Make a note of this: if you wear skinny pants or even super-straight legged pants with your blazer, you will look like a rockstar.
“
| — |
This Lez Get Dressed for Work post is basically Autostraddle validating my life choices.
Including: “I love a good menswear-inspired shoe especially because I’m so femme that often my footwear is what I rely on to balance my look out.” Word, lady. Word.
|
Today, the idea of a return to nature, which the Poppers first described twenty-five years ago in a scholarly article entitled “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” has become central to almost any conversation about the region’s future. The suggestion that residents embrace their own decline and convert their land into a vast national park known as the Buffalo Commons has sparked the enthusiasm of conservationists and the wrath of local farmers in equal measure.
It’s easy to understand why. Stretching along the eastern steppes of the Rockies from Montana to Texas, the plains constitute nearly a fifth of the land in the lower forty-eight. In the late 1800s, they were the very symbol of our country’s expansionist ambitions, flush with homesteaders drawn to the promise of 160 acres of free land, and a blank page on which to rewrite their lives. But over time the plains have also come to reflect the more modern habit of overdevelopment. By 1930, the agricultural boom in the region had already begun to stretch the limits of sustainability. Groundwater dried up. Drought set in. And under a billowing prairie wind, the shallow roots of annual crops proved incapable of holding the topsoil in place: with massive dust storms darkening the horizon, the migratory exodus began.
For the past eight decades, it has continued. Although many cities on the plains have grown, rural communities across Kansas and Nebraska, Montana and Texas, Oklahoma and the Dakotas have shrunk each decade since the Great Depression. In Kansas alone, more than 6,000 towns have vanished altogether. Nearly a million square miles of the American heartland currently meet the definition of “frontier” used by the Census Bureau more than a century ago.
— Wil S. Hylton
(h/t Ann Friedman Weekly)
kateoplis:
Oklahoma
NYT, Tuesday 5/21/13:
The tornado swirled out of a fast-developing storm that began cutting a destructive path through Moore and other sections of the southern Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday about 2:45 p.m. It plowed through 17 miles of ground over 50 minutes, damaging or destroying hundreds of homes, businesses, schools and hospitals in Moore and in Oklahoma City itself. Winds reached speeds of up to 210 miles per hour, and many structures were wiped clean to their foundations.
Severe weather has become an almost routine part of life in Oklahoma City and its suburbs, a section of Middle America where the lore of twisters and thunderstorms has long been embraced and at times even celebrated. The National Basketball Association team is called the Thunder, and there is an annual National Weather Festival, where families gather for weather balloon launchings and storm-chaser car shows. But the 1.3-mile-wide tornado that struck Plaza Towers on Monday stunned Oklahomans, in both its size and the number of victims, dozens of whom were students who were killed or injured.
17 miles in 50 minutes, 210 mph winds, 1.3 miles wide.
The thing I love about you (ok, it’s one thing. one stone in a rock yard of things) is that you have this dream and you don’t let it deflate and stagnate like I do. You don’t lift your skirt and step over it to the petty, self-inflated demands of the day, like I do. You don’t keep it precious and shelved and preserved, like I do. Your thing is smoothed out in front of you, constantly, like a map of the battles you intend to wage by night. And win by daybreak.
We are here, because you are fearless. Because you consider nothing impossible. Because you show up, and work and stay the course and steady the ship and keep watch on the horizon, unsleeping. And whether dry land appears or not, you prepare for it as if it lies under the next swell. Because one day, it will lie under the next swell.
“
| — |
Been Thinking: What I know of You
Lifting your skirt and stepping over your dreams to the petty, self-inflated demands of the day. Keeping your dreams precious and shelved and preserved is such a perfect description of how I have been in the habit of living.
I’m trying so hard now to do the other thing. To keep the map out. To show up, to work, to prepare for dry land. I’m not sure I’ve ever really done this before. It’s hard, and I’m doing it.
|
Where the inspirational figure is selected for us, and the gap between their life and ours is too great, the effect is not one of encouragement but of disillusionment - especially if their story is told in terms of personal qualities like bravery or persistence.
Knowing a famous person has the same impairment as you can be reassuring, but only in the vague way that hearing of a successful distant relative is reassuring.
Most of us will never scale Everest, compete for our country at sports or have a showbiz career. This doesn’t mean we’ve failed.
“
| — |
For BBC’s Mental Health Awareness Week, Mark Brown questions the value of glorifying role models who share our own disabilities and pathologies.
A flipside of the same coin to consider is the perilous “tortured genius” myth of creativity, which implies that depression, addiction, and other mental health issues that plagued some successful creators were central to their genius. The human antidotes to this mythology are worthy role models.
|
NINETY-FIVE GRIEVANCES TO GOD: ABRIDGED
After Martin Luther
1. Children are capable of feeling
both shame and abandonment.
14. My father lives alone. Also,
a hawk killed his dog and you
expect me to believe in mercy.
20. Good things happen to bad people.
47. One day, every person I have ever
loved will die and the only option
you have given me is to just sit by
and watch it happen or hope
I am the first to go.
48. Speaking of love,
86. The list of artists who have
committed suicide only includes
the ones who were well known
enough to be found.
95. As a child, I prayed every night.
It felt important. Mature. Powerful.
I wish someone had told me that
it was me, that I was the powerful one.
Imagine it: fleets of six-year-olds
believing that strongly in themselves.
- Sierra DeMulder
Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing. … It also employs rhetorical parallels and differences… . It pays attention to the sounds and rhythms of its sentences… . Much of the information it proffers is implied. … These are among the things that indicate talent.
The thing that sucks about Girls and Seinfeld and Sex and the City and every other TV show like them isn’t that they don’t include strong characters focusing on the problems facing blacks and Latinos in America today. The thing that sucks about those shows is that millions of black people look at them and can relate on so many levels to Hannah Horvath and Charlotte York and George Costanza, and yet those characters never look like us. The guys begging for money look like us. The mad black chicks telling white ladies to stay away from their families look like us. Always a gangster, never a rich kid whose parents are both college professors. After a while, the disparity between our affinity for these shows and their lack of affinity towards us puts reality into stark relief: When we look at Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, we see people with whom we have a lot in common. When they look at us, they see strangers.
“
| — |
Hipster Racism Runoff And The Search for The Black Costanza by Cord Jefferson @ Gawker
When they look at us, they see strangers.
(via darkdarkgirlvashti)
I was trying to find this quote recently. I don’t think most white people understand how it feels to be thought of as only as a dehumanized stereotype or a token. Never as someone like you who can be relatable and have things in common with you. It’s always a surprise to people online and offline when people find out that I like things that they do, too ; that I’m not just some angry activism-obsessed woman. When people like Lena Dunham say they don’t know how to write Black people, it’s pretty much saying that she doesn’t think that Black people are also fully complex human beings like her. Sure, there are cultural considerations to be made, but it’s ignoring the fact that people of color are diverse and not a monolith, so it’s not like the only girls who are like her are white.
(via wretchedoftheearth)
I first saw this like a week ago and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
(via rosalarian)
|
