Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Much like dismissing people talking about working out, I also dismissed people talking about the joy of an electric toothbrush–until I experienced it.  I got a Goby toothbrush (because the design did not make me sad) and it’s wonderful. It’s like I just left the dentist every time! Also, did you know that exercising is fun?!

2. The Cut asks the important questions in a piece that speaks to me, vacillating about getting bangs: Is This Mega-Popular Instagram Haircut a Lie — or the Truth? I haven’t had bangs since a disastrous layering attempt when I was 12, but I am so tempted. I blame Stevie Nicks (and Instagram):

 

Let’s Get Political Again

By in feminism, politics

Mom’s illness pushed a lot of the shitshow that politics continue to be out of my head, but let’s get our blood boiling again! “Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer” is a long and damning piece by Rebecca Traister about Joe’s appeal to white guys, his policies, and the creepy af way he touches women.

The gross physical familiarity and disrespect radiated toward [Lucy Flores] by a man in her field, in a public space, treating her body as if it was his to smell and squeeze and kiss, is classically, casually—even while non-cataclysmically—symptomatic of the daily, easy belief that men can treat women’s bodies as accessible, without regard to the comfort or desires of the women in question. It is also further evidence that Anita Hill’s testimony—grounded as it was in the notion that unwanted, inappropriate verbal and physical contact is unacceptable in a professional context—left no impression on him. Here’s the truth: If Joe Biden had ever done two minutes of actual thinking about the harm he’d helped to inflict on Hill, on women, and on the nation in handling of those hearings, he wouldn’t still be doing this kind of thing.

 

(For anyone who would argue that Joe’s behavior “isn’t as bad” as our current President’s, may I put forth this radical idea: What if we elected someone with NO history of touching people inappropriately? They are out there! They exist!)

Wednesday Poem

By in poems

I posted this last year after Mom’s diagnosis, before our annus horribilis, telling myself that it would all be OK, the trees get their leaves again, we will get through this.

We did get through it but not all of us; this year it seems even more appropriate, as the rest of us figure out “a return/to the strange idea of continuous living despite/ the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.”

 

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Friday Links

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. When I have downtime in the afternoon, I’ve been enjoying the “Color Stories” from Katy Kelleher–a longer piece on the history and culture of a particular color. Read one and I guarantee you’ll learn something new.

2. I stumbled on this quote from novelist Donna Tartt and really liked it (honestly, because I still need to be told it’s OK to be a Serious, Smart Person and still like clothes):

Poring through racks of vintage clothes or obsessing over just the right shade of sky-blue or violet satin for the lining of a black jacket stems from exactly the same impulse that makes me tinker happily with a sentence all afternoon, changing adjectives and moving clauses around until it’s just right.

3. The latest from Nathan Pyle’s “Strange Planet” is pretty accurate:

 

Thursday Essay

By in sad stories

Here’s a short, searing piece from Andy Kopsa about losing her father to pancreatic cancer. Why do I keep posting about grief when I have enough of it in my life? Because, as she points out in the essay, there is something to be said about hearing from someone who has also been through this. “I am finding my tribe — the ones of us who watched our parents dying.”

From “There Are No Five Stages of Grief“:

 

My research suggests there will be a period of adjustment as I try to find a new normal. So far my new normal has involved a variety of public and private acts of mourning. Some days my pain is like accidentally brushing fingertips across a hot iron, burning yet mercifully brief.

Other days I start crying over a bag of frozen shrimp at Trader Joe’s. Or like today, I stare out the back door at my wintry rooftop garden and think of summer tomatoes, the smell of dirt, of my father, and sob.

[…] As Americans, we have been trained up to believe that grief is a process, something linear we are capable of understanding. But I am comfortable with my broken heart now after my dad’s death, comfortable even when my sadness reaches a maddening crescendo because that is when I get the gift of giving up.

Be Here Now

By in book lists, hippies

A couple weeks ago I ended up at a tiny online store (to find a shirt I wanted) and clicked around a little before I left. In their “Books” section was Be Here Now by Ram Dass and the illustrations they sampled were astonishing.

I dug a little to find out more. You can read the whole thing online; I haven’t (yet) but I was just taken with the art.  Was that type hand lettered? Rubber stamped?! Turns out it was rubber stamped–I found this article about the making of the book on Fonts In Use:

Ram Daas explained the production process in a 1970 lecture at the Menninger Foundation that was later published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology:

They start with these four-foot pieces of cardboard and this book is 108 pages and each day they meditate from five to eight in the morning – there’s a group of five of them – and then all in silence … they hand rubber-stamp each page, all the letters of the page, and then the artists do all the sketching around the thing. Then the whole thing is photo-reduced and shipped to Japan where it’s printed on rice paper and hand stitched because it’s an experiential-type document.

As the Fonts In Use article says, “The book is a feat of non-mechanical text arrangement” and pretty amazing to dip in to–both for medium and for message (for this hippie, at least).

(That “Surfing” one made it up to my office wall.)

Tuesday Project Roundup: Traditional Gifts

By in sewing, Tuesday Project Roundup

For our fifth anniversary, I made Doc the traditional gift of “condiment-colored loungewear.”  This is the Rebel Raglan sweatshirt in bamboo terry and matching ribbing from Blackbird Fabrics.

More online fabric companies need to match their ribbing to their sweatshirting because when Blackbird Fabrics did it, I couldn’t click “buy” fast enough. Literally–they had a really great muted rust and even a nice blue and those were gone before I could get an order in.

I did clear this mustard color with Doc before I bought it and again when it arrived. He deemed it “OK for loungewear” but sometimes I forget not everyone loves 70’s yellow the way I do. (Also, I realized I love it so much that now his sweatshirt matches my own Everlane sweatshirt I wear around the house. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Three guesses as to who really, really loves this fabric and color, though:

Eleven Years

By in Toby 1 Comment

Eleven years ago yesterday I brought Toby home from a Petsmart adoption event. He’s been the constant in my life, between houses and jobs and relationships and sorrows, and as we both reach middle age together he’s both a given and a fresh joy every day.

Sometimes I look at him and don’t see Toby, the cat whose meows I know, but this wild creature who lives in my house and will let me pet him–and I’m overcome with wonder and gratitude that such an impossible thing could even happen. Who hasn’t dreamed of having a tame tiger ?

 

First year babyface with a pink nose

 

With the dignified nose freckles of middle age

 

Currently a Very Distinguished Gentleman with his floppy ear

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