#whereas I know full well I can bullshit my way through an essay and make it sound good

[leejeann]

If you want an example of my brain likes to seemingly go against the grain sometimes: I have a final exam later and I feel significantly more confident about the essay question (no idea what the question is yet) than I do the multiple choice section lol

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

I Need to Talk About “Problematic Faves” within TWDG [3/?]

Character design, being drawn towards characters we find visually attractive, and how big of a role in plays in our feelings towards them.

“He's a murderer but like.... a cute murderer, y’know?”

This goes hand in hand with the whole first impressions thing we’re talking about, but rather than talking about the character’s traits, dialogue, history, and overall character, we’re talking about physical appearance.

This is something I want to touch on even though I already know the answer to it. It’s just a food for thought sort of idea that I wanted to explore given how much we talk about our favorite characters appearances while discussing them with one another.

Let’s face it: We’re all a little shallow at some point in our lives.

“Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” is bullshit. I pick up that book in the first place because it’s pretty and has sprayed edges. The only reason I put it back it is because I can’t find an actual summary of the book because publishers think we want to read a bunch of “Best book of da year!” by Who The Fuck Cares written all over the place rather than an actual summary...

....What was my point?

Oh, right, character design.

When we’re first introduced to a character, we immediately make a judgement of them based off their looks.That’s not to say that our opinions remain the same based on our first impressions after only looking at them, but it’s something we do initially. 

Game developers, artists, writers, and directors will usually strive to make their characters as visually appealing to us as possible because that’s what makes us go “ohhh they pretty *picks thing up.*” 

There are issues that develop from this, such as unrealistic expectations of what true beauty is and how it actually affects the audience. After taking in so much of this content, I started to wonder if it had any affect on why we have “Problematic Faves” and if there IS something linked within the way we view them as physically attractive. 

While I believe that appearance is an important factor in character development and is what draws us to them, it’s also a bit more complicated than that.

One of the many things I adore about the final season is it’s character design for all the students at Ericson. All of the Ericson kiddos have their own unique looks and manners of which they hold themselves.

Sure we’ve got Louis and Violet, who we all gush about all the time on how beautiful they are. How many times have we talked about Louis’ freckles or Violet’s eyes or just how gosh darn pretty we think they are while incorporating it into writing our fanfics or headcanons or creating out artworks of them?

But what’s great is that they aren’t all “conveniently attractive” or someone a shallow Hollywood director would look at one time and say “there’s our star!”

Willy is a fan favorite among many in our community. What I love about his design is his teeth. He’s a kid growing up in the apocalypse without proper dental care. His teeth are crooked, there are gaps between them, and he’s even missing some. If that same Hollywood director were to look at him, they’d either slap some extreme braces on him or cast him as a tree troll. 

But not everyone has those perfectly straight pearly whites. Some of us have crooked teeth, or we’ve had painful braces to try and straighten them, or we’ve lost or broken a tooth at some point. You know how refreshing it is to see a character as likable as Willy show up with that smile of his while still being considered a fan favorite? 

Speaking of refreshing, what about Ruby? Everyone loves Ruby. She’s not tall and thin, she’s short and thicker. 

I remember seeing nasty posts questioning why someone like Aasim would have any interest in her because of the way she’s built, and that that pisses me off. 

It’s so damn great to see someone like Ruby portrayed the way she is in this game. As someone who IS more on the shorter and heavier side, it’s hard to find a character like this who doesn’t suddenly become slim therefore “prettier” over the course of the story or who isn’t a terrible or whose weight and build is all their character is. The last movie I watched that featured a plus size main character was that god awful Sierra Burgess movie on Netflix and that character made me want to punch things. 

All I can say is thank god for Ruby.

Speaking of which, how about Omar? He’s short and stocky, too, but y’know what? We made this dude a GOD. What does that tell you?

These are examples using more minor characters that fall into that non-”Problematic Fave” tier, but what about our characters that do?

I used to have a strong theory that some characters got more love and attention JUST because they’re more attractive to the audience, even if their character is boring, holds little to no plot relevance, or is an “evil” being beyond forgiveness.  

It’s a theory that I believe still holds some truth, though I think that truth lies more with the younger fans, or those who aren’t quite as mature. 

As someone who has worked around elementary school children, as well as 13-14 year olds, I think I can safely make the assumption that they tend to take things at face value a good chunk of the time.

Pretty person = Good!

Not pretty person = Bad!

That sort of deal. 

So, the question I pose is:

Does a character’s level of attractiveness have an effect on our willingness to forgive some of their more problematic behaviors?

I’m sure most of you read that and said “Uh, is this a trick question? No?”

When you think about the kinds of stories that we’re always told about the beautiful princesses who are pure and good and the ugly stepmothers who are evil and bad, it’s not hard to see why the younger ones would see things as more black and white rather than a shade of gray. 

If the pretty princess poisons her “evil” stepmother during their morning tea, how easily do we forgive her just because we’re told that she’s a pure, pretty princess? We know poisoning someone is bad, but... if the stepmother was ugly and evil, then the princess must have had a reason for doing this, right? So... it’s okay... right?

Is the princess justified in her actions, even if the stepmother wasn’t doing anything more than drinking her morning tea?

I look at that and say, “No,” whereas a much younger person might say, “Yeah. The stepmother was evil.” 

Young children are fascinating to talk to, by the way. They’re sponges who absorb knowledge like you wouldn’t believe but somehow they still take everything at that face value and believe whatever the “good” person says in a story until you help them see the bigger picture. That’s why they tend to be more susceptible to falling for twists. 

But once you explain to them the more complicated elements of the princess and the stepmother, they’re intelligent enough to grasp that the princess is wrong. 

I believe once we grow older and open ourselves up to more complex stories full of gray characters, learning about them through experience, we start to see that beauty isn’t just in the eye in the beholder, but also that it doesn’t mean shit at the end of the day. 

You can have the most beautiful person in the world be your main character, but if that beautiful person drowns a bag full of kittens, suddenly they aren’t so attractive, now are they?

One of a kid’s favorite example of a good-looking antagonist is Hans from Frozen. 

While I think the whole “he was actually evil the whole time haha we fooled you” thing in that movie is garbage, I give it credit for being the first exposure of this concept to young kids, sending them down a path of looking at different characters they see in a new light. 

We like characters who are attractive because, well, they’re attractive. But we’re  also mature enough to know that their attractiveness isn’t solely based on their appearance. It’s merely the seed that only grows with development, personality, and an arc. It only makes up a small portion of why we like a character in the first place. We know that just because someone is good-looking, it doesn’t justify their actions. 

But for those who are still growing out of those black and while fairy tales and just starting to expand their views of different characters while learning that looks can be deceiving, are they more likely to forgive a character or not fully understand that they’re in the wrong just because they’re visually pleasing? 

Another example outside of TWDG that I can give you is Nathan Prescott from the game Life is Strange. I’ve mentioned this game several times before, and even wrote a whole segment on it in my Louis and Violet essay from a while back. 

When I was a young lass, I picked up this game and really liked it. I wasn’t as into it as I am TWDG, but I liked it enough to play every episode as it came out and then check the tag to see what everyone thought. 

While browsing this tag, I noticed that a lot of the fan base seemed young. Makes sense, it IS a game starring teens set in an academy setting and I was young, too. 

But with that, one thing that always bothered me was how a number of young people talked about Nathan. 

Nathan who, if you haven’t played the game, is one of the antagonists. They would gush about this kid, seeming to make up excuses for the appalling things he did and it felt very tied to his looks. 

I’m sorry to any Life is Strange fans who might’ve been one of these young fans... but that really is the impression I got at the time.

Maybe I just didn’t get the hype about this dude who drugged girls so he could pose and take pictures of them because of his weirdly under-explained relationship with the surprise villain of the story, but he doesn’t seem like the type of guy to get all “Poor, precious, beautiful baby boi didn’t deserve this !” about. 

Then again, if writing this has taught me anything, I might have missed something by not being involved with that fandom, but what I gathered was that he didn’t become the redeemable character they all thought he would be and they didn’t like that, so it becomes harder to try and justify the things he did because he didn’t end up being good in the end even though they all thought he would be. I guess. 

But, gathering that a lot of them were so young and going off the content I predominately saw... I don’t know. It didn’t ever feel right. I had suspicions that lead to this theory. That’s what I’m saying. 

This can apply to other fandoms, too, where a group of people will take a character/person they find attractive and gush about how pretty they are rather than anything else that makes them interesting. Not everyone, of course, but I get the feeling you all know what I mean and have come across something like it before. I’m just trying to explain it. 

Or maybe it is just me and you have no idea what I’m talking about. 

Either way. 

Returning back to our “Problematic Faves,” lets ask this question about them in particular. 

How much of David’s attractiveness plays into my love of him? 

I mean, he’s not a bad looking dude. In fact, I dare say that the Garcia brothers are both very attractive guys. I give ‘em both a 10/10. 

But does that actually aid in my actual feelings towards him at all? 

What about the others we’ve talked about so far?

I don’t see many people talking about how pretty they think Kenny is... though his mustache IS majestic and that’s something we all agree on.

And Lilly’s okay. I guess. 

Nate could be a good-looking dude if he’d just put his crazy eyes away.

I believe our best bet it in getting a more clear answer to this question would to be take a quick look back at Minerva.

Remember how I said Minerva was so hyped up based on a two second appearance in the ep3 trailer? Granted, we did have more than JUST her appearance to form this hype around.... but admit it, a huge part of the hype was how good she looked.

She looked awesome.

Hell, just seeing her had me excited to see what she would do in ep3, even though I had the feeling she wouldn’t be an ally.

I used to have a hard time wrapping my head around why so many people love her as much as they do, and I previously thought it was based a lot on her appearance.

Is it ignorant and shallow of me to think y’all loved her based solely on her looks?

Probably. Yes. Yes, it was.

Now that I’ve looked into this further, I see that there’s more to the love and interest surrounding her, but..... it’s kind of what my first thought was? In the beginning? 

