Vague Blue

2012-05-24

by Emily Dahl.

Pretty much how I want to dress all the time.

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Choices are what what we all need. And when I walk out into the bricky warp of these American cities, that is exactly what I feel. Choices aplenty. Things I don’t know anything about but might like are here, possibly waiting for me. Even if they aren’t. The exhilaration of a new arrival. Good light in a restaurant that especially pleases you. A cab driver with an interesting life history to tell. The casual, lilting voice of a woman you don’t know, but that you are allowed to listen to in a bar you’ve never been in, at a time when you would otherwise have been alone. These things are waiting for you. And what could be better? More mysterious? More worth anticipating? Nothing. Not a thing.

— Carson McCullers, The Sportswriter (via drinkyourjuice)

Source: drinkyourjuice

2012-05-23

“‘Valley of the Dolls’ meets Upper East Side meets Amish.” THIS IS PERFECT.

Source: tomandlorenzo.com

2012-05-19

On Dan Savage

boyborninabarn:

forgetpolitics:

1. Dan Savage hates trans people and uses transphobic slurs.

“Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives. Perhaps I’m a transphobic bigot, but I honestly think waiting a measly 36 months to cut your dick is a sacrifice any father…

Dan Savage says a lot of things that I do like, but after seeing so many articles and posts listing his pretty serious offences, I’ve pretty much written him off.

I have been reading/listening to/watching Dan Savage for years now, and I will continue to follow him, even though he says dumb shit sometimes. Has he said/written all the stuff that this person references? Yes. Do those represent the entirety of his thoughts on the subject? No. This whole list makes me want to grab something heavy and hurl it at the internet. If socially liberal can’t exhibit a certain amount of toleration for other opinions, not to mention attempt to judge a person by the totality of their life and opinions instead of a misstatement they’ve made here and there, then I don’t see how we can expect the actual bigots to behave any better.

I, for one, will always respect Dan Savage for being willing to talk about issues relating to sex and relationships that the vast majority of people don’t want to touch with a ten foot poll. As someone whose sex ed was basically like the stuff you see in Mean Girls, minus the condoms, I have a huuuuuuge amount of respect for that. Is he perfect? No. Is his heart in the right place? I should think that would be obvious by now.

(via antoniaeh)

Source: forgetpolitics

2012-05-17

As many of you know, I don’t tend to be very paranoid about a lot of things, which means that in many areas of my life I am actively not super cautious. For example, I’ve never worried about whether or not the doors were locked at night. Maybe it comes from growing up with Mormons? Anyway…

ALL THAT CHANGES NOW

My memories are a little fuzzy, but Zach and I both woke up a little after 5 this morning when someone said, “Scoot over.” Zach asked me if I was cold, and then we both looked up and noticed a strange man in our apartment.

Needless to say, we both screamed bloody murder.

As we calmed down and determined that he wasn’t stealing our stuff, it became clear that he was suuuuuuper out of it, and also wearing nothing but a pair of boxer-briefs. He wanted to know why we were in his apartment; we wanted to know why he was in our apartment. Apparently he lives two stories above us. We managed, by turning on the light, to establish that the apartment was definitely not his, but efforts to expel him were hampered by the fact that he was obviously drunk off his ass, and thought he’d left something in our bathroom (he hadn’t). Luckily Zach managed to put on some boxers and take charge of the situation and shepherded him out the door.

I have no idea how this guy ended up outside his own apartment wearing only boxer shorts at five in the morning. My theory: drunk laundry. But really, I don’t want to know the reason and I hope he blacked out and forgot the whole thing so I don’t run into him in the entryway and start giggling hysterically.

In the end, I’m glad I learned my lesson in such an inane way: I feel like my personal space has been violated, but the whole thing was actually hilarious, and I just hope that that guy went to sleep on his side.

Needless to say, when I come in the door I’m going to be locking the door behind me every fucking time from now on.

2012-05-16

thehairpin:

lisahanawalt:

adamconover:

A few weeks ago Lisa and I went to check out the International Beauty Show at the Javitz convention center. I’ve always loved trade shows, and this one turned out to be especially nuts, so we came back the next day with a camera and made a short video of us goofing around on the convention floor.

Lisa is absolutely hilarious, and collaborating with her on this was an incredible ton of fun. Check it out and enjoy!

Do you like montages? How about MAKEOVER MONTAGES?

Huge thanks to everyone at IBS for being such good sports, and to Adam for being SO FUNNY and game to collaborate. This was a crazy experiment - Now back to drawing!

LISAAAAAA!!!

lol IBS

Source: adamconover

2012-05-15

What Pinterest Taught Me About Marriage as a Capitalist Prison

death-before-decaf:

Seriously though, fuck gravy boats.

As someone who uses it semi-regularly I definitely agree that pinterest is indicative of a lot of things that are wrong with our culture as a whole (the glorification of inspiration as opposed to actually producing shit bugs me a lot—and yet, I still pin pictures of pretty dresses. Yay hypocrisy!)

But also, I’ve read a few articles lately citing demographic studies that marriage is becoming more and more limited to the privileged classes of society, which I think supports this person’s point—if you and/or your friends and relatives can’t afford that gravy boat, no health insurance and hospital visitation rights for you!

Source: death-before-decaf

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A better essay on bullying than the one I'm about to write.

