*cking low-rent, you can’t even be exploited. Not to mention the fact any restaurant that serves anything in a f*ckload is not a nice restaurant.” — Dan Egan

Dan might be the most maniacal character on the entire show, and Jonah is often his target. No “friendship” is made in politics without a bottom line, which Jonah should have remembered during his brief bro stint with Dan.

“I redact your f*cking face.” — Mike McLintock

HBO

Mike constantly struggles with feeling impotent on Veep, and Jonah is the perfect foil to make him feel a modicum of power.

“It was an accident. Much like when Big Foot got your mom pregnant, resulting in you.” — Mike McLintock

HBO

Veep really takes the “let’s laugh at the tall guy” jokes and elevates them to the next level.

“How many times have you talked to the president today?” — Mike McLintock
“He actually spoke to me four times.” — Jonah Ryan
“And in each of those, did he say, ‘Someone get this freak the f*ck away from me’?” — Mike McLintock

While he was a White House liaison, Jonah’s constant peacocking about his connects often blew up in his face.

“You’re not even your mom’s favorite Jonah, Jonah.” — Amy Brookheimer

This twist on the classic “Your Mom” joke is to the point and cutting, much like Amy herself.

“What are you laughing at, Jolly Green Jizz Face?” — Selina Meyer

HBO

There have been plenty of bizarre descriptions of Jonah over the series run, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus sells it every single time.

“You let that unstable piece of human scaffolding into your house?” — Selina Meyer

HBO

Jonah’s innate ability to ruin things often leads viewers to wonder how he has managed to stay employed.

“Hey, Jonah, listen, settle something for me. You like to have sex and you like to travel? Then you can f*ck off.” — Selina Meyer

The sheer number of ways that the Veep has managed to tell Jonah to go f*ck himself is truly awe inspiring.

“Jonah, you’re not even a man.  You’re like an early draft of a man where they just sketched out a giant, mangled skeleton but they didn’t have time to add details like pigment or self-respect. You’re Frankenstein’s monster if his monster was made entirely of dead dicks.” — Ed Webster

Sadly, Ed the tee-totalling Quaker has only shown up for a handful of episodes. In that short time, he has managed to eloquently cut Jonah down to size on a number of occasions.

“You guys, are we seriously going to let the guy with the police sketch face of a rapist tell us what to do?” — Catherine Meyer

After being the recipient of his unsettling come-ons, the vice president’s young daughter quickly joins the “We Hate Jonah” club.

“I was trying to use Jonah for information.” — Dan Egan
“That’s like trying to use a croissant as a f*cking dildo! … It doesn’t do the job and it makes a f*cking mess!” — Selina Meyer

This is truly one of the most hilariously brilliant analogies in television history.

“Go. Period. F*ck. Period. Yourself. Exclamation point!” — Selina Meyer

HBO

Once again, Jonah misreads the room and is the easiest target for Selena’s frustration.

“Go f*ck yourself, Jack and the Giant Freak-stalk. Your team lost, and you should be fitted with a leper bell, you stinking sh*t.” — Dan Egan

Jonah once again learns that any alliance with Dan is fleeting and prone to devastation. You’ll get them next time, Jonad.

straightforsharks:

when you type “parks and rex” instead of “parks and rec”

feministlisafrank:

Quote from the documentary Miss Representation. Bonus statistics from the film can be found here: http://therepresentationproject.org/resources/statistics/

buzzfeed:

There’s a Chrome extension that replaces “Millennials” with “Snake People” and it’s pretty great. [x]

Our national full-justification of text nightmare is over...Amazon has finally ditched fully justified text on the Kindle.

But the new app finally gives the boot to the hideous absolute justification of text that the Kindle's been rocking since 2007. The new layout engine justifies text more like print typesetting. Even if you max out the font size on the new Kindle app, it will keep the spacing between words even, intelligently hyphenating words and spreading them between lines as need may be.

The layout engine also contains some beautiful new kerning options. They're subtle, but once you see them, you can't unsee them: for example, the way that the top and bottom of a drop cap on the Kindle now perfectly lines up with the tops and bottoms of its neighboring lines. Like I said, it's a small detail, but one that even Apple's iBooks and Google Play Books doesn't manage to quite get right.

Huzzah! The company is still working through a backlog of converting titles to the new layout, so give it some time if the changes aren't showing up. (via nextdraft)

moonblossom:

deluxetrashqueen:

Honestly, Rick Rolling is the best practical joke ever. Like, there’s nothing offensive or mean  spirited about it. It’s just like “Oops you thought there would be something else here but it’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.” which isn’t even a bad song. It’s fairly enjoyable to listen to. There’s no jumpscares, no screaming, no ill will. Just Rick Astley telling you he’s never going to give you up. I think that’s great. “You fell into my trap! Here, listen to this completely benign song that will have no negative effect on you.” 

I wish this were true. There’s a really good article about the problems inherent with rickrolling here.

For three sweet weeks in 2008 while the economy was on the brink of extinction, I decorated cupcakes. The job—froster at a cupcakes-only bakery—came from my roommate, who worked there on weekends. She was working part-time at the ACLU during the week. The decorator job opened up when she got a full-time spot campaigning for Death with Dignity.

“It’s fine,” she explained. “You don’t have to talk to anyone; you don’t do any actual baking—just icing. Sometimes you do special orders, but those are just different colors. We used to do custom writing. The policy changed after I did an order for a retirement party and had to put ‘Way to go, Yolanda!’ on six dozen cupcakes.”

“Yolanda?”

“It’s fine. And you get to take home a box of leftovers after every shift.”

“You’re giving up your ration of free cupcakes for full-time Death?”

And so I became a nightshift cupcake froster. I walked out the door to start my workday just as my roommate was coming home at the close of hers, dragging in boxes full of signatures and a trunkful of cheeky picket signs behind her: “LET ME R.I.P.!” My shifts ended at 3 a.m. Streetlights lit up nothing and no one in particular; the roads glittered. Seattle’s neighborhoods, little sprawls connected by pithy backed-up veins, smushed together in an 80 m.p.h blur while I sailed home along empty streets. Jittery from too many red velvet seconds, windows down and crusty-eyed, blasting “Don’t Stop Me Now,” trying to stay awake until I fell through the front door and crashed.

I had two co-workers, a pair of guys in their early 40s who did the baking. I worked in the front of the shop, patting frosting on the muffin tops in swoopy shapes and having my way with the sprinkles. They worked in the back; I worked next to the espresso machine in the front. They had their sweaty, hairy forearms elbow-deep in butter yellow batter all night long. They never ate the cupcakes. I practiced my palette knife maneuvering and slammed cupcake seconds into my gob at five minute intervals. We all made $9 an hour.