Either way, it’s still an interesting idea to consider when thinking about a character you love.

With that said, what if we apply this question to a character who is less of a “Problematic Fave” and more of my “God Tier Fave.”

You all know that Louis is my favorite character across ALL the games. My love for him is vibrant, but one of the many things I love about him IS his character design. He’s a visually appealing guy, and his personality, different traits, dialogue, flaws, and character arc only build onto the attractiveness of his character.

If Louis didn’t look like this, would I still love him?

Assuming that everything else about him is the same, then yeah. 

What if the developers went with the concept art of him that looked like a odd Harry Styles knockoff? Would I still love him?

Again, I want to say that I would, assuming that everything else about him be the same. But going with that certain concept art does take away an important aspect of his character and his relationship to Clementine.

Many of you have told me how much you appreciate the fact that Clementine and Louis represent a sweet, healthy black couple. That’s important to all of us. If we went with the first concept art, then that’s something we’d lose. Would we still ship clouis? Probably, but again, that important element and representation is lost and that would affect our overall opinion of it, even if just a bit.

But, what if Louis looked exactly as he does now, but were to do something awful? Would I still love him?

Well, my first instinct is to say, “Yes.”

In ep3, Louis tells us that he purposely broke up his parents marriage because his father wouldn’t let him take singing lessons. He broke into his father’s credit cards and made it look like he had a mistress, then made sure his mother knew about it. He did this over the course of a year. Then, when the divorce was finalized, he threw his father’s words back in his face: “You get to be happy or you get to be rich. You can’t be both.”

Knowing this, I still love Louis.

What he did was awful, but the reason I don’t hate him or even like him any less is because of how he acted while telling us. You can feel the guilt and remorse in his voice, the shame that he was once a person who thought that was okay to do.

He did that a long time ago, he learned from this terrible mistake he made, went as far as to punish himself by taking on a irresponsible, piano-playing jokester persona who anyone rarely ever took seriously. Louis changed for the better and he’s still a likable, relatable, lovably character despite this.

But in order to dig a little deeper into this idea of attractiveness and just how far we’ll go to try and justify a character based solely on their looks, I then thought:

 “Okay, then consider this: What if Louis and Minerva switched places with him doing all those things she did that made me dislike her? Would I still love him?”

And things got a little complicated.

Because my immediate first thought was “Yes.”

That shocked the hell out of me.

Why the fuck would I be okay with LOUIS acting the way Minerva did, but not MINERVA herself? That makes no sense.

Louis betraying us on the boat by knocking Clementine out and locking her in the cell isn’t suddenly okay because it’s LOUIS.

Louis showing up on the bridge to try and murder Tenn isn’t suddenly okay because it’s him and not MINERVA.

The reality is this: If Louis and Minerva traded places, I wouldn’t love Louis. I don’t care how attractive his character design is, I would feel the same way about him that I feel about Minerva. I love Louis for who he is within the context of the canon game, but if Louis traded places with Minerva, he wouldn’t be that Louis that I love.

The problem with asking myself this is I know Louis’ character and I want to think the best of him. I’m attached to him. I don’t want to imagine him doing anything that horrible because I know that would be an breaking of his character. His appearance has nothing to do with it. 

But my first instinct was to side with him. 

That’s when it all came together.

A character’s appearance is important in the first impression, but our perception of that character’s attractiveness is only elevated or lowered based on the important things: personality, backstory, relationships, flaws, fears, regrets, change, and complete character arc. 

So how does this apply to my love for David?

Well, it eliminates any possibility that I only like David just because he’s pretty.

Perhaps I’m not so shallow after all.

Yeah, that’s the conclusion of this segment: something I already knew. But, I felt it was a concept that could spark some thought about what attractiveness really means while debunking any idiots who may grasp at straws with the insult of, “You only like [blank] and excuse their toxicity because you think they’re hot!”

... except the Life is Strange community might come after me for implying a nicer version of that towards one of the antagonists... but hopefully you understand the point I was attempting to make in bringing that up as an example.

I like David’s design, but him being an attractive dude isn’t why I like him. If anything, his looks being appealing to my eye is at the end of my long, complicated list of why I like him.

Conclusion:

Looks matter initially, and our perception of a character’s attractiveness is either elevated or lowered based on the more important qualities of their character, problematic or otherwise.

[continued in 4/?]

[what-is-your-plan-today]

Stark Spangled Banner One Shot: A Snack

Summary: Katie’s hungry…and there’s only one snack she’s pining for.

Warnings: Language!! Smut (NSFW)

Pairings: Steve Rogers x OFC Katie Rogers (nee Stark)

Square filled: Mutual Pining for @avengersbingo​

A/N:  This is set in the Stark Spangled Banner Universe, taking place in late 2024. You don’t have to read that full series to enjoy this but feel free to if it grabs your attention. To all my regular SSB readers, as a treat I’ve included the messages referred to at the bottom for a bit of fun too!

Steve grabbed his thermos full of coffee before he headed out to the hallway, meeting Katie at the bottom of the stairs with a fully dressed and clean Jamie in front of her, freshly changed Aurora on her hip.

“You ready son?” he looked at Jamie.

“Just need my jacket.” he nodded.

“It’s on the peg by the door.” Katie said, giving Steve a peck on the lips.

“Love you.” he smiled at her, before he kissed Rori’s head and she grinned at him.

“You too, have a good day.” Katie smiled, as she waved them both out of the door.

The Rogers’ household routine in the mornings always seemed to go the same. Family breakfast, change the kids, wave Steve and Jamie off…but no matter what time they got up in the morning it always seemed to be a rush. And she knew it was going to get even worse when she went back to work in a couple of months. But, as she walked into the kitchen and placed Rori in her bouncer seat with a teething ring, she looked around and realised she wouldn’t have it any other way.

As she tidied and set another pot of coffee going she spotted Steve’s wallet on the side she rolled her eyes and fired him a quick message telling him he had forgotten it.  His response was almost instantaneous and she smiled, arranging to drop it in to him at lunchtime.

Once she was done she settled at the table and logged into her emails, smiling as she had one from Emmy asking her to read over one of her essays before submission. She had an agreement with the teenager, that she would proof read and highlight areas where there were errors or parts which could be improved but would point blank refuse to provide either corrections or detailed suggestions as she was keen that the work was Emmy’s own.  Not that she needed much help, their eldest was a brainbox and currently flying high in her first Semester at Harvard.

And, according to her email, was coming home this weekend for the first time in 4 weeks.

Which in Katie’s opinion called for a family dinner. So she set about organising it, except the group chat kind of went a bit haywire when Emmy flipped out, sending a copy of a photo she’d seen of Steve that had been taken that morning which was trending on twitter.

Katie snorted at Emmy’s disgust but then her attention diverted fully to the photo of Steve. It must have been taken by one of his students earlier that day, and was apparently posted on twitter accompanied with the tag line of “My tutor is a snack”

Katie had to laugh because as much as she wasn't sure that it was appropriate for students to be taking photos if their tutors on such a way, she couldn't deny that her husband was a snack. In fact, he was more like a 4 course fucking meal in the photo in question. He was sat in a chair, reading a paper. It was ridiculously innocuous, but there was something about it that set every nerve in Katie’s body on edge. His jaw line, his hands, his wrists…holy hell he was channelling some big Daddy Vibes.

She was squirming all morning after seeing that photo. By the time she met Steve for lunch she was ready to jump his bones but there wasn’t really much opportunity to do that in the public arena of the coffee shop.

“Hey baby doll.” Steve smiled as he spotted Katie pushing Rori’s buggy through the door, standing up to greet her, hand on the glass pane to keep the door open slightly.

“Hi handsome.” she smiled, accepting the kiss he dropped to her cheek before he turned his attention to Rori, picking her up out of the pram. She giggled and waved her arms and legs, grabbing at his beard. He sat back down on the leather sofa, Katie dropping his wallet onto the low table in front of them.

“Thanks.” he said “Luckily I had a twenty in my pocket or I’d have been severely caffeine deprived this morning.”

He looked up as the waiter came over and they placed their orders for a couple of paninis and coffees before Katie sat back, nestling into the space under his arm which was resting across the back of the sofa.

Katie smirked “Had a good morning Daddy?” “Stop it.” he said in a low voice, shooting her a look as he bounced Rori on his knee. She flashed him an innocent one of her own back and he rolled his eyes before she laughed.

“I’m sorry but…it really is a damned good photo…” she fished out her phone “And Emmy was right. Steve Rogers Snack is trending.” Steve groaned. “I know, I’ve been getting screenshots off Sam all morning, well I was until I blocked him as well.”

“As well?” she frowned “You mean you actually did block Bucky?”

“He sent me a clown picture.” Steve shuddered “So yeah. I did. I’ll unblock em later. Maybe” he said, waving his hand.

Katie shook her head, watching him for a moment as he concentrated on Rori who was now chewing at her hand. Reaching into the changing bag, Katie handed over a teething ring which he took and passed over with a smile, Rori making some form of babble back as she shoved it in her mouth eagerly.

“She’s looking more like you each day.” he said, smiling and looking back at Katie.

“You think?” Katie asked, looking at her daughter.

Steve nodded. And he meant it. Whereas Jamie was a carbon copy of him, he felt that Aurora was in turn going to be the double of her mother. Her eyes were almost completely green now, and her hair was dark too. She had her mother’s nose and face shape although Katie insisted the cheekbones were definitely from the Rogers’ side, not that Steve could see it. “She’s beautiful.”

“Charmer.” Katie smiled

“Only for you.” he shot back, winking.

****

Seeing Steve at Lunchtime had done nothing to stop or help with Katie’s spiking libido. It really was ridiculous how much of effect a fucking photograph taken on the sly was having on her. She’d been pining for him all day long. In fact, the last time she’d felt this desperate for him had been before they’d even started dating. At the time where they’d both been dodging round the feelings they had for one another for months.

