Middle class underachiever
RSS1. Spit it into her voice-mail, a little slurred and sounding like the shot whiskey you downed for courage. Feel as ashamed as you do walking into work in last night’s clothes. Wake up cringing for days, waiting for her to mention it.
2. Sigh it into her mouth, wedged in between teeth and tongues. Don’t even let your lips move when you say it, ever so lightly, into the air. Maybe it was just an exhalation of ecstasy.
3. Buy her flowers. Buy her chocolate. Buy her a teddy bear, because that’s what every romantic comedy has taught you. Take her out to a nice restaurant where neither of you feel comfortable and spend the whole night clearing your throat and tugging at your tie. Feel like your actions are more suited to a proposal than the simple confession of something you’ve always known.
4. Whisper it into her hair in the middle of the night, after you’ve counted the space between her breaths and are certain she’s asleep. Shut your eyes quickly when she shifts toward you in askance. Maybe you were just sleep whispering.
5. Blurt it out in the middle of an impromptu dance party in the kitchen, as clumsy as your two left feet. When time seems to freeze, hastily tack on “in that shirt” or “when you make your award-winning meatballs” or, if you are feeling particularly brave, “when we do this.” Resume dancing and pretend you don’t feel her eyes on you the rest of the night.
6. Write her a letter in which the amount of circumnavigating and angst could rival Mr. Darcy’s. Debate where to leave it all day – on her pillow? In her coat pocket? Throw it away in frustration, conveniently leaving it face up in the trashcan, her name scrawled on the front in your sloppy handwriting. Let her wonder if you meant it.
7. Wait until something terrible has happened and you can’t not tell her anymore. Wait until she almost gets hit by a car crossing Wabash against the light and after you are done cursing at the shit-for-brains cab drivers in this city, realize you are actually just terrified of living without her. Tell her with your hands shaking.
8. Say it deliberately, your tongue a springboard for every syllable. Over coffee, brushing your teeth side-by-side, as you turn off the light to go to sleep – it doesn’t matter where. Do not adorn it with extra words like “I think” or “I might.” Do not sigh heavily as if admitting it were a burden instead of the most joyous thing you’ve ever done. Look her in the eyes and pray, heart thumping wildly, that she will turn to you and say, “I love you too.”
- R. McKinley, “8 Ways To Say I Love You“ (via pale-afternoon)
(Source: obdormio)
(Source: anythingthatmoves)
Think dehumanizing women in the public sphere, portraying them as sex objects and victims of men and simply vessels to be fucked or abused or turned into a great big joke is completely harmless? Tell it to the office worker whose boss referred to her by asking a colleague “if big tits has come in yet”. Tell it to the woman who was asked by her boss in front of 30 colleagues “If I ‘wax my crack’”. Tell it to the girl of 10 who was walking home from school when “two older boys said ‘show us your tits’”. Tell it to the child of 13 who didn’t even understand when two men in a white van asked her if she had “a tight pussy”. Tell it to the woman who reported being groped by strangers “at least once a week and often much more, regardless of what I wear, where I am, how I behave.” Tell it to the woman who declined to talk to a group of men and was pursued down the street by them, shouting “rape!” Tell it to schoolgirl who was “beaten by her boyfriend” and whose “friends asked her if she was going to stay with him until after the prom so she’d have a date”.
- Laura Bates, in an article titled The 12 Days of Misogyny, explaining why your hilarious jokes about women actually do matter. (via theharmattan)
Poor people used to live in slums. Now the ‘economically disadvantaged’ occupy ‘substandard housing’ in the inner-cities. And a lot of them are broke. They don’t have ‘negative cash-flow’, they’re broke. Because many of them were fired. In other words, management wanted to ‘curtail redundancies in the human resources area’, and so many workers are no longer ‘viable members of the workforce’.
Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.
The CIA doesn’t kill anybody, they ‘neutralize’ people, or they ‘depopulate an area’. The government doesn’t lie, it engages in ‘disinformation’. The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something called ‘sunshine units’. Israeli murderers are called commandos, Arab commandos are called terrorists. The Contra killers were known as ‘freedom fighters’. Well if crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?
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George Carlin, Euphemistic Language (via kabinessence)
Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.
Read that again. And again. And again.
(via mehreenkasana)
Ayo, if you follow anyone on Twitter, you should follow @maleprivilege
edit: I didn’t expect this post to blow up; I should probably add that this is not my twitter account and I can take no credit for it
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.
- ~Fred Rogers (via adventuresinlearning)
(Source: furples)
(25# Bolivia) Julieta Paredes: Why she kicks ass
Whenever we’ve gone out to do graffiti, we have been
afraid, and we’re always afraid. But we’ve thought about our right to do it… Coca-Cola pays and paints, Repsol pays and paints, so why can’t we paint without paying? The problem isn’t that the walls are painted, the problem is that it’s not paid for. If we must pay for public space, then it’s a big contradiction in democracy. What’s public and what’s private? Streets are public space, the whole city’s courtyard, not a jail hallway, where you go from the jail of your house to the jail of your office job… if it’s public, then everybody can use it. But if you pay for public space it becomes private. Public space doesn’t exist. Let’s start this discussion.What’s dirty? What’s clean? “You’re making my walls dirty!” Oh, so when Coca-Cola contracts a painter, it doesn’t make the wall dirty? That’s an
aesthetic concept. It seems to me that it has made the wall dirty in a disgusting way. And what we have done, our graffiti, that’s beautiful.
- She is an Aymara anti-patriarchal feminist activist, writer, singer, author and poet, and has been involved in feminist training with indigenous and working class women throughout Bolivia and in other parts of Latin America.
- She is also a communitarian lesbian feminist, co-founder of Mujeres Creando (Women Creating) and the Community of women creating community as well as the Communitarian Feminist Assembly.
- Mujeres Creando publishes Mujer Pública (Eng: Public Woman), produces a weekly radio show, and maintains a cultural café named Carcajada (Eng: Laughter). Julieta described Mujeres Creando as “a ‘craziness’ started by three women (Julieta Paredes, María Galindo and Mónica Mendoza) from the arrogant, homophobic and totalitarian Left of Bolivia during the 1980s, where heterosexuality was still the model and feminism was understood to be divisive.” Diversity is fundamental for Mujeres Creando, which is made up of lesbians and heterosexuals, whites and indigenous women, young and old women, divorced and married women, women from the country and from the city.
- Mujeres Creando gained international attention due to their involvement in the 2001 occupation of the Bolivian Banking Supervisory Agency on behalf of Deudora, an organization of those indebted to microcredit institutions. The occupants, armed with dynamite and molotov cocktails, demanded total debt forgiveness and achieved some limited success. Julieta Ojeda, a member of Mujeres Creando, explains that “in reality the financial institutions were committing usury and extortion, cheating people and exploiting their ignorance, making them sign contracts that they didn’t understand.” Mujeres Creando has denied that members directly participated in the occupation.
- Members of Mujeres Creando and supporters involved in the production of an educational film dealing with violence in relation to women’s human rights were beaten by La Paz police. The police violence was condemned by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
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