We were on our own; the managers never worked nights. The shop was empty and clean (the baristas got paid a dollar an hour less but had to mop before they shut the place down at night). Everything was quiet—lights off, gleaming counters crumb-free, chairs upturned and sleeping. A single pendant light illuminated my little workshop of buttercreams and sugar decorations. I was like Gepetto, tinkering alone in the workshop. I could wear headphones. Though it was technically food service, I barely noticed. Until I got fired.

During the job interview I’d mentioned to my manager that I had a prior commitment and would need to take a few days off, three weeks after starting the job, if they chose to hire me.

“I’m, um, having a small surgery sort-of?”

“How can you sort-of have surgery?”

“Um, I agreed to donate bone marrow. To someone with cancer.”

“To someone in your family?”

“No, just someone. Anonymous. I’m healthy, they’re sick, I don’t have—”

The manager waved off my clarification, winced, and thought about it for a minute.

“If this is a one-time thing, then it’s… probably fine.”

“You’ll probably never hear from us” is what the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) tells you when you sign up to be on their registry, which takes nothing more than a cheek swab and two minutes of your time. But when they do call you (on a groggy, August afternoon a few weeks before your roommate gets you that bakery gig, and you’re moseying around a camping goods store during business hours trying on backpacks because you’re in between things) they’ll remind you over the phone where and when you signed up.

Here’s how that conversation goes:

“Sorry, how did you find me?”

“You joined the registry in April of 2006, ma’am?”

“When did I do that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Let’s see … this was in … Ohio. Oberlin, Ohio?”

Fuck. Bingo.

“Oh. Shit. That’s right. … I was in college, I was going to rugby practice … I was early. I stopped at a table in front of the library to kill some time. I got a red pamphlet from you,” I went on, pouring my life story out to the other end of the line. “It said to expect to never hear from you again. Don’t people stay on the list for 30 years and never get called?”

“Ma’am, are you still interested in making a donation?”

This is probably a mitzvah, I thought. And I’m certainly not busy.

“Yes? I guess? Sure?”

“That’s great. We’re testing eighteen people who could potentially be a match for an anonymous recipient; it’s more likely that you’ll go back in time and get into Harvard than end up the actual donor, but let’s go through a few questions. Have you ever been to England or been a gay man?”

I went to a local hospital later that week for a pre-screening, chest puffed. A quick blood test. Still unemployed, but potentially containing extremely important biological material. I deflated when it was just a couple of tubes to fill. No cookies, no juice box afterwards. The phlebotomist shooed me out the door: “Thankssomuchwe’llcallyoubye!”

Two weeks later, the NMDP called again. The chances were 1 in 20,000-ish, but there was a lady out there with leukemia and we were a perfect match. Was I still interested in making a donation?

“Should’ve applied to Harvard,” I thought.

Donating bone marrow is something of a process. You don’t get paid (there are places where you can sell your bone marrow. Spoiler alert: it fucking hurts). When you donate, you’re going to enough appointments for a few weeks. It almost feel like you have a job. Because all of the meetings are about you, and how healthy you are (and in my case, how my potassium levels were a little low, so could I please eat two bananas a day for the next couple of weeks to see if we could bump it up?), you feel like a precious, shining star all the time.

There was a physical, an EKG, an STD check, a pregnancy test, a battery of blood tests, a handful of consultations to explain the procedure/prevent lawsuits, meetings with the donor coordinator to sign documents, and multiple trips to the pharmacy and grocery store to procure iron supplements, narcotics (for pain!) and high-protein vegetarian foodstuffs for before and after. All I ate were swiss chard and black bean tacos, plus two bananas a day. A week prior to the surgery I donated a unit of blood—banked for me. Should I need a transfusion after the surgery, they’d toss it back in. These appointments were happily sprinkled during my designated sleeping hours away from the bakery; I was bloodshot and sugar-shocked, and didn’t give a shit. I am doing a good thing. If I don’t know what to do with my life or if I never help anyone or change anything again, I will have done this, I often thought. I was borderline ecstatic.

Most people who donate bone marrow don’t have it removed from their hips anymore; what’s more often done now looks a lot like a blood draw. The technicians spin out the parts of your blood that they need and the rest gets pumped right back into your meat sack. You go home four hours later, juicy as a chicken breast. My donation was part of a study to determine the best type of donation for acute myeloid leukemia, my intended recipient’s diagnosis. I got assigned to the surgery group. I consented.

The NMDP representative who coordinated my donation, a woman who my grandmother would have referred to as “a real spitfire,” was standing over my gurney after the surgery when I came to. She presented me with a bit of unofficial compensation: a plain white mug with the word “hero” stamped on the side, stuffed full of chocolates. She couldn’t say where she was headed, but she was carrying a cooler (the kind you fill with tuna sandwiches and take to the beach) containing my bone marrow and she was headed to the airport. “We got a liter!” she cheered, and shook the cooler.

I spent the rest of the day receiving blood transfusions and hydration. I watched Michael Phelps win one gold medal after the next on tv, and a friend dragged me home late the next day. It took ten days for me to fully recover; on my first day out and about I walked the eight blocks, slowly, to a party at a neighbor’s, sat on a porch and rewarded myself with an ice cream sandwich. I lifted my shirt and showed off the remaining green and blue and brown flecks the drill had left behind to anyone who asked. I mentioned the hero mug; “they said I’m a hero. They didn’t say it. But I have it on a mug.” Until I moved away, my friends introduced me to strangers as, “Have you met Marne? She’s a hero.”

Every day that I was away from the bakery, I called to let them know—first that I was bedridden, then that I was dizzy but standing, then that I was standing but not walking without limping. Five days turned into seven turned into ten. I wasn’t dumb. Food service, even the beautiful candyland kind, is still food service. You can’t make mistakes. You don’t get sick. You don’t elect to donate bone marrow to strangers in the weeks before you get hired and then actually do it. Though once you’ve donated bone marrow, you feel a little more certain that your life is bigger than your food service job. One in 20,000, right?

The last time I drove over to the bakery, it was mid-August and the sun was setting. I headed to my station and wondered if I was going to get called to the principal’s office. I waited.

The manager was pacing in the kitchen and headed me off from the bin of clean aprons and called me upstairs to the office. I followed her up the garret stairs to a little paperwork-lined room with a single computer, nestled in a pile of cupcake-themed T-shirts and swag stacked up to the ceiling. “Take a seat,” the manager gestured to a folding chair.

She looked at the floor.

There’s a woman somewhere getting an IV drip of my blood and guts, I thought.

She sighed. “Yeah, we need to talk…”

I have four puncture wounds and they’re still weepy, I thought.

“I’m so sorry, I really don’t want to have to do this, we just really needed just someone right away, A little more reliability, I know, I’m really sorry about this, I just, we hired someone else.”