“Mutual pining.” Natasha said wisely as Katie let out a groan, sitting down at her desk.

“No one is pining…” she said, looking at her.

“Bullshit.” Natasha shook her head “If that’s the case then why does he keep refusing to ask any of the girls I suggest out on dates…” “Because he doesn’t want to date.” “And why do you both look at each other like there’s no one else in the room?” “You’re imagining things.” Katie sighed. “Maybe.” Natasha said “But I’m a highly trained Spy with astutely honed senses…so I doubt it. The pair of you are clearly mad about one another, just too stupid and stubborn and afraid to do anything about it.”

Katie ignored her and glanced over at where Steve was stood talking to Rumlow, leaning over a table as they glanced at some sort of map. Steve looked ridiculously good in his stealth suit bottoms, the compression shirt highlighting every single ripple of muscle he possessed, his strong jaw line was twitching as he contemplated what the Strike Leader was saying. It set something off in her lower belly, as it always did, a raw desire. Frankly, if she thought she could get away with it, she’d jump his bones in a second…but there was no way he felt the same, Natasha was wrong.

Steve was aware of her eyes on him, so he didn’t look around. He didn’t trust himself to. The suit was tight enough as it was without a certain extra bulge in the trouser department adding to the issue. One look into her eyes at the moment was enough to send him off like a horny teenage kid. It was ridiculous…not to mention frustrating that he was chasing something he could never have. There was no way she felt the same, despite what Natasha told him.

“Momma!” Jamie called as the door opened. Rori let out a shriek at the sound of her brother’s voice and grinned as he ran into the room.

“Hey baby, did you have a good day?” she asked, looking up from where she was sat on the rug playing with their youngest, and he nodded.

“Yeah but tomorrow is gonna be even better as it’s soccer day!” he grinned. Katie smiled, Jamie hadn’t been at school for very long but he already loved soccer and baseball practice. She ruffled his hair and glanced up at Steve who was leaning in the doorway, still in that fucking jacket…

Steve spotted the look on his wife’s face straight away. He knew it well enough. A thirst, a lust, desire…

“Jamie, why don’t you take your bag upstairs and get changed?” Steve tore his eyes off Katie’s to look at his son.

“Can I play on my computer?” he asked hopefully.

“Just until dinner.” Katie said, looking at him.

He gave a triumphant yell and stood up, bounding out of the room.

“Speaking of dinner I better start it.” Katie said, standing up. “You ok to watch her?”

“Course I am.” Steve chuckled “She’s my daughter.”

“Just checking.” she said, brushing past him in the doorway. She stopped and glanced at him, her hands running up the lapels of his jacket and he gave a smirk.

“You really like this jacket huh?”

“Almost as much as I liked the stealth suit.” she agreed before she looked him up and down, making no attempt to disguise the fact she was as she bit her lip and headed off up the hallway.

Steve waited until she had gone and let out a soft groan. Since her dirty text earlier he’d had a semi-hard on all fucking day. And now, after that little display he was turned on even more.  Taking a deep breath he knelt down on the floor and tickled Rori’s tummy where she was grabbing at the baby gym she was underneath. He could hear Katie gently humming and after another minute or two he picked Rori up and carried her through to the kitchen, placing her down in the playpen in the corner of the room.

Without a word he crossed over to where Katie was stood reaching into the cupboard for something. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her back towards him, his lips gently skating up her neck.

“This what you want?” he asked softly and she gave a grin, tilting her head to look at him.

“What gave you that idea?” she asked.

“Just a hunch…” he muttered, his lips meeting hers in a soft kiss, before his mouth moved to her jawline, one hand straying to the button on her jeans. He popped it easily and worked his hand into the front of her underwear and she gave a soft gasp as his fingers began to play with her sensitive flesh.

“You know…” he continued to speak as her sighs slipped from her mouth “I’ve wanted this all day doll, you’ve had me pining for you…”

“Yeah, well, the feeling’s been mutual…” she said softly, arching her back and taking a sudden breath as two of his fingers slipped insider her. She pushed back slightly, the curve of her ass pressing into his groin and he gave a hiss.

“Fuck baby…” he said through gritted teeth, and he gave a disgruntled wimper as his hand stopped what it had been doing.

“Steve…”

“Such an impatient brat…”he chastised, his mouth on her neck and as she closed her eyes she could hear the tell-tale sound of his belt buckle being undone and the zip on his flies being pulled down. His hands retuned to the front of her jeans undoing them the rest of the way and sliding them down wither panties to her ankles. As he stood up, his hands gently traced the curves of her calves to the outside of her thighs and he grabbed her hips pulling her back towards him before he bent her gently forward, nudging her legs as wide apart as the clothing round her ankle would permit.

He didn’t say another word as he pushed into her in one glide, burying himself to the hilt. Katie let out a groan, her hands slipping forward on the kitchen counter slightly as he bottomed out, before he gently pulled back and did the same again and again, hands gripping at her hips as he continued.  He leaned over to nip at her neck, causing her to whimper, one hand moving from her hip to clasp her jaw, tipping her head round to meet him. His lips crashed onto hers in a hungry, domineering kiss, swallowing her dirty little moan as he picked up the pace, his hips rutting forward faster.

She gave a loud, low purr of delight as he slid his mouth to the pulse point on her neck, before he let out a growl of his own and glanced down at the point where their bodies were joined, the sight of him slamming into her worked him up even more.

His rhythm became faster, and Katie felt her hips banging against the side of the marble surface tops. She knew there would likely be some bruises there tomorrow but at that point in time she really didn’t care. Her hands tightened around the edge of the kitchen counter, her hips bucking back into his, desperate to feel him as much as she could, the feel of him brushing against her spot was finally scratching that itch, satisfying that hunger she’d been feeling all day.

“Fuck you feel so good doll…” he praised, lips warm on the shell of her ear as she arched her back slightly, letting out another keen of desire and she felt the animal in her belly beginning to stir. Steve could read the signs well enough by now to know she was close, and he moved one hand to stroke between her legs whilst he continued his relentless rhythm.

“Stevie…” she stuttered his name, before her voice became nothing but a strangled, hoarse cry and she tightened around him, her legs buckling slightly. He tightened his arm around her belly as he felt the familiar white hot ribbons surge through his body as he let himself go, his rhythm faltering as he emptied himself inside her with a groan.

Katie laughed softly as he moved back, his hands gently gliding up her arms as he kissed the back of her neck softly before he stepped back to allow herself to pull up her clothes as he tucked himself away and fastened his buckle.

“Now I gotta stand here, in damp panties and cook…” she turned and looked at him, sliding her arms round his neck.

“Well, that serves you right for snacking before dinner.” he grinned, as she let out a bark of a laugh before he dropped his head slightly, running his nose up against hers “Let’s hope you haven’t ruined your appetite completely for desert….”

@the-omni-princess​  @momobaby227​ @geekofmanythings16​ @angelofhell-666​ @thewackywriter​ @marvelfansworld​​  @cobalt-gear​  @asgardlover75​ @jennmurawski13​​​  @jtargaryen18​​ @saiyanprincessswanie​​  @navispalace​​ @patzammit​​  @joannaliceevans-fanficblog​​  @icanfeelastormbrewing​​ @djeniiscorner​​  @ayamenimthiriel​​  @coldmuffinbanditshoe​​  @disneylovingal​​ @madzmilllz​  @sgtjaamesbaarnes​ @sweater-daddiesdumbdork​

[douchebagbrainwaves]

0 MEANS USING THE WEB AS A PLATFORM DIDN'T LIVE MUCH PAST THE FIRST CONFERENCE

This phrase began with musicians, who perform at night. Most are service businesses—restaurants, barbershops, plumbers, and so on. 0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right? This side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Getting work makes him a successful actor, but he doesn't only become an actor when he's successful. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. He was like Michael Jordan. But the first time around it was co-opted by Sun, and we got Java applets. Albrecht Durer did the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups is that they're not. But there is also huge source of implicit tags that they ignore: the text within web links. The test of any investment is the ratio of return to risk, if both were lower.

I advised startups never to let anyone fly under them, meaning never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. Let's start with a promising question and get nowhere. Unfortunately, the question is a complex one. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking. Another reason people don't work on big things, you seem to have been influenced by the Chinese example. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912: Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject. Originally, yes, there does seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong, things that seem obvious in retrospect. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a skateboard. Should you add x feature?

As an example of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent abstract concepts, you'll have a lot in the calculus class, but I know that when it comes to empathy are practically solipsists. 0 have in common. And yet if I had to write in school are not only not essays, they're one of the angels in his Baptism of Christ. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. Does Web 2. In the best case—if you're really organized—if you're really organized—you're just writing it down. I found that what the teacher wanted us to do was pretend that the story had really taken place, and to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness.

What made it possible for small organizations to succeed in some domain, you have to compete with other local barbers. I read an interview with Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite. You can use the cram schools to show you where most of the 1970s. No doubt it was a description of Google? How to Start a Startup I advised startups never to let any other company offer a cheaper, easier solution. 7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect. It does seem to me very important to be able to get a day job that's closely related to your real work. Number two, research must be substantial—and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to get the rest you have sit through a movie.

The goal he announces in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that it was a waste of time? It's not considered insulting to say that life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is bullshit. I was a kid I was always being told to look at it. It's not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working. Web 2. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to discover them because they're useless, let's try to discover them because they're useful. In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. He has noticed that theoretical knowledge is often acquired for its own sake, out of curiosity, one of the first digital computers, Rod Brooks wrote, programs written for them usually did not work. Most businesses are tightly constrained in a.

And so began the study of ancient texts had such prestige that it remained the backbone of education until the late 19th century. Basically, what Ajax means is Javascript now works. As credentials are superseded by performance, a similar role is the best source of rapid change. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinating, no matter how much you're getting done. Most don't discover anything that remarkable, but some through luck or the efforts of their founders ended up growing very fast, we wouldn't need a separate word for startups, and in particular the most successful startups, or they'll be out of business and the people would be interested in painting. They work well enough in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard. Musicians often seem to work in record stores. By which one defended it. Why are they so hot to invest in photo-sharing apps, rather than for any practical need. But unfortunately that was not the conclusion Aristotle's successors derived from works like the Metaphysics.

