It’s about time people understood we need to talk to BOYS about rape. Stop telling girls and women to dress differently or hide themselves, teach boys to seek consent and stop raping.
Laurie’s right. It’s not all roses all the time. I went through tons of uncomfortable times and some downright miserable times in the workplace and it was all in service of building a better life and understanding what that better life looked like. I wouldn’t have known this 15 years ago without that slog but our better life includes less work and more family time, less nonsensical social obligations and more deep connections to the people who value what we value.
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom: Raising Really Good Hell for People Who Cannot. I will read anything by Dr. McMillan Cottom. It may not be comfortable but it will be intelligent and it will likely have a whole lot of truth. Most of all I do think she sounds like herself in her writing, as much as I can tell who herself is, and I admire that a lot in a writer.
The homeless situation in Los Angeles is getting worse and this part of it makes me extra peeved – who can keep up with that??: “From 2010 to 2018, median rental prices for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles increased 84 percent, while median wages during the same period only rose 11 percent.”
Not so strangers: I have never considered that I’d be someone’s not so stranger, but mine are mostly dogs. I have a hard time recognizing humans if I don’t have an actual relationship with them.
I remember when @operaqueenie launched @Tinselwear, I thought it was very cool but I definitely wasn’t the market for it.
We didn’t have a special name for it but we grew up with the kunik. I wonder if this Inuit parenting style works as well in isolation rather than in a community.
Some truths about being a digital nomad. I would have thought these were all common sense about working from the road! This might be because I’ve been in the position to do that for years and it’s still work. Not only that, it’s work in addition to all the logistics of travel even before the added complication of a family and kids and dogs. Nowadays the best possible option in my opinion is a safe home base that I love and am comfortable in and no central office that I have to report to.
Matt Lane steps up to the plate with a very logical point by point response to the nonsense published last week. This is a very long read but well worth the time.
Frogdancer on Chipping away at large tasks. I particularly resonated with this bit: “The research finds that the more writing kids are allowed to do, especially ‘low stakes’ writing, the better their skills get.” I was a TERRIBLE writer in high school, but blogging for years on my own helped me get out of the Embarrassingly Bad Zone to Passable.
Vicki Robin on her life and FIRE: “I don’t see financial independences as the ultimate goal. I see it as just a ticket to the greatest show on earth – the earth itself with all her beauty, complexity, critters and currently crises. The opportunity to ask the Mary Oliver questions: What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I adore the Blair Braverman + Quince Mountain team’s sharing of dog sledding on Twitter. They’re training for the Iditerod at Alpine Creek Lodge now. Long long ago, I was obsessed with dog sledding because dogs, of course, but didn’t have anything like today’s access to the spot from my own warm spot at home.
Go, Big Dog!
We love watching agility videos with JB, this is an excellent one!
This is about talking to a high schooler about college but OMGoodness the opening paragraphs about the years before then wrench my currently tender heart. And then I was very sad to see that this was the blogger’s last entry since May. I was so excited to find another substantive writer.
Brooklyn Bread’s zero waste wins. We’ve got to do the pancake thing. Financial infidelity. In our earliest years, I definitely struggled with trusting that PiC would be responsible with money, as I defined it, and wanted to hide money from him to save more. He didn’t do anything to earn my distrust, that it entirely stemmed from my fears built over years of being betrayed by my dad. I had grown to adulthood being lied to by adults about money and had a thick shell to protect myself – control everything and trust no one. Thankfully I realized that long term, that was a terrible solution to a trust problem engendered by someone else and I made myself work with him to make sure we were on the same page with the same goals so I didn’t have that impulse any longer. I have complete control over our money of course but I share all the information with him.
This measles outbreak is horrifying. Anti-vaxxers are terrible people.
Are You Selling Yourself Short Professionally?: As women, I think we tend to sell ourselves short when we talk about our work, not just because bragging is hard. (Though to be fair, it is.) It’s also because our culture doesn’t value the soft skills it takes to make a company withstand the test of time. And it doesn’t value support work.
Things I didn’t know about RMDs for inherited IRAs. No one in my family has enough money to leave an inheritance so this was all new information to me! Our generation is the first to invest and may be passing money down to the next generation. Though I wonder what’s really going to be around in 50 years, considering climate change.
I didn’t learn about Jane Elliott and her Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes experiment until adulthood but her work is hugely impactful. It makes me sad to know that not that much has changed since she started her work, though.
Luxe’s $6000 rental car debacle: I’ve always used my AmEx for anything that I might need to make claims for and that’s because I absolutely loathe working with Chase. They are the pits and they make everything, like this claims process, incredibly difficult.
By contrast, I have filed multiple claims with AmEx for various things (like that purchase protection claim) and think the most difficult claim I had with AmEx was one that I didn’t bother completing because I got the manufacturer to actually honor their warranty.
Life as an adjunct is intensely stressful – low pay, tons of work, scarce stable work.
I think we know the answer to this
“If you, as a White person, would like to be treated the way Black people are in this society, stand.” pic.twitter.com/t7WcwCahAt
Matt has been a welcome vocal feminist ally on Twitter and talks about how that’s impacted his own life here. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t ruined his life and it HAS generated respect for him, in contrast to what the misogynists claim.
A Dying Mother’s Letter to Her Daughters: “While I would have chosen to stay with you for much longer had the choice been mine, if you can learn from my death, if you accepted my challenge to be better people because of my death, then that would bring my spirit inordinate joy and peace.”
As a daughter who lost her mother too early, twice, first to dementia, and then later in truth, this letter broke me a bit. I wish over and over to know what she would have wanted to tell me, as an adult. We had just begun to get to know each other in my adulthood, and see each other as fully people outside of our relationship as mother and daughter, when her grip on her self slipped out of her hands.
Accidental hug at work – I have a fun anecdote of my own on this. Someone reached over to open the door for me but did it in an awkward way that triggered that “he’s coming in for a hug” recognition in my brain the same way it did for the OP and it was NOT accurate. I blurted out: what are you doing?? Because I don’t believe in keeping silent awkward to myself I guess. He was pretty confused.
Although the actor believes that he learnt a lesson from the ordeal after he eventually thought, “What the fuck are you doing?” I’d argue that there’s something even bigger to glean from all of this. Whether we like to admit it or not, racism has and will continue to have a far deeper psychological impact on society than many of us realise.”