My marrow is circulating through someone else’s body, I thought.

“Can I have my check at least?” I asked. I got up and left.

I walked with a slight limp out of the bakery. I wafted home, whipped up. I’d never been fired before. The wounds closed up eventually.

A year and a half later, the NMDP rang me up one last time. I was riding a city bus, headed home from my new job. The anonymous recipient of my donation, a woman in her 40s, the coordinator said, was in remission and doing well. She was expected to make a full recovery.

This story is part of our food month series.

Marne Litfin has never met the woman who received her liter of blood and guts. She remains a member of the National Bone Marrow Donor registry. She no longer has any interest in commercial baking. Contact her at marneasada@gmail.com.

Photo: Nate Steiner

Getty Image

Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak will reportedly be paid $7.5 million to write a book about their are they-aren’t they, were they-weren’t they relationship that has for some reason always been a topic of interest and speculation, because everyone wants to see Ryan and Kelly together IRL. According to the New York Daily News, Kaling will make the formal announcement next week on May 30 at New York City’s BookCon, where she’ll be talking about her upcoming book of essays, Why Not Me?

Kaling and Novak have never been public about the nature of their relationship, until last September when Kaling told Howard Stern that she and Novak had previously dated, and that he had broken it off with her, despite the fact that she claims she would have married him at the time. Her admission did nothing but fan the flames, however, and their occasional flirting on social media doesn’t help much, either.

In the June 2015 issue of InStyle, via NYMag, Kaling said of the relationship:

I will freely admit: My relationship with B.J. Novak is weird as hell. He is not my boyfriend, but he is not my best friend. I guess you could describe our relationship as a “romantically charged camaraderie with loud arguments,” but I don’t think Facebook would accept this as a new status.

If I had to guess, I’d say their book will either set the record completely straight once and for all, or make things more convoluted than ever. I’d bet on the latter.

(Via Vulture)

As far as cute animal videos go, you can’t get more adorable than combining tiny living things with tiny versions of delicious foods that are generally meant for a demographic other than hamsters, rabbits or turtles. Today, the internet brings you a gift: a video of tiny tortoises eating tiny pancakes and loving every second of it. Or trying to love every second of it. At least one of the tortoises seems kind of scared of the pancakes before he changes his mind and starts chomping them. You can do it, tiny turtle! Pancakes are for everyone!

Also: Is it just me or did anyone else never really think about turtle tongues before this video?

(Via Buzzfeed Blue h/t The Daily Dot)

The post Wedding Poems: 30 Not At All Cheesy Ideas For Your Ceremony appeared first on A Practical Wedding: Wedding Planning, Inspiration, and Ideas.

Welcome to the millennial revenge bunker. Here, in this dead-mall-turned-torture-chamber, there is only one master, and it is all of us, equally. Bow before our UGG boots and prepare to sip the calcified piss of a fellow old from one of our myriad trophies. Dodo fuckboys, it’s time to get humble. To spell out the law of the land in the dead language of your time: on a Letterman Top Ten list of this situation, we are all number one, and you are numbers two through ten. The fleek have inherited the earth.

We begin by playing a podcast of your transgressions:

1) Subprime lending, 2) Large scale environmental destruction, 3) Codifying and enshrining an insidious form of systemic racism, 4) Using up all the Quaaludes, 5) Selfie Shaming, 6) Buying us off-brand Sleek Skoots when we explicitly asked for Razor scooters (pause for SquareSpace promo), 7) Factory farming, 8) Saying you are cool with gay people as long as you don’t have to see them, 9) Tori Amos nostalgia, 10) Being raisiny skin-sacks of irrelevance.

We have brought you here to do penance for your sins.

Your torture will begin each morning with a hearty bowl of print magazines and crude oil. Eat standing up like the sticks-in-the-mud that you are, for laziness is ours now. You bestowed it upon us alongside crumbling public transit infrastructure and deindustrialized urban centers. No coffee.

At 10a.m. you will engage in physical fitness in the food court. The Presidential Fitness Test is a program designed to instill America’s youth with lifelong exercise habits. You only live once (#YOLO) so get moving. Sit and reach for the unattainable delusion of a financially-secure future. May the dull tone of the PACER ring in your ears until it is finally confirmed that nary a child has been left behind.

No lunch. You refused to buy us Lunchables, and now you must pay. Grab a seat at a standing desk because this afternoon you work an unpaid internship in dubstep. When the beat drops, admit that it is no longer feasible to put oneself through college working a part-time minimum-wage job. In the millennial revenge bunker, we can’t hear you scream over 23 years of earbud-induced tinnitus.

In the afternoon, there is an IRL Spotify, or as you might have called it in your day, a “record hop.” The playlist is as follows: Ke$ha covers of Wilco, nothing else. There will be no mixed gender couples, as heterosexuality is now obsolete. You may choose to gay-marry another old, or you may twerk alongside this effigy of Reagan.

Dinner was going to be a heaping bowl of French Toast Crunch, but you discontinued it. Instead, you will satisfy yourself by reliving every moment of your stable 35-year career at a single job. Dessert will not be a hefty pension and a Rolex, nor will it be crunchy M&M’s, for you discontinued those too.

Before bed, you will walk across a hot bed of MacBook chargers while texting. You will text using one hand (thumb only!), and if you collide with another old you must immediately take the blame and confess to being self-centered, inconsiderate, and lazy. As you walk through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, the only rod or staff that will comfort you is the sharp sting of a Selfie Stick against the backs of your thighs.

Do not attempt to bribe your way out of this novel hell with your handsome pile of social security riches. Shove them up your ass, we might say, if assplay wasn’t exclusively ours now. After abstinence-only sex ed ruined vaginal intercourse, we headed west towards the frontier and found a hole to call our own. Besides, we only accept bribes using Venmo. None of us have checkbooks.

Jamie Lauren Keiles is the last enthusiastic person in New York.

I stood on the corner of a busy, grungy, industrial intersection in Vancouver, B.C., outside of a Canadian Jiffy Lube, trying to bum their unprotected wi-fi. I wanted to post one last photo of the boat before I boarded it for two solid weeks. I told people I’d keep a blog; now I feel so obligated to show them something that I’m completely unhinged when a voice behind me says, “Excuse me?” because I’m staring too deeply into my stupid phone.

I turn to see two scruffy-looking fellow backpacker kids—a guy with greasy ginger hair and a shaggy goatee, and a gal with piercings all over her face and pink hair, smiling nervously. After a pause, they asked, “Uh, do you know how to get to downtown from here?” It almost seemed too generic, like they were just trying to find a way to initiate conversation, backpackers to backpacker.