The reason credentials have such prestige is that for so long the large organizations in a market can come close. The Airbeds just won the first poll among all the YC startups in their batch by a landslide. By gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could probably make them more airtight. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users. Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know if Plato or Aristotle were the first to ask any of the hackers I know write programs. The people who want a deep understanding of what you're doing. Other times nothing seems interesting. And so instead of correcting the problem Aristotle discovered by falling into it—that you can easily get lost if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they continued to fall into place. I've used both these excuses at one time or another. We didn't draw any conclusions.

But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too. But schools change slower than scholarship: the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not start the type with the most potential? It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. Why not as past-due notices are always saying do it now? This was particularly true in consulting, law, and finance, where it led to the phenomenon of yuppies. That was as far as I'd gotten at the time. Only a tiny fraction are startups. To some extent you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to take these cycles into account, because they're affected by how you react to them. 6x 7% 33.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Abby Kirigin, and Anton van Straaten for putting up with me.

[bluewatsons]

Atosa Araxia Abrahamian, Money for Nothing, New Republic (August 29, 2018)

Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck?

Some years ago, I had a colleague who would frequently complain that he didn’t have enough to do. He’d mention how much free time he had to our team, ask for more tasks from our boss, and bring it up at after-work drinks. He was right, of course, about the situation: Although we were hardly idle, even the most productive among us couldn’t claim to be toiling for eight (or even five, sometimes three) full hours a day. My colleague, who’d come out of a difficult bout of unemployment, simply could not believe that this justified his salary. It took him a long time to start playing along: checking Twitter, posting on Facebook, reading the paper, and texting friends while fulfilling his professional obligations to the fullest of his abilities.

The idea of being paid to do nothing is difficult to adjust to in a society that places a high value on work. Yet this idea has lately gained serious attention amid projections that the progress of globalization and technology will lead to a “jobless” future. The underlying worry goes something like this: If machines do the work for us, wage labor will disappear, so workers won’t have money to buy things. If people can’t or don’t buy things, no one will be able to sell things, either, which means less commerce, a withering private sector, and even fewer jobs. Our value system based on the sanctity of toil will be exposed as hollow; we won’t be able to speak about workers as a class at all, let alone discuss “the labor market” as we now know it. This will require not just economic adjustments but moral and political ones, too.

One obvious solution would be to separate income from labor altogether, a possibility that two recent books tackle from radically different angles. Give People Money, by journalist Annie Lowrey, offers a measured, centrist endorsement of Universal Basic Income—the idea that governments should give everyone a certain amount of cash each month, no questions asked. The anthropologist David Graeber posits that the link between salaried positions and real work has long been tenuous in any case, since many highly paid jobs serve little purpose at all. In Bullshit Jobs, he tries to make sense of the peculiar yet all-too-common situations in which people are hired, after much fanfare, to do a job, then find themselves not doing much—or worse, performing a task so utterly pointless that they might as well not be doing it.

In the absence of a truly useful job, most people, Graeber considers, would be better off living on “free” money. Lowrey views UBI less as a way to eliminate useless work than a way to compensate invisible forms of labor, such as caring for a relative or doing housework, or to bolster underpaid workers. Cash transfers, she proposes, could also stimulate entrepreneurship and creativity. Either way, the idea of paying people just for being alive is now one that both a radical scholar and a reasonable Beltway journalist can take seriously—though neither author fully reckons with the social reordering that would arise from a world organized around love and leisure, not labor.

Graeber’s book expands on his viral 2013 essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” in which he took aim at “employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Eric, who worked as an “interface administrator” at a design firm, found himself in such a job. His responsibility was to make sure the company’s intranet system worked properly, which sounded useful enough. But, it turned out, he was set up to fail. None of the employees used the system because they were all convinced it was monitoring them. It had been designed with the worst, buggiest software. A confluence of office politics and poor management had led the company to hire Eric, who had no experience working with computers. He was to oversee a system that was never supposed to work in the first place.

Eric ended up doing little. He kept irregular hours and explained to the odd employee how to upload a file or find an email address. He started drinking one, then two, beers at lunch; reading novels at his desk; learning French; and taking trips for nonexistent “business meetings.” If this sounds idyllic—a salary with no work and boozy lunches!—Eric didn’t experience it that way. Instead, he acutely felt “how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness.” Graeber suggest two reasons for Eric’s despondency. One concerns social class: The first person in his family to go to college, Eric wasn’t expecting the white-collar world to be such, well, bullshit. Another reason is existential: When faced with it, “there was simply no way he could construe his job as serving any sort of purpose.

By Graeber’s metric, my old gig wasn’t quite bullshit, mainly because I rather enjoyed it and found it meaningful. The term is subjective: If someone thinks a job is pointless, it probably is. There are also many repetitive, grueling, or boring jobs that do not qualify as bullshit because they meet an essential need: If a cleaner or bus driver doesn’t report for work, it hurts other people. (These Graeber terms “shit” jobs.) His method for identifying bullshit is, by his own account, unscientific. He draws from a pool of anecdotes to produce an anatomy of bullshit workers, who fall into five categories: “flunkies,” “goons,” “duct-tapers,” “box tickers,” and “taskmasters.”“Flunkies” are the modern equivalent of feudal minions who make bosses feel big, important, and strong. Whereas they were once doormen and concierges, they now tend to be receptionists who do little besides answer cold calls and refill the candy bowl, or personal assistants who drop off their boss’s dry cleaning and smile when he walks through the door. “Goons” essentially bully people into buying things they don’t need: Marketing managers and PR specialists do this, as do telemarketers. “Duct-tapers” are employed to fix things that aren’t or shouldn’t be broken or do tasks that could easily be automated—data entry, copying and pasting, photocopying, and so on. “Box tickers” help companies comply with regulation (or offload responsibility for complying), and finally “taskmasters,” or middle managers, spread more BS by assigning it to others.

“The creation of a BS job,” one manager tells Graeber, “often involves creating a whole universe of BS narrative that documents the purpose and functions of the position as well as the qualifications required to successfully perform the job, while corresponding to the [prescribed] format and special bureaucratese.” She explains that her organization’s bureaucracy created odd incentives to retain employees whose work was inadequate. It was easier for her to hire someone in a new position than to fire and replace the incompetent employee. This, she notes, helped BS jobs proliferate.

Graeber attempts to quantify just how much—and after some back-of-the envelope calculations, he wagers that 37 to 40 percent of all office jobs are “bullshit.” He further contends that about 50 percent of the work done in a nonpointless workplace is also bullshit, since even useful jobs contain elements of nonsense: the pretending to be busy, the arbitrary hours, the not being able to leave before five. “Bullshitization” is even infecting the most nonbullshit professions, with teachers overloaded with administrative duties that didn’t use to exist and doctors forced to deal with paperwork and insurance firms that probably should be abolished.

There’s no sure way to verify Graeber’s estimates, but for white-collar workers, they seem basically right. Work backward: How much activity on social media takes place during work hours? How many doctor’s appointments, errands, and online purchases occur between nine and five? In other words, how many of us could stand to work half as much as we currently do without any significant consequences? And yet we insist over and over that we are terribly, endlessly busy.

This state of affairs seems to defy not just human reason, but also basic capitalist logic: Wouldn’t a profit-seeking organization tend to cull unnecessary compensated labor rather than encourage it? Graeber proposes that there is an explicitly irrational reason why such jobs exist—a system he calls “managerial feudalism,” wherein employers keep adding layers and layers of management so that everyone can feel their job is important or at least justified. (They’re “mentoring” young people. They’re helping others develop careers!) The bigger the staff, the more important the company and its leaders feel, regardless of purpose or productivity.

There might be something refreshing about the fact that capitalism has not yet gained full control over its means and ends, and that there are millions of people sitting around getting paid to do nothing all day. Graeber doesn’t buy it. On the contrary: He considers bullshit jobs to be a profound form of psychological violence, a scourge that’s fueling resentment, anomie, depression, and apathy. Patrick, an employee of a student union convenience store, mostly agrees with this judgment. He didn’t mind the work itself; what he resented was being assigned inane busywork, like rearranging things, after he’d finished his tasks six times over. “The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think,” he tells Graeber in an email:

So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive.

Of course, some people can escape by focusing on creative pursuits during the hours they are idle. And it helps if everyone in said job acknowledges, if tacitly, that they serve no purpose by being there. But that’s hard, too, Graeber argues, because of the structure and nature of the modern workplace: the rules, the conventions, “the ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense.”

The existence of bullshit jobs has, further, led to the devaluation of vital occupations. Workers in essential, nonbullshit jobs are constantly told by moralizing politicians that their work is noble and that they ought to be grateful for the often low pay they receive. Even though the middle managers and box tickers of the world can console themselves with the thought that they are “generating wealth” and “adding jobs” by virtue of their “economic output,” they secretly envy the real, human sense of purpose that useful workers—teachers, garbage collectors, care workers—share, Graeber writes, and end up vilifying them out of “moral envy.” This impulse plays out politically: Nurses, teachers, and bus drivers, for example, are constantly portrayed as “greedy” when they bargain for better union contracts, or they’re said to be “stealing” from the state when they make overtime wages. When voters in bullshit jobs hear these words over a campaign season, it can swing legislative bodies to the right.

Would it be better if those workers stuck in bullshit jobs could simply walk away? Graeber isn’t one for policy recommendations, but he does float UBI as a potential salve to our sad professional predicaments. A UBI would “unlatch work from livelihood entirely”: If, guaranteed enough money to live on, people could choose between bullshit or nothing, he wagers that they’d choose nothing and do something more useful and interesting with their time instead.