I’ve discussed this from time to time with Zach, but I really don’t remember bullying happening at all while I was in junior high and high school. In elementary school the only instances I can dredge up are the couple times I casually tormented my brother and his friends (he repaid me by driving me crazy at home, and then we would play legos together; ours is a relatively functional relationship). Zach theorizes that I don’t remember any bullying because it never happened to me, and he’s probably right—in junior high and for most of high school I appeared (and realistically, I was) bland and uninteresting. I wasn’t a particularly high achiever and I went out of my way not to call attention to myself. I didn’t adhere to the ideal image of attractiveness, but I did so in the same way that a lot of other girls did. I was mousy and plain and quiet, and nobody gave a shit.

My junior high and high school were, however, notorious for how well-mannered their student bodies were. No fights in the hallways; open campuses; not a lot of behavioral problems. Did bullying happen? Did I see it and forget about it? I hope that even as a teenager I had a sense of justice and at least wouldn’t turn away from that kind of behavior, but teenagers are self-centered and horrible and I was no exception, so maybe that’s what I did.

I suspect, however, that everything was much quieter (though perhaps not among the boys). I witnessed one thing that truly horrified me at the time and has stuck with me. In my ninth grade geography class I sat behind a crowd of the popular girls—bleached blond hair, lots of makeup, new clothes, you know the type—and I despised and envied them as I’m sure we all did at that age. One of them stood out for being particularly dumb, rich, and silly. I think her name was Ashley, but there were like 50 Ashleys at my school so who knows if I’m mixing her up with someone else or not.

Anyway, there we were, sitting in geography class, probably working on some kind of group project because we could talk but there was no class discussion going on or anything like that. Whatever else could be said about Ashley, she was always generically nice, and she was always smiling, but on this particular day one of her friends turned to her and started throwing everything I’d always secretly resented about Ashley back in her face as an insult. In retrospect it was silly stuff, and I think I knew that at the time, too: how can you blame someone for how wealthy their dad is? I guess we can all choose whether or not to wear make-up and new clothes and go to the salon with our moms, but really, what does all that matter? And yet there was that nameless friend, spitting all that out like it was the worst thing in the world—and as far as I could tell it hadn’t been provoked at all. All those awful feelings just appeared out of nowhere, and Ashley stared at her notebook and tried not to cry.

I didn’t do anything, of course, except watch and feel horrified. There are millions of different ways for people to be nasty to each other, but somewhere in my gut I remember the feeling of watching Ashley be verbally abused for something she had no control over, and it resurfaces when I encounter similar situations. Undeserved critique—I heard my friends do it a lot freshman year, and Diana was prone to it as well. But sane adults aren’t so obvious about letting their emotions spill over into mostly unrelated conversations. Which takes me back, in a roundabout way, to my last job.

It seems pretty clear to me that I would like doing pretty much anything, as long as I didn’t totally suck at it and I enjoyed the people that I worked with. And so, as I think about possible career trajectories, I wonder if I should go back to working with kids. Because when I think about all the things that frustrated me on a daily basis, none of them had really anything to do with the kids themselves. Chasing Tino around the classroom and arguing with Dylan and cleaning up a huge range of bodily fluids? Small stuff. It was things like poor planning and bad communication on the part of my fellow adults that made me dislike the job.

But what really drove the point home was the feeling of vague unease that started following me nearly everywhere a few months before the end. I try really hard not to participate in the kind of girl-on-girl hatred that happens a lot in our culture, but unfortunately, sometimes our culture raises us ladies to say subtly bitchy things instead of what we really mean, and isn’t that the worst? Ashley’s friend grows up into someone whose emotions are still getting mixed into the wrong places, but she doesn’t come right out with it anymore; all our jealousies and frustrations slip out in little cutting sentences here and there, and of course they don’t mean anything when you’re confronted with what you’ve said, but they actually do.

That kind of meanness is so much harder to recognize. Part of me was always uncomfortable, but another part of me was sure that this other person was mostly acting like someone who liked me and wanted to be my friend. In the end when I said goodbye I gave her a hug and forced out the right words, but I felt uncomfortable as she forced out some obviously overblown emotions and I still feel that way now. She showed me, in lots of different ways, that she was upset at me, and yet she would never admit it, and the few times I had the guts to confront her about it she called me cute for overreacting. And it really poisoned the whole place for me.

I wish I could convince everyone to look each other in the eye and say what we really mean, but I’m pretty sure we don’t know what we mean a lot of the time, and I’m not totally convinced that honesty is always the best policy anyway. Judgement, sincerity, self-examination: that’s a lot to ask for from people of all ages. And certainly too much to expect from most middle-schoolers. I’ve convinced myself that, like Ashley, it had very little, if anything, to do with me, and maybe I’m right. Hopefully I’ll have better luck at my next job, or I’ll learn something more about boundaries and letting it all role off my back. We’ll see.

2012-05-13

theclotheshorse:

steven alan f/w

Jonathan took us into a fancy boutique while we were strolling along South Congress in Austin, and I spent many minutes bemoaning the fact that I can’t afford to dress like a Steven Alan lookbook all the time. We have a long-running conversation going about how I think men’s clothing is boring, and he took issue with the fact that I love Steven Alan, which, when you get right down to it, is basically just men’s clothing with skirts and defined waists.

I have nothing to say to that except that the outfit on the bottom right is pretty much my ideal, and if that makes me boring, then so be it.

Source: theclotheshorse

2012-05-11

The wonderful lady behind Dear Sugar lives in Portland?!?

I feel like I should’ve done more to take advantage of the vast cosmic knowledge and awesomeness that was no doubt concentrated in that geographical area due to her presence there.

Also I just read this essay and it made me cry.