After I pointed out the ways to get to downtown and “the bad part of Hastings,” surprising myself by how much I actually knew about Vancouver, they hung around. “Where are you going?” they asked. “Right there,” I said, pointing to a big cordoned-off ramp with signage saying “RESTRICTED ACCESS ONLY” all over it. The Port of Vancouver terminal. “I’m going to be a passenger on a cargo freighter ship to South Korea.”

Nearly a decade ago, I Googled something along the lines of, “PEOPLE USED TO TRAVEL BY SHIPS THAT WEREN’T DOUCHEY CRUISE SHIPS SO DO THEY STILL DO THAT NOW?” and discovered that purchased passages were available on container ships all over the world. I swore I would do it someday, and when I was planning a trip around the world after leaving my home of seven years to move back to New York City, it seemed only appropriate to kick off on a 278-meter megaship, floating away from everything in the middle of the Pacific for two whole weeks.

I found a travel agency based in London that booked this sort of thing, checked it as best I could to assure my mother I wasn’t being sold into slavery, and found myself a few months later, standing on an upper deck, ready to depart for Korea.

As I approached the security booth at the port entrance gate, a little old man with a gigantic cop mustache leaned forward. “You working?” I found it encouraging that a young blonde lady would be presumed to be working in a shipyard, but told him, no, I was a passenger. After flipping through about one and a half pages of the “Crew List,” he came to a sheet that said, “Passenger List.” There was one name on it: mine.

I didn’t expect to be the only passenger on board (the paperwork said they could take up to eight), much less the only woman. The entirety of the officers (who were all German) and the crew (who were all Filipino), however, treated me wonderfully; they were simply thrilled to have a new face in the mix.

In the morning, I shuffled downstairs from my tiny cabin to the Officer’s Mess Room, where I took a seat at the Captain’s table next to a super-silent and brooding older man who happened to be the Chief Engineer. The Captain himself was a gruff, grey-haired, bearded man from Hamburg. He was on the precipice of retirement and uninterested in most of what was going on in the shipping industry nowadays. I, of course, was wholly interested in everything going on in the shipping industry nowadays. It did not make for good breakfast conversation.

As I contemplated a non-lame way to ask about the ship, the affable, blonde, thirty-something First Mate burst through the door. He was smiley but still very poised and proper, tall and somewhat goofy, an excellent conversationalist. One of his favorite pastimes was teasing the Captain in a rousing round of ‘poke the bear,’ chortling at his own jokes with a funny gulping noise and grinning a huge grin whenever the Captain would get irritated. Of all the officers, he was the one giddily walking into breakfast at 0800 after having already worked four hours, hollering, “GOOD MORNING!” as the Chief Engineer grumbled but didn’t bat an eye, and the Captain muttered something as he rubbed his eyes. I just smiled and said, “Good morning!” back, though with significantly less gusto.

With enough time and coffee and jibes from the First Mate, though, the Captain seemed to come around. I had been sitting on the sidelines, relishing the delightful banter and silently shoving buttered rolls in my mouth when the Captain suddenly turned and looked at me in such a stern way I thought he was going to command me to swab the deck. “The First Mate and I will be drinking beers at 1100 on “D” Deck, Starboard side,” he said matter-of-factly. “You join us, yes?” Surprised by this sudden acceptance into what appeared to be a private chummy routine, I said, “Sure, sounds fantastic.” We chatted a bit more, mostly about whether or not they felt like their lives were a movie like Captain Phillips, and then the Captain got up to leave. “Remember,” he said, pointing upstairs, “Beer at 11.”

My daily ritual included taking the full interval between breakfast and lunch to wander about the ship’s upper and lower decks, making a full circle from the starboard side, up around to the front at the bow, down along the port side, looping to the lower deck on the back of the boat at the stern, and back around to the starboard side. It was relaxing and somewhat thrilling to lean on the edge of the barely-there rail, knowing that on a cruise ship this same rail would be excessively fortified to prevent any shuffleboard pucks, small children, or lap dogs from slipping through the gaps. Staring down at the churning ocean below slapping the sides of the ship, we were moving incredibly fast, and no one knew where I was for hours at a time. I tightened my grip.

The containers were fascinating. They were multi-colored and labeled with a dozen different companies from around the world. As the First Mate described it to me, different companies rent different containers and place them aboard the ship. They’re required to tell the shipping company what it contains if it’s to be refrigerated or if it contains hazardous material, but otherwise the company has no idea what it’s moving in these containers. It was fun to try to guess what North America was moving over to Asia. A few days into the trip, I noticed some tiny brown pebbles that suddenly appeared on the deck as I was making my rounds. I’d sweep them away with my foot, but the next day they’d return. It turned out that one of the containers had not been closed properly in port and was pouring out its contents. I was curious, and (quite illegally, probably) climbed up one of the ladders leading to the open edge of the container to sneak a peek. As soon as I reached the top rung a gust of wind blew through the gap between the containers, showering me with dried lentils.

The containers were mostly old, with several rust spots and dings in the sides that belied when a new guy had been operating the crane in port. In some places, while I was looping around the decks, the containers were actually suspended above my head. I’d linger in this cavernous spot, just near the front of the boat where the bow began to curve forward, and hear the echoes of the clanks and clangs of metal hitting metal as the ship pitched slightly on the waves. It was a great way to rattle the troubles out of my brain. Sort of like a sensory immersion tank.

In that spot, there were patches of sunlight that would stream through the gaps between the containers overhead, so I’d post myself up on one of the protruding cylindrical posts used to tie the ship to the dock (“bollards,” in official nautical speak) and sit peacefully to zone out staring at waves. The ship was so massive, I very rarely came across any of the deckhands as I roamed around, but this time one of them found me. “Making yourself at home, eh?” he said with a huge grin. Before I could even tell if he approved or disapproved, he said, “Wait right there—don’t move.” Certainly. I hadn’t really any plans for sudden movements, sir.

He returned a few minutes later with a deck chair complete with an ultra-thick cushion on top. “This is, like, the kind of thing you get on an actual cruise,” I said to him, dumbfounded and half-expecting him to produce a blended margarita from behind his back. He just grinned stupidly again, proud and pleased with himself for thinking of it, and said, “Hey, we don’t always work so hard—sometimes we get to relax, too.”

And indeed, he was right. After successive nights eating all meals in separate quarters—the German officers (and me, the blonde American ship guest who looked German) eating German food in the German mess hall, the Filipino crew eating Filipino food in the Filipino mess hall—the Captain decided we should blend our three represented cultures and bond over something we all have in common: grilling meat and getting drunk. We decided to throw a barbeque on deck.