In Give People Money, Annie Lowrey is less concerned with dissatisfied professionals than with some of the world’s poorest (including those in the United States), who in addition to already being overworked and underpaid—if they are employed at all—will likely face the harshest economic consequences if or when menial tasks are automated. These workers are already up against weakened unions, corporations dead set on extracting maximum value from their workforces by scaling back benefits and slashing wages, the rising costs of education and health care, and other trends that wind up concentrating wealth at the very top. When the robots come, as Lowrey believes they will, there’s little that governments, companies, or other organizations can do to make them go away. The best shot for these people, she comes to believe, is unconditional money.

Lowrey makes a convincing moral argument for UBI, insisting that “every person is deserving of participation in the economy, freedom of choice, and a life without deprivation—and that our government can and should choose to provide these things.” She also points out to great effect the destructive moralizing that Americans, at least, attach to money. “We believe there is a moral difference between taking a home mortgage interest deduction and receiving a Section 8 voucher,” she writes, in a refreshing moment of indignation. “We judge, marginalize, and shame the poor for their poverty.” Gaining support for UBI would mean persuading people to reject those assumptions; convincing a majority to see, as Graeber and Lowrey both urge, that commanding a high salary doesn’t automatically make you a good person.

A further challenge for advocates of UBI today is the lack of definitive, long-term surveys “proving” the mechanism’s efficacy: There have been no truly universal cash transfers within one country for an extended period of time, and there are thus no narratives to follow or macroeconomic conclusions to draw. Thanks to increased interest in the phenomenon, though, there are more and more smaller-scale studies, and Lowrey visits one of them in Kenya with GiveDirectly, a charity that essentially hands out cash through mobile payments in poor places. There she meets a man named Fredrick Omondi Auma, who “had been in rough shape when GiveDirectly knocked on his door: impoverished, drinking, living in a mud hut with a thatched roof. His wife had left him,” she writes. “But with the manna-from-heaven money, he had patched up his life and, as an economist might put it, made the jump from labor to capital.”

More money, Lowrey reports, turns the villagers into good capitalists who invest their savings in education and supplies, start businesses, and help grow the local economy. Her observations recall the breathless and somewhat naïve boosterism that surrounded microcredit programs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She even meets three sister-wives who plan to pool their funds and create a small bank to lend to women. In the United States, too, she finds clear-cut potential for success. In separate chapters, she illustrates the promise of cash transfers for the American poor with more clarity and purpose, visiting a family with disabled children and speaking to women whose jobs just don’t pay enough for them to get by. Simple cash could help teenagers finish school instead of working to support their families; it could adequately compensate women who stay home to care for sick loved ones; it could spare the elderly or disabled from the bureaucratic hell of waiting in line to plead for meager welfare benefits.

Ending poverty around the world ought to be a priority, and Lowrey makes a strong case that unconditional cash transfers can help do that. But in the wrong hands, a UBI can do more harm than good. It can serve as a pretext to further decimate social programs and put more blame still on the individual for any mishaps or shortcomings. As Lowrey notes, libertarians love the idea that UBI could replace the welfare state, shrinking big government—a move that could render the whole program ineffective, since it’s hard to imagine a UBI stretching to cover market-rate housing and exorbitant private health care. Meanwhile, cash payments can also reinforce social and racial divisions by throwing money at a problem without addressing its causes. Giving the individual residents of an over-policed neighborhood cash transfers won’t, for instance, make them any less susceptible to unreasonable searches or violence.

That’s why it matters who supports UBI and, more significantly, whose policies it gets attached to. Many of the people funding UBI research or advocating for cash transfers—Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, to name just two—are in fact among those who do best from the current distribution of wealth. A UBI would, after all, benefit corporations: For any company that depends on people having money to buy their products—whether groceries, prescription drugs, or driverless cars—the idea of a jobless, incomeless population presents a threat to its bottom line. Free money lets consumers stay consumers; it maintains the current system. And that’s without getting into the possibility that unemployment and poverty might add up to riots, class war, and mass unrest. In that situation, the CEOs would be the first to go.

Both Graeber and Lowrey struggle with the fact that—for all work’s miseries and for all the promise of UBI—work is deeply ingrained in American society. While many of us might hate our individual jobs, most of us love the idea of a job. Our world is constructed around the idea that a job is not just a paycheck: It’s a status symbol and a form of social inclusion. This, of course, supports the creation of bullshit jobs, which prop up the socioeconomic status quo. Now that a jobless (or less job-full) future may be within reach, the question is how to reimagine our relationship with work.

Lowrey appreciates the extent to which people identify with their work—even if it’s bullshit or shit (in her parlance, “crummy”) work. Having reported extensively on the psychological toll that unemployment can take, she insists that the culture (or is it cult?) of work is most likely here to stay. It might not be the healthiest approach—she dislikes moralizing around the virtue of work almost as much as Graeber does—but she realizes it’s something we have to build in to our short- and medium-term expectations because “the American faith in hard work and the American cult of self-reliance exist and persist, seen in our veneration of everyone from Franklin to Frederick Douglass to Oprah Winfrey.”

For his part, Graeber insists that there’s no value in working for the sake of just working. That often gives the impression that anyone who does want to work for work’s sake must be a bit of a sucker and that the compulsion to work is a manifestation of false consciousness or, worse, stupidity. He thus glosses over the strongly felt benefits, be they professional, social, or psychological, that many people get from their jobs. If Graeber’s unscientific assertions about bullshit jobs feel vital, urgent, and intuitively true, his dismissals of work’s inherent value—not moral, but social—feel incomplete.

With a compulsion to work so deep-rooted, UBI is a solution that will only go so far, even if implemented in a way that truly does alter lives for the better. Giving people money will not make us less moralistic about labor: People used to working will not necessarily know what to do with themselves or with their time. (I certainly wouldn’t.) Such measures represent only a fraction of the socioeconomic overhaul that will be needed to deal—if not now, then for future generations—with this twin utopia-dystopia: a world with less work and less money.

A solution that neither Lowrey nor Graeber spends much time dwelling on is perhaps the obvious: to split the difference. In a 1932 essay titled “In Praise of Idleness,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted that he had come to think of work not as something morally necessary, but as a means to enhance pleasures in the rest of life (after all, would you want to attend a dinner party you could never leave?). While acknowledging that he is a product of a Protestant work ethic and thus a compulsive worker, Russell suggests halving the workday to four hours, which would be enough for a person to secure “the necessities and elementary comforts of life,” leaving the rest of his time to do whatever he wanted.

“There will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia,” Russell goes on. “The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion.”

[wanderinguterus1]

Economy Class

“Deserve is a bullshit term. None of us deserves anything. We get what we get.” -Brit Bennett

I once read an article in which a researcher detailed a human behavioral study conducted on airplanes - particularly, among economy class passengers. On some planes, economy class passengers have to pass through the first class area before getting to their (inferior) seats. The study found that on these planes, negative behaviors increased. For example, arguing with flight attendants and fighting with other passengers - all significantly higher in economy class if first class seats were present. The researcher landed on this theory: seeing first class patrons - with their roomy seats, individual arm rests, and ample leg room - made economy class passengers like they were being treated unfairly. In other words, when people are forced to witness drastic inequality, their mindset shifts in a negative direction.

Teaching in a private school, I am often reminded of that article. A few days ago, after third period, I made my way around the classroom, sanitizing the students’ desks. In the beginning of the year, I delegated this job to students, but over time, I realized doing it myself was easier than overseeing reckless 14-year-olds with sanitizer bottles, fearing they would spray a friend in the face or drop the sanitizer on someone’s computer. The label on the bottle warned: “Attention: Can Cause Blindness.” I decided not to take my chances with teenage boys.

I had an hour until my next class arrived, so I sat down at my computer and began flipping through quizzes and recording grades. The soft tapping of the keyboard drastically contrasted with the sounds of hyper ninth graders who had filled the room a few minutes ago. I was enjoying the silence when a former student came by to visit.

“Hi Ariel!”

“Hi Ms. Long.”

Since I had taught her as an 8th grader, I remembered her as a tiny, overly nervous 13- year-old. Now a senior, Ariel moved with confidence, sitting in the desk to my right and straightening the quizzes I had graded and discarded haphazardly.

“Are these To Kill a Mockingbird quizzes?” she asked, looking over the students’ answers.

“Yes.”

“I hated that book.”

I shook my head and sighed. Pulling my mask down to take a quick sip of coffee, I resisted the urge to rebuke her for her bad taste.

“My sister got into Yale,” she announced.

“That’s awesome,” I responded tentatively. Ariel, an average student, had a genius sister. I wondered how Ariel felt about her sister’s acceptance into the Ivy league, although it couldn’t have been too unexpected. Caitlin had been winning academic awards since she was in middle school and had spent the previous summer shadowing a world-renowned journalist.

“Yeah, and I got a full ride to FSU.”

“Wow! I’m so proud of you! I bet your parents are so happy!”

“Yeah, but since it’s not really fair that they don’t have to pay for my college, and Caitlin’s tuition is like 40 thousand a year, they are going to give me the equivalent of that in cash every year to make it even.”

I stared at her, wondering if I had actually heard her correctly. And wishing someone had taught her to “read the room.” Did she just imply the injustice of a full ride? And admit that her parents would be giving her, an 18-year old, forty thousand dollars in cash? To make things FAIR?

Obliviously, she continued, “I’ll probably be able to buy a house as soon as I graduate college.”

Suddenly, I had a realization: being a teacher in a private school was like sitting in the first row of economy class with the first class section in clear view. Every day. For eternity.

I’m not jealous because I want a bigger house or a nicer car or a boat; I just want a baby. One baby. Forty-something thousand dollars stands in the way of my husband and I adopting or trying IVF, but here sits an 18 year-old who will be gifted that amount of money each year for the next four years of her life. She would be able to buy four babies by the time she's 21.

