June 2017

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. This is a masterpiece: A day on the internet in 2017: an internal transcript.

2. The New York Public Library’s summer reading list (for all ages).

3. A Business Insider writer covers her son auditioning for Julliard and breaks down the Zen of practicing:

When someone is unable to relish the small steps, they just stop, because process starts to seem hopeless if you constantly focus on the end. You have to have a proclivity for hard work (which might be as crucial and inheritable as talent) combined with the ability to take joy in the process itself.

Let’s Talk About Long Hair

By in let's talk 2 Comments

I’ve been growing my hair out and so far progress is non-noticeable. (At least it’s curlier than the last time we talked about hair, but I attribute that to finding a better stylist who doesn’t hack it to death with a razor.)

Anyway, my goal was to get to a nice chin length that I could pin back, but then I saw the Wonder Woman movie and now all I want is a Connie Nielsen/Queen Hippolyta mane of loose curls:

And a sword. I think a sword is really what that hairstyle calls for. This is gonna be a good look for my 40s.

Political Wednesday Poem

By in poems 1 Comment

Revenge

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;

I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.
With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,
my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,

because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,
and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:

we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common cause with us
the way you trample us both,

oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.

I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.

But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,

of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Unicorn Shirt

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup

After I made the Style Arc Blaire shirt and said that the new Kalle shirt pattern from Closet Case Files was “already drafted to be what I really wanted,” I wanted to try it.

Since I was spending $22 on a printed pattern and shipping and felt pretty confident about the outcome–despite never having made a Closet Case pattern before (dun dun dun)–I went with something not too nice but that would be fun and wearable: Unicorn-embroidered seersucker.

 

On paper–and on the hanger–this is great. But, as it turns out, I like the Blaire shirt a lot more. It’s drafted more elegantly, I think; the sleeves on this Kalle are shorter than I wanted and the collar stand is giant, which pushes the collar up higher on your neck than it should. (I’m going to do a side-by-side review next week.)

I wish I loved it more, but in the end I still have a unicorn shirt that I don’t have to be too precious about. I even walked over to downtown’s most ridiculous hotel to get a bathroom selfie there, vs. my un-gilded and un-marbled bathroom at home:

John Denver Day

By in nature, weekend report

We went up the Willow Heights trail Sunday straight into a John Denver paradise: blue skies, bluebells and lupins and forget-me-nots in bloom, crossing an aspen forest to a lake.

I’ve been discovering Rocky Mountain High after dismissing it for years as corny. But it’s about the perfect summation of being happy in the mountains that I’ve found:

“And oh, I love the life within me, I feel a part of everything I see.
And oh, I love the life around me, a part of everything is here in me.”

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. I kind of love this: Seinfeld episodes summarized from “the perspective of the normal women whom Jerry terrorized.”

2. Via Kottke, a long and saddening read on What Bullets Do to Bodies.

3. Quotes From 25 Famous Women on Their Pets. From Meghan Daum:

“In my life so far, I have never felt more in tune with another living thing. If Rex could have talked, we’d have finished each other’s sentences. Then I met my husband, and he loved Rex too. And though I stopped being that particular kind of single woman, we became a particular kind of couple: the kind for whom their dog is their child, the kind that talks about their dog in such a way that people who have actual children make fun of them in the car on the way home. But we didn’t care.”

The Modern Lipstick Index

By in Uncategorized

One of these days I’m going to write about going from using no makeup to a full face at age 35. I talked about it a little here, but I think it does really boil down to feeling more confident.

It can seem really frivolous, though, to talk about “makeup is actually empowering! I’m totally not doing this for the male gaze!”–but this study about makeup purchase habits seems to back that up:

In a series of experiments, Netchaeva and Rees demonstrated that when women are concerned about money, whether due to a recession or their own circumstances, they use makeup to alleviate their worries “because through the use of makeup, women feel more confident in their ability to find a romantic partner and to get (or keep) a job,” said Netchaeva and Rees.

In one study, in which the researchers asked women to choose between two lipsticks, they branded one shade as both “Pouty Pink,” with a tagline “It may not get you your dream job, but it will get you your dream man,” and also “Professional Pink,” which claimed the opposite. Women concerned about money were significantly more likely to select Professional Pink. “Between the options of securing resources through getting a job or attracting a partner, women opt for the former,” Netchaeva and Rees wrote.

Summer Poem

By in poems

It was the summer solstice yesterday. We missed the sunset trying to get to an overlook to see it, which made me sad until I realized I miss most of the summer anyway because we all have to work. Can we go back to having summer vacation? Someone wrote a poem about it:

First Year Teacher to His Students

by Gary J. Whitehead

Go now into summer, into the backs of cars,
into the black maws of your own changing,
onto the boardwalks of a thousand splinters,
onto the beaches of a hundred fond memories
in wait, where the sea in all its indefatigability
stammers at the invitation. Go to your vacation,

to the late morning cool of your basement rooms,
the honeysuckle evening of the first kiss, the first
dip and pivot, swivel and twist. Go to where
the clipper ships sail far upriver, where the salmon
swim in the clean, cool pools just to spawn.
Wake to what the spider unspools into a silver

dawn dripping with light. Sleep in sleeping bags,
sleep in sand, sleep at someone else’s house
in a land you’ve never been, where the dreamers
dream in a language you only half understand.
Slip beneath the sheets, slide toward the plate,
swing beneath the bandstand where the secret

things await. Be glad, or be sad if you want,
but be, and be a part of all that marches past
like a parade, and wade through it or swim in it
or dive in it with your eyes open and your mind
open to wind, rain, long days of sun and longer
nights of city lights mixing on wet streets like paint.

Stay up so late that you forget day-of-the-week,
week-of-the-month, month-of-the-year of what
might be the best summer, the summer
best remembered by the scar, or by the taste
you’ll never now forget of someone’s lips,
and the trips you took—there, there, there,

where snow still slept atop some alpine peak,
or where the moon rose so low you could see
its tranquil seas…and all your life it’ll be like
some familiar body that stayed with you one night,
one summer, one year, when you were young,
and how everywhere you walked, it followed.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Shorts!

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup

I made clothing for my bottom half! It worked! They’re fuchsia and look like a serape! They FIT! (I’m sparing you pictures of my legs but they really are comfortable and well-fitting.)

Details:

Fit adjustments:

  • Graded from a size 10 in the hips to an 8 in the waist, which I will not do next time. (I don’t know why I can’t grasp that waists need to be big enough to go over hips as you pull on shorts. This pair works but I think shorts can be a little more, ahem, relaxed.)
  • Added two inches to the inseam because nobody at age 37 wants to wear 4″ shorts.
  • No other fit changes, but next time I’m debating between just adding a half inch at the top below the waistband or slashing and spreading at the hipline to get a little more length in the torso (mine is super long).

Next time, I say? Why yes, I do have the pants fabric from last week and a cut of this ikat for another pair of shorts on their way.

Staying Cool

By in Toby, weekend report

We washed window, read on the deck and visited families for Fathers Day, while the furrier among us stretched out under the ceiling fan and lounged under the deck chair just out of reach.

1 2 3