At 1700, when their shift ended, a bunch of the deckhands scurried about—setting up tables, posting up tarps for wind blockage, fighting over who would man the grill. I was excited to see what all of the Beck’s and San Miguel’s would do to get folks loosened up, especially for those who, like the Chief Engineer, previously were not. After a few, he began chatting with me about growing up in East Germany, and I lapped it up. “Everything was better when it came from West Germany, even when it was not,” he said in his thick accent, leaning over the edge of a railing with the most casual body language I’ve ever seen a German display. He took another swig. “I remember one time we got coffee from West Germany that was very expensive and so awful. We all pretended it was very good so as not to look stupid.”

I was thrilled for the opportunity to sit back and watch the others loosen up from their workdays and work months. After so much time at sea, this little GRILL EVERY MEAT WE HAVE ON BOARD AND DRINK ALL THE BEERS extravaganza was the most normalized landlubbing event they could throw for themselves. I sat back with the Captain, who was a natural observer rather than participant, and we watched the Filipino guys pass around a guitar and play successive 1990s pop radio hits. After spouting “Zombie” by The Cranberries and “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton, they started up with “What’s Going On?” by Four Non-Blondes. I turned to the Captain next to me and said, “Uh, would you hold my drink for a moment?” and scampered over to sing lead. It’s one of my karaoke favorites. I killed.

The next morning I was feeling quite hungover and, of course, it was sunny outside. I felt like a real seafarer, armed with a hammock and securing ropes my friend had bestowed to me before my voyage, knotting the ropes around the white-painted piping, pulling the lassos tight against the wind that was trying to twirl them about, clipping the carabineer closed as I tucked the parachute of the hammock tight under my arm and prayed it didn’t lift me up over the rail and overboard. Finally having both sides clipped and taut, I gently lay down in it, slouching with only six inches clearance, maybe, to the deck, and felt the sea breeze and sun hit my face hard, while I smelled the diesel fuel and heard the rumbling dull roar of the ship, with the refrigerated containers buzzing in the background. Moby Dick in hand—because what better place to tackle the high school reading you’ve ignored for fifteen years—I held the corners of the pages down and suddenly remembered I was in my own seafaring story. There were three hundred and sixty fucking degrees of ocean around me. I was bound for Asia.

Before long, I found my favorite spot to stand on the boat. The ship had an upper and lower deck that stretched the entire length of the ship and with seven more “miniature” decks that only resided in a stacked tower near the middle-rear of the ship. This was where all of the “people” stuff was: the cabins, the mess halls, the officer’s game room filled with German versions of American Western pulp fiction, which I stole a few copies of to read.

On the lower deck, right at the stern of the boat near the rudder, I found a spot underneath an exposed staircase and looked down at the water over the railing. This was as close as I could be to the water on this vessel—it was maybe two or three meters down, I thought, now that I was measuring like a seawoman/the rest of the planet. I leaned on a post to be able to keep my hands warm in my pockets, having dozens of random thoughts float through my head and pass right by without consequence. I really couldn’t recall when last I’d had the time for that luxury. An old roommate used to call me “afternoon legs” for my want of bicycle-riding energy in the mornings, the fact that when I return to New York it will be the year 2015 and my very own encapsulation of Back to the Future, that episode of The Golden Girls where Sophia is giving some sort of eulogy and says, “I’ll look back, and I’ll smile”—and then I spot some tiny dolphin fins jumping in the distance. “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to have them come very close to the boat while I’m standing in this spot,” I say out loud to the ocean, as talking to one’s self is what you do when you’re standing alone on the back of a bellowing ship. “Or even better, if it were a wha—” I nearly fall backwards as a giant puff of blowhole water roars up right in front of my face, and slowly, a heartbeat later, a massive, sleek, dark gray body slides upwards in the same spot, hanging at the surface for a few seconds as it arches back downward, showing its dorsal fin just before it dips back below. I was so taken aback by my apparent manifestation that I nearly tripped trying to scamper towards the stern to see it do its thing two more times. And then that was it—the boat moved on, she was out of sight. I blinked a few times, frozen. I felt like I was on drugs.

Much of my experience on the ship could be likened to drugs, really: staring at the swirling waves too long and then turning to look at the floor or the steps or a container made me feel like I took psychedelics, like my whole reality became a lava lamp for thirty seconds. There were times when the rocking and pitching of the ship went past the point of “noticeable” and became “I feel thoroughly drunk when I’m walking.” Conjuring a fucking whale seemed fairly typical.

If I ever need to feel like I’m not doing enough career-wise, I can sit back and wistfully think of the ship’s mechanic, who was only 19 and already knew more about seafaring and engineering than I ever will in this life or the next. He and I chatted on “E” Deck after dinner at sunset as the boat glided through the still waters of the Aleutian islands of Alaska. “When the ships go through pirate areas, the company makes rules—we cannot fight back, and we cannot have weapons,” he told me, preemptively sharing stories he felt would pique my interest. After silently appreciating the lack of pirates in the Pacific, I asked him if they did anything different themselves when they were in those pirate areas. He thought for a moment, then replied, “Well…we put the fire hoses over the sides, so if they try to climb up we can spray them back down, if that’s what you mean.” Hundreds of years of fighting pirates and that’s what we’ve got.

We stared a while in silence as Alaska passed by in the golden glow of the sunset. I commented on how glorious it looked, how protected. He stretched his arms out to the sides and remarked, “Yes—you can only see this from the sea.”

After weird time and space mindfucks, like going to bed on the 31st and waking up on the 2nd after we passed the international dateline, or having left Canada and sort of been in Alaska while ending up in Korea, my final day at sea came. Today is the last day of slow-moving for a long while, I thought to myself, and it was just as well. The uber-slow doesn’t suit me for too long. But the pacing the decks, the staring at the greasy, rusted metal hoisted up to hold the dingy containers, the getting lost in the thousands of folds of waves—I was able to suspend my disbelief for a bit and pretend I existed back in the slow travel days, starring in my own movie of sorts. I laughed to myself, imagining writing a script about it at some point and delighting in the amount of blonde Germans I’d have to hire.

While packing up my cabin and shuffling through a variety of papers from the desk, I came across the ship company magazine. Right on the cover, so carefully and intentionally placed that I can’t believe I didn’t spot it before, it said: “Life writes the best scripts from reality.”

Sarah Royal is a writer, gin drinker, and Golden Girls enthusiast living in New York City. You can find her on instagram or sarahroyal.com. Image by Sarah Royal.

FOX

Fox officially announced their upcoming fall line-up on Monday morning, and, as expected, The X-Files is a big part of it. The six-episode season — described as a one long movie — will premiere in January 2016, starting with a two-night premiere, and it will follow the NFC Championship game for maximum viewership. It all but guarantees huge numbers for the returning show, and, if the numbers are as gigantic as they could be, we may be seeing more than just six episodes.

The show will air on Mondays at 8 p.m., so get your cigarettes and conspiracy theories ready.