I think of money in terms of babies now. For example, I heard that a Pokemon card sold on eBay yesterday for 500,000 dollars. Instead of dollars, I imagined that Japanese cartoon character being traded for twelve and a half babies.

Don't get me wrong; I understand that compared to so many, I lead a privileged life. I come from a two-parent, middle class home, and I’ve never known what it’s like to suffer from racial discrimination. If I lived in a less developed country, I would be comparing myself to very different types of people: women who sit outside for hours every day, rain or shine, selling vegetables for next to nothing; taxi drivers who work seven days a week, twelve hours a day, just to be able to feed their families. These people don't spend time writing autobiographical essays about how flawed the system is. Even though I understand these truths, I can't help but feel, at times, that I've been shafted.

                                                       *

Two years ago, I lay naked save for the papery hospital gown, in a cold pre-operation room. Hooked up to an IV, I waited on my doctor to arrive and remove the twelve fibroid tumors he had found during my ultrasound. Luis stood by the bed, holding my hand and telling me about the infamous Star Wars holiday special of 1978 in an effort to distract me.

“It actually had Wookie porn in it. Wookie porn. What were they thinking? Chewbacca’s father just groans for like ten minutes straight. It's known as one of the worst films to ever air on television.”

The surgery, an abdominal myomectomy, consisted of cutting open the abdomen in order to remove the tumors. After a year of trying to have a baby and failing, this was our first expensive problem-solving attempt.

On the other side of the curtain, a nurse greeted her patient. “Good morning! What are we having today?”

The voice of a man replied, “It’s a girl.”

“How exciting, is it your first?”

“No,” his female counterpart answered with a chuckle.

I tried to focus on Luis’s Star Wars story, but I kept thinking about the happy couple, leaving later that day with their brand new baby girl all wrapped up in her soft, pink blanket, smelling like cookies after they’ve been dipped in milk. I would leave with nothing but a cleaner uterus and a fat hospital bill.

Moments later, a surgeon arrived, nodded his head to us and continued to the other side of the curtain. I heard him ask, “Ok, so C-section and tubal ligation today, right?”

I almost laughed out loud. So my body was about to be cut open to make it a welcoming home for a fetus while my roommate’s doctor would be rearranging her organs to do the opposite.

I hear the sounds of a table wheeling around and the clanking of instruments. “Do you have a name picked out?”

“Yes, her name is going to be Seven.”

“That’s unique.”

“Well, she’s number seven. I have had six kids in ten years. So yeah, I'm ready to get the tubes tied.”

I looked at Luis indignantly. Seven children in ten years!? I'd been diligently tracking my temperature in order to perfectly time our “lovemaking,” doing headstands after sex, and eating vegan cheese, and this girl is popping out babies every other year. How can two women’s bodies be so utterly different? Luis widened his eyes as if to say, “Well? Do you really want seven children?”

My husband had a way of reframing any depressing situation. When we visited friends who lived in houses much nicer and more expensive than ours, he said things like, “I didn't really like their shower head,” or “I wouldn’t want to live that far away from the city.” Whereas I was seriously considering asking my hospital roommate if she wanted someone to take Seven off her hands, he was probably just thanking the universe that he wasn’t going home this afternoon to a house full of seven kids. On a plane, he would probably find a way to prefer his tiny, middle seat in the back row near the bathrooms to the luxurious first class experience. “Economy people are more friendly than rich people,” he might say.

                                                   *

Before the surgery, I had asked the doctor multiple times how long I would be in recovery, but he would only respond with, “Everyone is different.”

Well, in my mind that translated to two or three days of bedrest, because I rarely use more than three sick days in a school year. Unfortunately, my superior immune system had nothing to do with post-surgery pain, and for seven days afterwards, I was confined to the couch, unable to stand up straight or move more than a few feet without stopping, and in serious pain when my abs contracted. Any time I sneezed, coughed, or tried to flip myself over, it felt like someone was using a straight razor to open my stomach as if it were an Amazon box.

After an entire week of lying on the couch and taking opioids every five hours, I went back to work, still a bit hunched over and rather pale. And on the eighth day, I had to go back to the doctor for a post-op appointment so the bandage could be removed and the healing process be judged.

The bandage - about six inches wide five inches thick, had been placed right on my underwear line. I had already tried to remove it a little myself, just out of curiosity, but I didn’t get very far because it felt like it had been super-glued to the most sensitive area of my body. No one had warned me to shave completely before surgery.

In the car on the way to the appointment, I worried about the removal process and, not wanting to experience more pain, asked Luis, “The doctor probably has something to put on this to make it come off easily, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding doubtful. This should have been a signal to me. Luis, being a man, knows how men think. He knew, but didn’t want to break it to me, that there was no way a doctor has ever concerned himself with how painful a bandage removal process would be.

Choosing to be naively optimistic, I decided to trust in the kindness of medical professionals; surely they wouldn’t put me through more pain after so recently having had my abdomen cut open. However, once I was lying on the examination table, naked from the waist down, feet up in the stirrups, doubts started to creep in. As the now familiar ultrasound wand moved around inside my body, Dr. Edwards crowed on about how clear and devoid of fibroids my uterus looked.

Ok, surgery was successful, fibroids are gone, good job, thank you, now please get this thing out of me. When the ultrasound finally ended, he asked, “Do you want to remove the bandage or do you want me to?”

I hesitated, because that question implied that there was no procedure involved... that any random Joe off the street could just stroll in with normal people hands and just rip off this thing with no training whatsoever. My wheels were turning... So... you aren’t going to like, put some kind of magic lotion on me first?

Unfortunately, magic lotion only existed in my fantasies. In reality, surgery proved just a portion of the pain I would endure before it was actually over.

I began to remove the bandage, deciding I would rather be my own executioner. I picked the top part until my fingernails could get underneath, and started to tug. The skin rose as I pulled- it had been eight days since its placement and the glue didn't seem to have weakened at all. How was that possible? If humans are smart enough to design SuperBandage, aren’t we also advanced enough to create anti-adhesive?

When I got to the lower half of the bandage, which was on top of hair, things went downhill quickly. Removing it felt like getting a bikini wax - which I’ve only tried once and chickened out halfway through.

Eventually, I conceded. I couldn’t willingly put myself through the torture. “Can I just do it later, at home? In the bathtub?” I pleaded.

The doctor gave me a puzzled look, as if he didn’t understand the question. “I need to see if your scar is healing.”

“I’ll send you a picture. I swear.”

He chuckled, but I wasn’t kidding. I have never hated anyone more than I hated him in that moment. I bet he had never endured a bikini wax. He probably winced when his wife plucked his eyebrows. I made a mental note to give him a horrible Yelp review.

I refused to continue, so Dr. Edwards took over: he pulled and the nurse pushed the skin down as he went across - yes, pushing right below my stitches. I have never felt such excruciating pain in my entire life; it was like being stabbed with a hundred tiny needles on a part of my body that was only meant to be touched with loving hands. At one point, I instinctively grabbed the doctor’s arm, forcing him to stop. Staring at the bandage, which was only halfway removed, I cursed all men, including Luis. Why didn’t anyone tell me to shave? Why didn’t they give me anesthesia for this?

When the torture finally ended, Dr. Edwards looked at me with amusement in his eyes, and asked, “You ok?” as if I had been overly dramatic. I decided that I would never, ever, forgive him. Public Service Announcement for Women: Shave before any abdominal surgeries. And never settle for a male doctor if a female one is available.

I often wondered why I was putting myself though so much pain to bring a new life into the world. Was the desire to have children an evolutionary curse? Growing up, I never questioned whether or not it would happen because that’s what women are meant to do, right? What is a woman if not a mother? At least that’s what all the women I knew growing up led me to believe. Receiving the hospital bill in the mail a few weeks later prompted me to further question this desire. If I hadn’t cared about being a mother, Luis and I could have used the surgery money to take a trip to our dream destination - South Africa - flying first class.

Sometimes, when I’m lying naked from the waist down with my feet in stirrups, I think about my early 30s, when eggs and fertile windows were blissfully far from my mind. Unfettered by thoughts of motherhood, I concerned myself with traveling as much as possible.

Reading Walden had convinced me that staring at a computer screen all day was no way to live. Thoreau had inspired me to work with my hands, to get outside, to “suck the marrow” out of life. So after six years of teaching, I quit my job and departed alone on a plane to New Zealand. Although I had never even set foot on a farm before, I planned to volunteer on various organic farms as a way to connect with the natural world. The research I had conducted for this adventure amounted to about one hour’s worth of googling.

Since I had lived in a country where I didn’t speak nor read the language for three years, I craved traveling without a language barrier. My inferior sense of direction often weakened my resolve for adventure, so I needed a place where, at the very least, I could read the street signs. My first stop was a dairy farm in Opotiki. I pronounced this as if the last two syllables were “tea- key” as in tiki bar. The bus driver couldn’t understand me; he said he had never heard of such a place.

After some discussion and help from the internet, he dropped me off at the bus stop in “Ah-PO-Tah-key,” where a 20-something-year-old French guy named Clement stood smoking a cigarette. He had been sent by the dairy farmer to pick me up and seemed bored by the task.

Getting off of the bus, I must have looked a bit like Elle Woods showing up for her first day at Harvard. I wore skinny jeans, pink Uggs, and a tie-dyed sweatshirt. Clement had on overalls smeared with a brown substance, work boots, and a look that said, “You have no idea what you are getting yourself into.”

“Hi!” I exclaimed, eager to make a companion after a long solo flight and bus ride.

Clement lifted his chin in greeting and pointed to an old, faded black Honda Civic.

I stuffed my backpack into the trunk, and headed for the passenger seat, after an awkward moment with Clement in which I realized that the right side of the car was actually the driver’s side.

Undeterred by Clement’s apathy towards me, I asked, “How has it been, working on the farm?”

“Lot of cow sheet,” he responded, in a thick French accent.

He then reached for the radio and turned the music up to a decibel that prevented me from responding. Maybe my expectations for companionship had been a bit high.

