Just a little (link) love: Welcoming 2019 edition
January 3, 2019
I would LOVE to do a 100 best pens test.
Tanja: Ambition Doesn’t (Have to) End at Retirement
I’m A Man And It Took Me Years To Recognize I Had Been Sexually Assaulted: In our ongoing and expanding dialogue on the nature of sexual assault, I only hope that we continue to encourage men to feel safe in recognizing their experiences with it. Vulnerability isn’t weakness and victimhood need not be a badge of shame
This made me hoot with laughter: I Wore JNCO Jeans for Seven Days to Find Myself
Company Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
“Palessi” – a clever little stunt by Payless. The results don’t really surprise me.
What a lovely story about this writer’s dad’s friendship with Charles Barkley.
The trouble with girls: obstacles to women’s success in medicine and research—an essay by Laurie Garrett: The German Cancer Research Center has taken perhaps the biggest step: this year it hid the identities of all authors who applied to speak at its conference, leaving only one basis for judging entries: the merit of the work. The result? A whopping 82% of invited speakers at the October gathering were women.
An interview with Richard Grant, on his abusive alcoholic father. I find this view a bit hard to reconcile: Of course, like he always was, he either had blacked out or had no memory of what he’d done the night before, and would sign a check and push it across the breakfast table and be full of remorse and beg for forgiveness and all of that.
I absolutely loved and adored him, because he was a very, very funny, sharp-witted man and very provocative in his conversations. He was very well-read and all of those things. So reconciling that with this person that he turned into — I think that it’s a measure of how much a child loves a parent. That even though [I had] suffered those things, I always very, very clearly understood that who he became when he was drunk was not who he was. To me, that was the monster, and it wasn’t my father who I loved.
A 100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor on How Books Save Lives: “There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.”
May 2019 be the year that we stop entertaining the thoughts and words of Nazis and reclaim our humanity. Happy New Year!
I LOVED that Palessi campaign. Genius! I bought a pari of cheap-ish Payless boots for the winter here in Boise and they are awesome! Right now I’m having trouble reconciling some things my mom is saying/doing and a lot has to do with her drinking. It’s always so hard, even as an adult who is pretty far removed from the situation.
Palessi boots – I’d love to hear how they do in the winter out there!
Your mom – oh that’s hard. Even if you’re far away, that’s still really tough.
I loved reading that Charles Barkley story, thanks for the link. I really liked how the dad and Barkley really bonded together because of the stories they shared about their kids. It really shows that both of them are really proud of their kids and how much they cared about it by expressing it with each other.
I loved that point too, as well as the fact that Barkley clearly appreciated a fan who treated him like a human as much as Wang enjoyed sharing interesting tidbits with someone he admired.
If you were to listen to my husband, especially in the first years that we were dating, you’d think that his deceased father was a great guy– engaged, funny, taught him lots of things. I certainly thought his dad sounded like a much better person than my own mostly-absentee father. My husband didn’t say anything about the abuse until after we were engaged, and he’s only said anything about it a handful of times. I can see the effects running through his life, though, now that I know about it. I think that those stories he told in the first years were about the parts of his dad that he wished were the whole. And I think that the parts that he told stories about were a lot smaller than he made them sound. I don’t think the good offset the bad by any means. I think his mental/emotional life even now would be a lot healthier if his dad had been out of the picture throughout his childhood.
I think that a child’s love for an abusive parent can make things really complicated. The dissonance between Grant’s father’s worst behavior and Grant wanting to hold onto loving his non-drunk dad… it doesn’t surprise me. That early programming can be hard to overcome, especially when the person doesn’t want to see the badness of their parent as the truth of who their parent actually was.
It’s very true – that dissonance is incredibly hard to reconcile in any loved one, and much more complicated when it’s a child to a parent. You want them to be the hero of your stories like you once believed they were. You want them to be all the good things you remembered about them, all the time, not just some of the time.