What Happens Once You Kill Yourself? Because I'm Ready To Go.

okay, so I’ve seen multiple posts just today that were basically like “haha who ever said adulthood was having your life together and everything figured out, I’m 28 and real life is drowning me as much as it ever was”

and like…the answer to that is…adults. adults said that. generation after generation, the narrative from adults to young people has been, “you are a dumb kid who doesn’t know the world or yourself but I am a Grownup with Life Experience™, and that’s why you’re supposed to do what I tell you, that’s why I don’t need to listen to your thoughts and feelings, that’s why society imagines me as a full human being and you as something that’s going to grow into a full human being.”

there’s a great book all about this that I’ve had a lot of my students read - Childhood and Society, by a sociologist named Nick Lee. Lee argues that the child/adult binary is a socially constructed one, based, like any other such binary, on an imagined idea of clearly oppositional characteristics. specifically, he says that children are imagined as incomplete, unstable (as in their lives and experiences are constantly changing, not as in mentally unstable), and dependent, and adults as complete, stable, and independent. those characteristics don’t match up to reality if you think about them too hard for even a moment - no one is truly independent, adults’ lives aren’t stable, what does judging a human being’s “completeness” even mean - but it doesn’t matter, because our culture is so obsessed with believing in them.

and adults being forced to pretend they’re complete and independent and living stable lives is one of the toxic ways all this plays on people of all ages.

I really hope that seeing my generation talk like this - just flat-out admit that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing any better than we did ten years ago - means we have the potential to break this cycle. but honestly, entering my 30s and having seen so many people my age turn into those adults who act like they have life so well figured out compared to those dumb kids, it doesn’t seem likely. we might be a little better than we could’ve been, but too many of us are going down that tired old road of transitioning from talking about how much smarter we are than our parents to talking about how much smarter we are than our kids, just like every generation does when it hits this age.

I guess what I’m saying is, please, young 20-somethings of today, be better ten years from now than we are.

Honestly the best piece of advice I can give to younger girls trying to figure life out is to completely ignore men. I’m not being quirky or cute when I say that, I mean it seriously. Ignore men’s judgments of you, ignore their insincere compliments, ignore their half-assed romance. Focus on developing yourself. Practice your art, play sports, do theater, volunteer, spend time with your friends, but do not put substantial effort into pleasing men. They’ll be there for you to pursue when the time comes and if you want to. But nothing will waste your youth more than fighting for male acceptance.

A Tasting Menu of Female Representation:

The Bechdel:

two or more women talking to each other about something other than a man

The Mako Mori:

at least one female character with her own narrative arc that is not about supporting a man’s story

The Sexy Lamp:

a female character that cannot be removed from the plot and replaced with a sexy lamp without destroying the story.

Chef’s Specials:

The Anti-Freeze:

no woman assaulted, injured or killed to further the story of another character.

The “Strength is Relative”:

complex women defined by solid characterization rather than a handful of underdeveloped masculine-coded stereotypes.

if you dont have me on facebook you are probably not missing out on any posts but the comment section is important too lmao

ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.  

i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy. 

Rape Escape

Easy and very effective

Requires nothing but your body

Includes attack

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

If you are so committed to being perfectly lawful that you cannot see the value of breaking a law to defend yourself or others, you’re not good, you’re obedient.

Accommodating someone’s disability isn’t special treatment

A lot of pets will ignore you, but only a cat will follow you from room to room and check your lines of vision to make absolutely certain that you can see them ignoring you.