The drive to the farm consisted of Clement driving about 20 miles over the speed limit on tiny, winding dirt roads, and me closing my eyes and holding tightly to the sides of my seat with both hands. At some point, I felt the urge to vomit, but I just laid my head back and practiced yoga breathing. Clement did not seem to notice.

By some miracle, we arrived at the farm without incident, where I met John, an older man who owned a little red house on seven acres. He explained that Clement and I would be sharing the spare room, meant for volunteers, and he showed me where my overalls and work boots rested.

“Be ready to go at four a.m. I’ll have yogurt and granola ready for breakfast,” he said, handing me an empty water canteen. “Tonight, before you go to sleep, you need to fill this with boiling water and put it under your blankets. It's going to get cold in your room.”

Cold didn’t adequately describe the sleeping quarters. Until it was time for bed, Clement, John and I had been lounging in the cozy, carpeted living room near the fireplace. However, around nine pm, when we moved to the back bedrooms, the wood floors felt like ice on my bare feet. I retrieved a sweatshirt, a scarf, a pair of gloves, and two pairs of socks from my suitcase and put them all on. The temperature must have been around forty degrees, because I could actually see my breath in the darkness. Sleeping proved difficult; every hour, I put on another piece of clothing from my suitcase, eventually looking like the pigeon lady in Home Alone. The canteen was only big enough to heat up one body part and remained warm for just half the night. Throughout all of my tossing, turning, and the unzipping and zipping of my backpack, Clement slept peacefully in normal pajamas. At four a.m., when the rooster started crowing, I wanted to weep. I yearned for my warm Tel Aviv apartment, central heating, and my teaching job, which suddenly felt like a white collar position.

I snuggled deeper into my bed, hoping to enjoy the blankets for a few more minutes, until I saw Clement pop out of bed and don his overalls. Refusing to be the weakling that he probably expected me to be, I followed his lead.

“Did you bring a hat?” John asked, when I entered the kitchen.

“No. Why?” I asked, thinking if I had a hat, I probably would have worn it to bed last night.

“Some of the cows have lice and you could catch it.”

I eagerly accepted the hat John proffered.

Clement and I ate our yogurt in silence - not surprising for him, but I was just too cold and tired to care.

John led us to the barn after breakfast, where we would be milking the cows. When I walked through the doors, my hand instinctively covered my nose: the smell - similar to a Port- O-Potty at the end of a crowded, weekend-long music festival - attacked me. John and Clement, unaffected by the stench, chuckled at my reaction.

“Better than the smell of cars in the city,” John said, smiling.

I wasn’t convinced.

Now it was time to learn how to milk a cow. In my imaginings of this moment, I would sit on a cute step stool, a sweet little cow would trot up to me, and I would gently tug on her teats, squirting milk into a tin bucket below. I would repeat this a few times, and a day’s work would be done.

In reality, John owned about 200 cows. The barn housed 50 stalls into which the first herd of cows were guided; each stood so that her butt faced into the shed. John handed me one of many thick, black hoses that hung from the ceiling. At the end of the hose was a steel device with four suction cups; I needed to attach the suction cups to the cow’s teats. The three of us would walk up and down the stalls, eventually connecting the suction cups to all fifty cows, and then John would turn on the machine.

For the first set of cows, this went pretty smoothly; according to John, these were the “old gals” who were used to the process. But when the younger cows were led into the stalls, they seemed less than thrilled. I watched in horror as one of them furiously kicked her hind legs, trying to escape the suction cups. John ran over to her, adeptly tying each of her legs to the stall. What happened next was both horrifying and impressive. I remember learning about how vultures can vomit on demand; it's one of their defenses when threatened. Well, apparently cows have a similar skillset. The moment John finished tying up the second leg, that cow shot projectile diarrhea right onto his chest.

I managed to get through the morning milking - which took two hours total - without trauma. I felt victorious but exhausted; I longed to go inside and take a nap.

“Meet me back out here at noon,” John said, after the barn had been cleaned.

I wondered why we would need to come back to the barn so soon. Clement delighted in informing me that the cows were milked twice a day.

Eventually, Clement, John and I fell into a routine, and for two whole weeks, I milked cows (twice a day) without contracting lice or getting kicked in the face. I even learned some tricks for sleeping in 40 degree temperatures, like taking a scalding hot shower right before bedtime, throwing on clothes as quickly as possible, then running straight to the bed, where I had previously placed the hot water canteen.

When I look back on my New Zealand adventure, I marvel at my resilience. How I just trudged out to the barn in those big rubber work boots at four a.m. and kept talking to Clement even though he only responded in grunts. And even though I’m older now, and slightly less malleable, I’m still managing. Every day I go to school and greet those first class passengers without displaying any “negative behaviors.” (I still welcome Ariel when she comes to visit me.) And I’m going to keep tracking my ovulation and putting away money for adoption, at least for another two or three years. And if we are relegated to fly in economy class on a plane full of first class passengers for the rest of our lives, at least Luis will be there to remind me that first class isn’t all that great anyway.

[ourimpavidheroine]

The first glimpses of the new Turf Wars comic are being posted and let me just say, I fucking love Irene Koh’s artwork. Mine is winging its way to me as I type. Her gorgeous lines, the way she draws the connection between people - Korra and Asami of course, but also between the other characters - she is madly gifted and I will gladly pay to have her artwork in my hands.

My god, though. This painful coming out story. I just...really? I’d ask if that is what white cis hetero creator dudes think all queer characters need, but clearly that’s the case, because that’s what they keep giving us.

Repeat after me: There is more to queer romantic relationships - more stories to tell, more things to focus on - than homophobia!

And don’t get me wrong, I know it is well-meaning! I do not doubt that for a single second. I know that the intent here is to empower and uplift, to encourage and to be inclusive. But there is a reason why we need more diversification when it comes to the creators of fiction of any stripe, and this is exactly why.  There are more stories that are there to be told than the ones that the creators in charge think need to be told. (Or will be financially solvent, which is the determining factor nowadays. If the story won’t make money, it’s not worth telling. The end.)

I’ve said it before, but I will say it again: the very nature of speculative fiction means that you do not need to mirror the world we live in. Writing a grand epic fantasy story that is thinly based on medieval Europe? You do not need to make women a footnote in your story, or only include people of color as servants. For one thing, let’s keep in mind that history was written by white dudes who had some serious investment in writing history that made them look good. For another: speculative fiction.

I read an essay some years back that discussed why fanfiction would never be accepted as “real” fiction. It was a fuckton of self-congratulatory bullshit to wade through, but what it basically came down to was “real” fiction included “real” conflict whereas fanfiction did not.

Now obviously that’s not true: plenty of fanfiction includes conflict. But getting past that, my immediate thought after I finished reading it was, Fiction includes Conflict With A Capital C because it has been primarily the playing ground of white men. And they are the ones historically thriving on conflict.

As in, sure, Amy throwing Jo’s writing onto the fire is not conflict on the scale of  Westeros embroiling itself in war. But you know what? Just about every woman I know felt so deeply Jo’s anguish and betrayal over that; we totally understood why she cut Amy dead and refused to acknowledge her when they went skating. We felt that; it had impact, it had meaning. It was personal. (And let’s not discuss when Beth died; I sobbed for hours and hours, completely devastated.) 

But most men I know haven’t even read Little Women, and wouldn’t bother. Because it’s a girl’s story, you know? It’s a story written about four sisters and their life during the American Civil War; so it’s an old, outdated story about girls and they aren’t even fighting in the war! What could be interesting about that story? Give me Westeros! Give me epic battles filled with names and hundreds of dead, senseless carnage that numbs the reader and, in the scope of the overall story arc, is just one more horrific grand tragedy for the main characters to process.

Compared to that kind of conflict, what could I possibly learn from Amy’s brash act and her clear regret? From Jo’s refusal to forgive her? From two sisters who are always at odds because, despite their different personalities, they are so much alike? 

And it’s the same reason why well-meaning straight people write only difficult coming out stories for queer characters - especially for those who are embarking on romantic relationships. After all, we need to give tools to The Kids for dealing with the inevitable homophobia that they will obviously have to experience because Queer, right?

Well, okay, sure. There’s a lesson to be learned from that, I’m not denying that. But what about the lessons that can be learned about just being in a romantic relationship? Because I’ve been married twice: once to a man, once to a woman. Sometimes the issues that came up were universal, yes. Sometimes, however, they weren’t. And not because the world was homophobic, but because being in a relationship with someone of the same gender is different; differently culturally, different because of gender roles, etc. Sometimes queer kids need to see people who resemble them dealing with the breakdown of household chores or having a fight over who ate the last slice of pizza or which in-law they are going to go to for the holidays because when it comes down to it, that’s real life. That’s the nitty gritty of every single day in a relationship. And queer folks deserve to see themselves reflected in that as well, not just in how they have to deal with what the straight world sees as inevitable homophobia.

In other words, we have so many other stories than Coming Out And Dealing With Homophobia.

But see, that’s why I love Irene Koh’s artwork. Asami’s hand resting on Korra’s thigh; the way their embraces start out with their breasts barely touching and gradually become full body contact, the two of them molding around each other. There is a gorgeous story being told there of the relationship between these two women; told subtly, told sans drama or conflict or histrionics or evil bad dudes. Told sans institutionalized homophobia, even.

I want to read about Korra and Asami. I want to read about how Asami goes from the woman who clung to Mako in despair as her company failed to the woman who built her company back up at a desperately young age, resting her hand confidently on Korra’s thigh. I want to read about how Korra feels about this brilliant woman whose letters brought her back to life when she’d just about given up. I’m not interested in how the Fire Nation was homophobic (because of course they were, being the bad guys, hit me over the head with that sledgehammer of stereotypes again, why don’t you?). I don’t mind reading about epic spirit world conflict! But at the same time I want to know how Asami feels about polarbear dog fur all over everything and how Korra has to go back and forth into the spirit world because she’s the Avatar and that’s what she does and how Korra handles it when Asami quits traipsing around the spirit world on vacation and gets back to the grueling grind of actually running a business and spends 60+ hours a week doing something that Korra is singularly unequipped to help her with. That’s a part of their relationship that has nothing to do with coming out or homophobia. 