(Via Mashable)

On Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight, just in time for Mother’s Day, John Oliver tackled the subject of paid family leave. More specifically, the lack of paid family leave, as the United States is the only other country in the world aside from Papua New Guinea that doesn’t provide paid time off for new mothers.

In fact, to even be eligible for 12 weeks of unpaid family leave, new mothers have to be a full-time, salaried employee working for a company, for at least a year, of 50 or more employees. This leaves a staggering 40 percent of workers ineligible for even unpaid family leave. Those moms who are fortunate enough for unpaid family leave often have to cobble together vacation and sick time, or go back to work far earlier than they’re prepared, if they can’t afford to take the time off.

It’s a sh*tty way to treat new mothers. As John Oliver reasons, until we as a country do something to address this, and lawmakers are willing to push through legislation to help families, the only message we should be allowed to send on Mother’s Day is: “We’d do anything for our moms, up to, but not including, paying them to stay home for awhile after pushing a human being out of their body. But we do want to say, thank you.”

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There are two types of people in this world, those addicted to the delicious guacamole available for just $1.95 at your nearest Chipotle and those who have checked themselves into a rehabilitation facility in an attempt to ween themselves off the stuff. (Though, why anyone would futilely try to fight that power is beyond comprehension.)

In an apparent effort to give the masses more control over their addictions, the burrito chain recently unveiled the secret recipe used to create that green substance of the gods.

THIS IS ALL YOU’LL NEED:

• 2 ripe Hass avocados (In the restaurant, we use 48 per batch, multiple times per day)
• 2 tsp lime juice
• 2 tbsp cilantro (chopped)
• 1/4 cup red onion (finely chopped)
• 1/2 jalapeño, including seeds (finely chopped)
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt

Wait, there’s no crack? Seriously? That’s surprising. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go blow my rent money on a shipping container’s worth of cilantro.

(Via Bustle)

I experienced my first fine dining experience when I was a toddler. When I asked my parents how they managed to make sure my brother and I behaved, my dad said, “You didn’t have a choice,” and my mom said, “You both just seemed to enjoy the experience.”

Not much has changed since then; I still enjoy a memorable dining experience. Give me a thoughtful prix fixe, personable but invisible service, and a glass of champagne, and I am a happy camper. Obviously, these sorts of experiences don’t come cheap, and my income is well under six figures, so I have to plan ahead when I’m going to blow some serious cash on a single meal.

Because my parents have treated me to so many spectacular meals, for my mother’s sixtieth birthday, I wanted her to have An Experience. I wanted to take her to Per Se, a three-star Michelin rated Thomas Keller restaurant, with one of the most expensive tasting menus in the world. I estimated that the cost of dinner would total $2,000 for the both of us, and dutifully socked away $333 a month into my savings account in the six months prior to our New York visit.

The rest of the vacation would be relatively inexpensive: We used credit card rewards for our first-class flight and for four days at the Millenium Hilton and one night at the Plaza. The total cost for airfare and accommodations: $80 in fees.

At Per Se, the menus are prix fixe and change daily, the wine list is extensive, and reservations are difficult to get. Per Se only takes reservations one month ahead of time, and when I called at 7 a.m. PST 30 days prior our trip to New York, they were already booked solid for dinner for the days we were going to be in town. They did, however, have a lunch reservation available, and since I prefer to eat my biggest meal in the middle of the day and because the lunch menu is slightly cheaper, this worked out splendidly.

We arrived in New York and ate our way through the city for four days before our lunch date. We were greeted and seated promptly, and our server explained the dining situation to us. While my mother perused the menu, he asked what kind of water we wanted (tap, always, I’m not made of money!), and when I looked over at my mother, she had a tear slowly sliding down her face.

I asked her what was wrong, and she showed me her menu: They had printed “Happy birthday, Monica!” at the top. I don’t love making my mother cry in public, but fortunately, these were tears of job, and our table was tucked away and private. It would not be the last time happy tears were shed.

My mother chose the chef’s tasting menu while I opted for the vegetarian option. I am not a vegetarian, but we are seagulls who pick off each other’s plates so it seemed like a good way to try a bite of everything.

In my family, dining is a competition: She who orders the best meal is declared the winner. We often remember meals this way: “Remember that dinner at Quince? Mom, you totally won that one.” Usually, it is a unanimous decision, but on certain joyous occasions, there is a tie. At Per Se, we were both winners.

First, the bread—the bread was served with two (!) different types of butter, an idea so bizarre and delightful I repeated it at my Thanksgiving dinner the next month. I made it a personal goal to eat all of it, and failed happily. Two different amuse bouches followed the bread guy’s visit to the table, a light-as-air gougere and an ahi tartare cone, perfect salty bites before the courses began flowing from the kitchen.

There was the pumpernickel “blini” with vegetarian caviar made of crème fraiche; the salad with the most perfect tomatoes, even in October, that tasted like the way sunshine feels; the leeks, melted into a buttery puddle and punctuated by slivers of radish and mustard cress.

My mother, meanwhile, delicately savored her oysters and caviar; the bruleed foie gras that melted amidst the crunch of caramelized cubes of squash; a buttery scallop set amongst English peas that, she said, reminded her of gardening with her late father, snacking on peas popped off the vine and littering the pods while she weeded in the Midwestern humidity.

Dessert just kept happening. Like a fireworks finale, right when you thought it was over, there was another flurry of excitement. There was a selection of sorbet quenelles, a meringue that practically levitated to my mouth, followed by a sliver of torte so perfectly chocolate it sated a year’s worth of PMS cravings.

And then we went off menu: There were the fluffiest dots of sugar donut, followed quickly by a cookie course during which stacked drawers of macarons were set on the table. We wondered if we were really expected to consume two dozen cookies after a nine course lunch. “This must be it,” we giggled. We were happily wrong.

The chocolate course followed: truffles, more than anyone could eat in one sitting let alone after a nine course lunch and half a dozen cookies, were presented on a tray like cheese, and we were to pick our poison (the waiter kindly did not say if there was a maximum to how many we could choose, but we limited ourselves to two each).

“Surely, that was the end,” we sighed, full and satisfied until the candy course appeared, with caramels and gummies and the Per Se version of Jolly Ranchers.

Finally, our waiter presented a dainty cappuccino served with what can only be described as a beignet snowman. And that was the end.

When the bill came, my mother reached for her purse, and I told her that it was on me. She teared up again and tried to talk me out of it, but of course I had planned for this and wouldn’t hear of it. We excused ourselves to the restroom where we cried, not because it was over, but because it happened.

When we offhandedly commented that we might be interested in a few of those caramels—”and perhaps some of the macarons?”—our waiter essentially snapped his fingers, and a silver box filled with our favorite cookies, truffles, and candies was presented to us with a signed menu in a folder that must exist exactly for this purpose, as we left the restaurant.

