haikuforthesinglegirl:

rachelfershleiser:

(via Illustration by ObviousState)

Pretty much.

I can’t wait for “Smart Cookies Don’t Crumble” and “A Hero Is More Than Just A Sandwich”.  Wheeee!

(via Allow Women Into Your Life | The Hairpin)

murrayscheese:

amazing.

Despite detailed to-do lists, lists of books to read, movies to see, restaurants to visit, businesses to plan, and Google Docs galore, in all of my 28 years I’ve yet to execute a succinct, thoughtful list of annual goals.  I’ve had plans, sure, hopes and aspirations, mostly achieved, and through small collections of good decisions, sprinkled with a few not-so-greats, everything keeps moving along.  There are big victories, like planning a wedding that felt like a celebration of everything that Mike and I hold dear- our family, friends, food, farming, hip-hop, and Microsoft Excel- and there are the small things, like hanging up a file folder next to the front door to help us remember when things need to be mailed and filed, in our constant quest to become Real Live Grown Ups. 

The past year, more than any year, has felt so completely like a step into who I am and who I’ve always longed to be, and it makes planning for the next a measured balance of the desire to keep everything just as it is- at the moment, warm lamplight and full bellies, the last dishes of the evening getting a final rinse and intermittent attention paid to the James Taylor and Carole King duets on PBS- and a headlong rush into the next! big! thing! that we can surely complete, the two of us, unstoppable as we are.  We’ll see.

Looking over our photos of the last year, it seems like five.  We got engaged, married, Mike changed jobs, I became an aunt for the second time, my brother left for Afghanistan, we traveled to Vermont (twice), Oklahoma (three? four? times), Illinois (twice), made a brief stop in Texas (and more stops in the Houston-Bush airport than I would ever care to repeat), and split for upstate at every possible chance.  In between we snuck in picnics, football games, visits to socialist paper mache puppet museums, and skipped the line at the cherry blossom festival.  We made our own cheese, pickles, bread, ice cream, and jalapeno poppers, picked our own fruit, cut down our own Christmas tree.  It was the first full year of Us, and we didn’t waste a minute.

If nothing else, I ended the year in better health than I started- I wrapped up Christmas 2010 with a wicked case of the flu, a trip to the ER with an out of control fever, and spent the first week of the new year in bed, surrounded by a forest’s worth of Puffs Plus, watching seasons one through three of The Wire.  Oh, and there was a blizzard.

We spent the rest of the month watching the snow slowly, slowly, ever so slowly start to melt.  We had big plans a’brewing, but in the meantime we bided our time, coordinating NFC championship game outfits and making elaborate bar grub in our 4x6 kitchen.

Despite my best efforts to recreate a Bears color scheme using only the Gap sale rack as a design source, they lost.  

‘

We drowned our sorrows in hot wings and deep fried jalapeños.  It was rough.

Clearly, 2011 was off to a great, if artery clogging start.

More saturated fat to come.

From Some Reflections on The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry (2011)

I’ll just add that I’m devouring this anthology, but not at all as a scholar.  It feels curated, somewhat limited, like a guest list for a venue with limited capacity (and clearly no large budget for royalties, which remains a mystery.) Through it I’m happening upon old pals and their dear friends with whom I’ve yet to become acquainted, the pleasure of which outweighs the thought in the back of my head that we’re missing a few folks from the party.

Enjoyment aside: Helen Vendler is out of touch.  The fact that she arrived at a few ideas that aren’t entirely off base doesn’t mean she used a valid path to get to those ideas.  And this:

[T]here is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time, and its sifting of wheat from chaff: Which of Dove’s 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?

is but a thinly veiled bit of racism, agism, classism and sexism, not to mention among the worst arguments for the canon I’ve ever heard.  Please.  The passage of time just turns up the volume on the prevailing discourse and drowns out the dissent.  Get real, Helen.

The anthology is incomplete, and it isn’t wrong to problematize its proximity to the period it is anthologizing, but I don’t need some canon worshipping bigot to tell me so.  

areasofmyexpertise:

“Leon Cooperman the Omega Advisors Inc. chairman and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s money-management unit….  [wrote that] Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be….’

“[Now] Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.”

***

Max Abelson wrote a story today for Bloomberg about the hurt feelings of many bankers and CEOs who feel they are for some weird reason being cast as the villains in “A Christmas Carol” the bleak economy.

Allow me to tell you a story.

At one point on my book tour, I was approached in the airport by a former banker.