We hugged our waiter goodbye and toddled out of the restaurant, arm-in-arm through the mall and into Central Park, sharing a Nat Sherman, grateful for a good meal and for each other. (I do not condone smoking, but sometimes, after a perfect meal, passing a cigarette back and forth is just the thing to do on a fall day.)

Even with some particularly decadent wine pairings, the total bill ended up around $1,400, at which point I had one of those ridiculous brain gymnastics rationalizations that I had actually saved some money since I’d budgeted to spend more.

Sure, there are an infinite number of ways I could have spent that $1,400. I could have donated it to charity, invested in a mutual fund, taken a course to expand my knowledge base—and I do all of those things regularly. But the opportunity to give back to my mother a sliver of what she’s given me over the years was priceless.

This story is part of our food month series.

Morgan Balavage teaches yoga in Santa Barbara, where she cooks at home more often than not.

Photos by: Kowarski

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No baseball player has combined excellence and comedy (intentional or otherwise) as much as Manny Ramirez, and though his major league playing days are behind him, stories of his exploits will live on forever. Pedro Martinez, who was on Late Night with Seth Meyers this week, has given us another one that I had personally never heard before. Meyers prompts Martinez at the 1:13 mark in the video, though the whole clip is pure joy if you’re a fan of Manny.

Here’s a transcript of the key bit, though it loses Pedro’s storytelling charm in text form:

“Ramirez put three 100mg Viagras in it. So here we go, somebody needs to taste this to see if it works. So we decided to let Ellis Burks try to taste it and I say, ‘You know, this mamajuana, if you drink it, you might get turned on.’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ll try it. I’ll try it. I’m not playing anyway.’ So he took it, it seemed like it worked. So everybody was coming up to him for a little shot.”

So when Pedro says, “It seemed like it worked,” that means Ellis Burks popped a boner on the spot, right? That’s the explanation that makes the most sense. I didn’t know Viagra worked like that! And if everyone saw the boner, and then asked Manny for a shot as well, that means that all those Red Sox players wanted boners right before the game. Sure, whatever works for you.

Since it was in the middle of their historic run to the curse-breaking championship in 2004, we can’t say it DIDN’T help.

(Via Late Night with Seth Meyers)

micdotcom:

Watch: Amy Schumer’s ‘12 Angry Men’ parody is the most brilliant take down of how men judge women on TV this year

Another must-watch video from Schumer.

authorsarahdessen:

I felt invisible for much of my teen years. Because of this, I was drawn to people like my best friend, who was dynamic and bold. She was the one who things happened to, the starting point of every story. I was the oracle, remembering each detail from my supporting role. There was safety in the shadows, but also a kind of darkness.

In tenth grade, we made friends with a group of older guys who hung out on the main street of town, which ran parallel to the local university — guys who’d once gone to our same high school and had never left the social scene. When they weren’t doing BMX and skateboard tricks in front of the post office, they were spending what money they had at the nearby arcade, or spinning on stools and shooting straw wrappers in their favorite burger joint, just across the street. There was something especially cool about being friends with them. We were still at an age where our parents insisted on treating us like children. How wonderful it felt to have an “adult” who valued our opinion; thought we were not just cute but interesting.

My best friend was 14 when she fell in love with a 21 year old. (I know how that sounds: I cringe now just typing it.) But at the time, to us, it wasn’t weird or taboo as much as this epic, forbidden romance. What can I say? We were so young.

My friend’s older boyfriend was close with a guy I’ll call T. Before long we were all hanging out together, driving around in his car: T and me in the front, my friend and her boyfriend in the back. While they made out, we made conversation, thrown together in the awkwardness of nearby coupledom. Before long, we had our own inside jokes, a shared eye-roll at yet another lover’s quarrel in a small space. We talked about music, about high school, his experience then and mine now. He was a nice guy. He took an interest in me. I can’t say it wasn’t flattering.

One day, T. dropped me off at my house after school. My mother, spying him from the front window, asked me how old he was.

“I don’t know,” I said. (I did. He was 21.) “19? 20?”

Her brow furrowed. “I don’t want you hanging around with someone that much older than you.”

“Mom.” I’m sure I rolled my eyes. “He’s just a friend.”

“And you are 15,” she said.

“So?”

“So, no normal 20 year old wants to hang out with someone who is 15. I don’t like it. Stay away from him.”

This was the sort of thing that always led to my leaving the room in a teary huff, maintaining loudly that she Just Didn’t Understand. Once again, she was treating me like a child, someone unable to make her own decisions.

So I lied. It didn’t seem like such a big deal, as my best friend was doing nothing but sneaking around to be with her boyfriend. There is a certain thrill in deception. Suddenly, I wasn’t that scared, invisible girl anymore, watching from the sidelines. I had my own secrets. It made me feel powerful.

One Saturday, the guys planned a picnic in a nearby forest park. I remember it was a gorgeous fall day, crisp and cool, and the first time I’d had Brie cheese and red wine. I was wearing a Bundeswehr tank top I’d gotten at an Army supply store and faded jeans, a thrift shop crucifix around my neck.

After awhile, my friend and her boyfriend disappeared, leaving T. and me alone. This wasn’t new, of course. But as we sat there together in the sunshine, the wine buzzing my head, I suddenly felt … weird. Nervous. Like something was expected of me. I suddenly realized T. was sitting very close to me. I remember how quiet it was, birds soaring overhead, no other sound. Suddenly, I wanted to go home. I wanted my mother.

I told T. I didn’t feel well and needed to go. He, in turn, went to find my friend and her boyfriend, who were none too pleased at having to leave so soon after we got there. I was causing trouble, making things difficult for everyone.

“What happened to you back there?” my friend whispered as we walked back to the car with the guys a few steps ahead.

“It just felt strange,” I told her. “Like we were supposed to be boyfriend and girlfriend, or something.”

“Well,” she said slowly. “He does like you.”

It was so weird. I’d completely accepted her romance with an older guy as normal, even destined. But the idea of T. feeling the same way about me made me shudder. He was a big brother, someone to pal around with. Hearing that he wanted more felt like wading into the deep end. Just like that, you lose your footing, and you’re in over your head.

Extracting myself, however, was anything but easy. Once I knew T. had feelings for me, I felt strange every time I saw him. He noticed my sudden distance and pouted, unsettling to see in an adult. When he wasn’t upset, he was in kindness overdrive, buying me things: a gold necklace with a floating heart, stuffed animals. I grew to dread the moments we were alone, especially when I needed a ride home at the end of the night to make my curfew. We had gotten in the habit of him driving me home, and my suddenly wanting to make different arrangements seemed to inconvenience everyone. Even worse, I couldn’t say why I didn’t want to go with him. All I had was my instinct and discomfort — a bad gut feeling. Everyone has those.