He told me he was a life long Democrat and a huge fan of The Daily Show, but he also felt that Jon and the show had it all wrong.

(Because he was a multi millionaire, he has the right to just start critizing anyone in the airport he wants.)

He said that the bankers were not the bad guys in the subprime mortgage scandal and near financial collapse that they had everything to do with. They were just doing what the government allowed them to do.*

And so: he felt it was unfair and hurtful to make the bankers out to be the bad guys.

I was very happy to finally have the chance to say this to someone’s face:

I told him that as a freelance person, I had no idea how much money I would make this year. I never do.

But during the previous few years, due to hard work and exceedingly strange circumstance, I had made more money than I had ever conceived of making in my life. I had also paid a huge bucket of local, state, and city taxes, and that was JUST FINE WITH ME.

Because I knew that I had very little to worry about when it came to providing for my family and me this holiday season. And I suspected he didn’t as well.

But there are many, many people who are VERY worried about this. And out of consideration to them, it seemed to me a little unseemly for wealthy to care so much about the names they might be called.

“From my point of view,” I said, “I think you and me and other wealthy people should just suck it in and take it.”

I have never said anything like this out loud to a stranger before in my life, never mind a stranger who has money; but as I am now a Deranged Millionaire, I now have that right to speak my mind.

Naturally, he just ignored what I said and offered to consult on the Daily Show if we wanted.

 

***

LOOK: I do not mean to suggest that anyone in this piece is a monster. I am sure they are smart, innovative, and good to their families and employees. I respect success IMMENSELY and I am a capitalist.

However, I know better now than ever that wealth deranges.

It disconnects you from the world. It inflates your self-regard. It allows you to believe that four people congratulating you at your country club makes you a GODDAMN HERO OF AMERICA.

And it leads you to say things like former banker John A. Allison said in the article linked:

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.”

Because of course, you non-millionaires are not productive, and not worthy.

I know this from experience: when wealth takes hold, the brain creates a new reality in order to explain your new fortune over the poor fortunes of others.

It is not enough to say, as some of these men do, “I am wealthy, and I got some lucky advantages, but I also worked really hard and found some opportunities, and I am proud of it.”

You must instead say: “my extreme wealth proves that I DESERVE to be wealthy, because I am better.”

This logical fallacy is the core of Social Darwinism, but you’d think after a while that Homo Robber Baronensis would have bred some thicker skin.

But it’s like no one around these rich and powerful men have ever called them a name or even disagreed with them!

Oh! That’s right: no one has. At least, not for a long time.

Well, some of these guys are childish, and some of them are creeps. 

That is all.

AMAZING IMAGE OF ME AS A POOR DERANGED MILLIONAIRE COURTESY: THE AMAZING APE-LAD.  

*This was his actual argument. It is not an argument an adult makes. It’s the actual argument that TEENAGERS make at prestigious high schools where cheating is rampant: everyone was doing it, and no teacher was stopping them. So they WERE FORCED to cheat in order to be competitive. TEENAGERS ARE NOT JOB CREATORS.

 

togetherforjacksoncountykids:

“It’s Okay to be Neither,” By Melissa Bollow Tempel

Alie arrived at our 1st-grade classroom wearing a sweatshirt with a hood. I asked her to take off her hood, and she refused. I thought she was just being difficult and ignored it. After breakfast we got in line for art, and I noticed that she still had not removed her hood. When we arrived at the art room, I said: “Allie, I’m not playing. It’s time for art. The rule is no hoods or hats in school.”

She looked up with tears in her eyes and I realized there was something wrong. Her classmates went into the art room and we moved to the art storage area so her classmates wouldn’t hear our conversation. I softened my tone and asked her if she’d like to tell me what was wrong.

“My ponytail,” she cried.

“Can I see?” I asked.

She nodded and pulled down her hood. Allie’s braids had come undone overnight and there hadn’t been time to redo them in the morning, so they had to be put back in a ponytail. It was high up on the back of her head like those of many girls in our class, but I could see that to Allie it just felt wrong. With Allie’s permission, I took the elastic out and re-braided her hair so it could hang down.

“How’s that?” I asked.

She smiled. “Good,” she said and skipped off to join her friends in art.

‘Why Do You Look Like a Boy?’

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I’m going on Liz Taylor’s diet.

What Elizabeth Taylor Ate On A Typical Day, Circa 1960

used plastic bottle —> milk glass vase.  (via Milk Design Shop — Lace Vase)