When I write novels, there is always a clear trajectory: the beginning, middle, climax, and end. With real life, however, and memory especially, it is harder to keep things so neat and organized. Many memories remain fuzzy, but incidents such as that day in the forest remain in crisp detail.

There are two other incidents with T. also clearly etched in my memory.

In the first, I snuck out of the house with a guy friend who lived down the street. It was late and my parents were asleep as we drove over to the house where T. lived to have some beers. At some point, my friend left to go somewhere, and for whatever reason I didn’t go with him. Maybe I wasn’t invited. Maybe he only stepped out to go to the store down the block. What I do remember is sitting on a couch with T., him putting on a Elton John song and telling me, in words I can’t recall specifically, that he wanted to be my boyfriend. I think he put an arm around me. I don’t remember what I said to him. Maybe nothing. My friend came back, we went home and I slid back into my bed. The night stops there.

The second incident I remember happened when he was giving me a ride home. This was after the night at his house, though how much later I cannot say. I just recall being almost to my house, when I told T. I didn’t want to hang out with him anymore.

“You don’t mean that,” he told me. “That’s your mom talking.”

I told him that this wasn’t true: it was my choice. I could see my house now, coming up ahead.

“We need to discuss this,” he said.

I told him I didn’t want to. That this was just how I felt.

“We’ll go talk about it,” he said. He wasn’t slowing down. “We’ll go somewhere.”

And that’s when I said it.

“No. Let me out. Now.”

My own voice — big, firm, filling the space — was a surprise to both of us. I’d been quiet for so long, worried about hurting his feelings and the ripple effects of whatever actions I took. But it’s enough to say no. You don’t need to offer an explanation, even if someone asks you for one.

He stopped the car with a jerk, right past the top of my driveway, and I grabbed the door handle and got out. Then he drove away.

For many years afterward, I took total blame for everything that happened between me and T. After all, I was a bad kid. I’d done drugs, I’d lied to my mom. You can’t just hang out with a guy and not expect him to get ideas, I told myself. You should have known better.

But maybe he should have. When I turned 21, I remember making a point, regularly, to look at teens and ask myself whether I’d want to hang out with them, much less date one. The answer was always a flat, immediate no. They were kids. I was an adult. End of story.

In the initial years following, I never really talked about this with anyone other than my high school girlfriends and various therapists. As I got older, however, the more I realized that my experience was not an uncommon one. It seemed just about every woman I knew had a similar story, a time when wanting attention meant getting the wrong kind entirely. As a teen wishing to be an adult, it is easy to get in over your head. Especially for girls, who are often taught that being polite and sweet should override all other instincts. It was with this in mind that I began my narrator Sydney’s story in Saint Anything.

I’m 44 now, married with a daughter of my own. She is only seven. The teen years loom ahead and I’ve experienced too much to rest easily. Like me and Sydney, she will most likely yearn for attention at one point or another. It is normal. But how can I teach her that it is just as OK to need that scrutiny to stop?

What do I want? To teach her to be wary without being fearful. To know that she can trust her gut. That if something feels wrong, that’s all the reason you need to get out of there. Don’t worry about being nice, or hurting someone’s feelings: they’ll get over it. Or, they won’t, and so what? You don’t have to wait, I want to tell her, until you have no choice. You have more power than you know. So say no. Say it loudly. Say it twice. And then get out of there, and come home.

—————————-

I wrote this piece months ago, and have been very nervous about putting it out into the world. Earlier today, seventeen.com ran it on their website, and I’ve watched it be shared over and over again across the internet. I thought this had only happened to me, but I was SO WRONG. I cannot even count the number of messages and tweets I have gotten from girls who went through, or are now going through, something similar. I’m not proud of this time in my life: I did a lot of things I regret. But I am not sorry at all I wrote down this story. It happened, it affected me. And that’s what I do. 

Original article is here: 

http://www.seventeen.com/love/a30557/sarah-dessen-dating-an-older-guy/

According to a friend of someone on Amazon's taxonomy team, Amazon has removed the gender taxonomy of toys and games. Here's the before and after:

That's not to say you still can't shop for boys and girls toys on Amazon (jeez, those pages bum me out), but taking it out of the standard list of categories is a nice first step.

Now, how about you do something about this Amazon Mom thing? What's wrong with Amazon Family?

On Saturday night, two men were shown embracing on the Dodger Stadium Kiss Cam and — perhaps not surprisingly, but encouraging nonetheless — there was a hearty applause from the crowd. It’s a good sign that sports culture is slowly progressing past preconceived notions of masculinity. Now all the Dodgers need to do is eradicate that pesky fan-fighting problem.

(Deadspin)

mediamattersforamerica:

You need to watch this full video.

(Video originally by Benjamin Hancock)

ironhandmaverick:

feministlisafrank:

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Quote(s) by Naomi Wolf.

We’re having an obesity epidemic but you want to talk chains of slavery? You’re mad.

My bad, I forgot for a second that when one issue exists it completely negates the existence of any other issue and we immediately have to stop talking about it.

After years of talking about nonsense like black holes and theory of relativity and blah blah blah, Stephen Hawking finally said something useful this weekend: Zayn Malik is still in One Direction. One of the world’s smartest men (not Zayn) appeared at the Sydney Opera House in holographic form this weekend, and he was asked, “What do you think is the cosmological effect of Zayn leaving One Direction and consequently breaking the hearts of millions of teenage girls across the world?” It’s an important question, with an equally significant answer.

“Finally, a question about something important,” he said. “My advice to any heartbroken young girl is to pay close attention to the study of theoretical physics. Because one day there may well be proof of multiple universes. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that somewhere outside of our own universe lies another different universe. And in that universe, Zayn is still in One Direction.” (Via)

Hawking is clearly trolling us. He doesn’t care about Zayn still being in One Direction. He’s sucking up to tween girls so they’ll cross Zayn’s face off from their posters and replace it with his. Before long, Stephen Hawking will be in every middle school locker in America.

(Via BuzzFeed)

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When Orange Is the New Black returns to Netflix on June 12, there will be a new face among the Litchfield inmates. Showrunner Jenji Kohan was asked about the new season at the TIME 100 Gala, and she revealed that there will be a new character based on convicted felon, Comedy Central roastess with the mostest, and lifestyle maven Martha Stewart. We don’t know what her name is, nor do we know who plays her, but, according to Kohan, it’s someone worth looking forward to, from what it sounds like.

Guess who was also at the Gala? Martha Stewart! Naturally, The Stew was asked about this new character, but she admitted that she’d never watched the show. (Fun fact: Stewart was almost sent to the Danbury prison on which Litchfield is based; instead, she went to a facility in West Virginia.) However, it’s not that she has hard feelings about it because she said, “I’ll look at it.”

So, that’s a good thing.

Source: TIME