I’ve been given, over and over and over again, queer relationships that are framed and defined by coming out and/or homophobia; especially by straight people (well-meaning or not). I want more; I want to see their relationship framed and defined by them. As a queer person, I deserve it, damn it.

And that’s why I read fanfiction; or, you know, women’s fiction. Because sometimes life - real life, normal life - is epic enough. Conflict doesn’t always have to be the young farmboy (insert other normal, boring, average occupation here) thrust into an epic story of adventure and war; sometimes conflict is your sister burning your writing or the boy next door declaring his love when you don’t return it that way or even your mother trying desperately to make ends meet when your father is away at war. It doesn’t mean those stories are bad! I love Star Wars, too. But my very favorite moment of Book 3 was when Asami sauntered into the room on the airship that Korra was locked into, twirling those keys around her finger, flirting her ass off, while Korra - the Avatar, the most powerful woman in the world, a woman who could have easily bent through those restraints holding her - waited for Asami to come and free her. There was an entire story being told in that very small moment, that moment that meant nothing to the rest of the world, that was not part of the Red Lotus or the epic arc of the Legend of Korra. But it was the part of the story that I wanted to see more of, nevertheless. And it had nothing to do with coming out. Or homophobia.

So yes. I will purchase the comics. I want to support Irene Koh’s gorgeous art! But when it comes to the story of Korra and all of the people in her world, I’ll stick to fanfiction, thanks. It’s giving me the stories I actually want to read.

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Austin Smith

grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MA from the University of California-Davis, and an MFA from the University of Virginia. Most recently he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, where he is currently a Jones Lecturer. He has published three poetry chapbooks: In the Silence of the Migrated Birds; Wheat and Distance; Instructions for How to Put an Old Horse Down; and one full-length collection, Almanac, which was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His last collection, Flyover Country, was published by Princeton in Fall 2018. Austin’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Poetry East, ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, Virginia Quarterly Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Cortland Review, amongst others. His stories have appeared or will appear in Harper’s, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, EPOCH, Sewanee Review, Threepenny Review, Fiction and Narrative Magazine. He was the recipient of the 2015 Narrative Prize for his short story, “The Halverson Brothers,” and an NEA Fellowship in Prose for FY 2018. He is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in poetry, fiction, environmental literature and documentary journalism. He lives in Oakland.

http://www.austinrobertsmith.com/

The Interview

When and why did you begin to write poetry?

I started writing poems quite young because my father is a poet, along with being a dairy farmer. Some nights he would come in from the barn, clean up, and we’d go into town to hear him read poems at the local art museum. Glancing down the page, I see that this answer I’m giving can apply to the second question, as well, in that it was certainly my father who introduced me to poetry, not only through his readings, but through the collections on my parents’ shelves. From a young age I felt a particular pleasure in looking at a poem, even, I think, before really reading them. The shape of the poem on the page, the prevalence of white space, the way the lines broke on the right margin like surf. It appealed to me immediately. I still remember distinctly the first line I wrote: “The fire is burning hot.” I was kneeling in front of the fire (of course). Something had changed: I’d gone from hearing my father read poems to trying to make a poem myself. I must have been twelve or so. I still have the notebook, labelled “Poetrey” (sic), various marks in the corners of the pages, some lost order that I was already putting the poems in. As to why I began to write poetry, that’s more mysterious. Of course, I was following my father (my favorite poem on this score is Heaney’s “Digging”), but at the same time, I was striking out on my own, trying to speak of the same place and the same livelihood in a different way.

2. How aware were and are you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Again. I think I touch on this above, but I can say more. I wouldn’t say that I felt that older poets were dominating presences. The poets who meant the most to me were the poets who meant the most to my father: Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Forrest Gander, etc. Actually, my father and I have met and/or corresponded with many of these poets. I met Snyder when he came to Freeport, IL to give a reading, and visited us on the farm. My Dad and I have both corresponded with Berry, and I’ve corresponded with Merwin. We both know Forrest. The point being, it was clear to me early on that being a poet was about more than writing poems. It was a whole life, a way of being in the world. It had a lot to do with friendship, with the simple pleasures of sharing a meal and some drinks, trying to say something for the earth and our presence upon it. In other words, it struck me that to be a poet was to take up a kind of moral calling. So rather than their presence being dominating, I felt that a kind of gauntlet had been laid down that I better walk if I was going to call myself a poet. Now, whether I’ve actually managed to walk it is another matter, that I can’t speak to.

3. What is your daily writing routine?

Right now my routine is waking up, trying to write, realizing I have to get my shit together and drive an hour to school, and daydreaming about what I would have written had I been able to stay home. I’m teaching a lot at the moment so I’m hardly writing at all. Certainly no poems. An occasional short story. Anyway, when things are calmer I write in the mornings. After noon I’m kind of worthless. Sometimes I’ll work on poems at night: they seem to require less attention than fiction does. What I mean by that is that poems seem to exercise a different part of the brain. I think it’s actually best to be a little tired, a little distracted, when working on a poem. I don’t like to bear down on them too much, or exert too much control, whereas, with fiction, it’s quite a bit different.

4. What motivates you to write?

I don’t really know anymore. Actually, I’m concerned that I’m losing the will to write. I used to write so much that it bordered on obsessive-compulsive behaviour. I have, in a file cabinet at home, approximately 1700 poems. I don’t write like that anymore. I don’t feel the pull to write about everything like I once did. I used to have to write in order to feel that I had experienced something. In some ways I’m happier, not writing all the time, but when one has identified oneself as a writer, to not write is a terrifying thing. These days, what motivates me to write is the thought of sharing the work with a half dozen or so people (my parents, my brothers, several good friends). I’ve pretty much given up on the publishing world, selling a novel, going on book tours, all that bullshit. I’m more or less writing letters to people I love, only they’re in the form of poems and stories.

5. What is your work ethic?

Well, again, it used to be much stronger! I’ll say this, though: I work hard, harder than anyone I’ve ever met. I don’t say that to brag. I’m actually not all that proud of it. It comes, probably, from having grown up on a dairy farm, and watching my dad get up every single morning at 3:30 for thirty years without a single day off. I approach writing that way. I had a pretty woeful time in graduate school because I encountered poets who don’t think of writing in that way, and I judged them, thinking they were lazy, or fake. The truth is, they were just working differently. Anyway, I like that phrase, “work ethic.” It really is an ethics of work. For me, the ethics of work is the ethics of dairy farming. For someone else, the ethics of work may be very different. Who am I to judge them? I just grew up in a particular world that has guided the way I approach my work. And so I am always reading, always writing or trying to write, always bearing down on one page or another, either mine or someone else’s.

6. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

Haha, hmm. Well, I don’t admire too many. Hardly any fiction, most of it strikes me as absolutely inane bullshit that is only getting published because it might sell books. Only a few poets. Maurice Manning, for how he has blent his work and his life in Kentucky. Joanna Klink, whose poems strike me as truly vital and consequential. Ilya Kaminsky: I trust and admire his patience and his passion. My friend Nate Klug, whose poems are as perfect and precious as diamonds. Yea, that’s about it.

7. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

Read. Read until you find writers who make you so envious that you would die to write like them. Then try to write like them. Try to write like so many of them for so long that you eventually write like yourself.

8. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

Oh there are so many. I’m like Coleridge in this. I have a thousand ideas and hardly any of them ever come to fruition. I’m experimenting with several different novels, trying to get one to click and carry me forward. One is about the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a community of beleaguered farmers in the midst of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s (but it’s a hoax perpetrated by the mother of the boy who sees her). Another novel is about a young woman who marries into a dairy farming family and, over the course of several decades, tries to get to the bottom of a dark family secret. Another novel is narrated from the perspective of a farmhouse. There’s a linked story collection called BROOD XIII, following generations of a farm family, jumping every seventeen years with the emergence of the Northwestern Illinois brood of periodical cicadas. My third poetry collection will be called ALL THY TRIBE after a line of Keats’s. I’m working on a memoir about growing up on a farm, as well as a collection of essays oriented around specific substances (“Milk,” “Blood,” “Grain,” “Manure,” etc.). And I have a short story collection finished, which the NYC editors called “quiet,” which I’ll probably just self-publish online. Again, I don’t really care that much anymore about publishing, I just want to keep writing and sharing my work with the people in my life who matter most to me.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Austin Smith Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[bleederziine]

“I Like Weird Complicated Songs”; an Interview with Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz

Speedy  Ortiz puts the feminine in feminism. Their music is for everyone realizing that feminism isn’t just about women, but examining how attacking femininity is used to pretty much hurt everyone who isn’t wealthy, white, straight and male by birth. And even though talking about oppression is really depressing and often unproductive because of this, Speedy Ortiz is all about what would happen if we put the positivity we talk about all the time into action. Our world could not only be full of interesting discussions and equality, but playful scariness and fairy tale outfits. But Speedy Ortiz’s writing isn’t only valuable in its humor and politics. With a poetry MFA as their lead singer-songwriter, Speedy’s lyrics are insightful, hilarious, and achingly true. In Sub/Verse’s latest interview, I talked to singer, musician, and songwriter Sadie Dupuis about horror movies, political art, songwriting, and much more.

How was SXSW?

Sadie: Pretty good, I haven’t been there an insubstantial amount of times before, so I know what to expect. I enjoyed all the shows we played, and got to eat all the food I like. No complaints really. I got to see less shows than in the past. In the past I was running around in between sets trying to see a million different bands, but this year I took it pretty easy. I went to the showcases we played obviously, and I got to see US Girls, and Girl Ray, Kurt Vile. I went to the AdHoc showcase, and the Don Giovanni showcase.

Inspiration for new album?

SD: Its hard to talk about just one inspiration for the new album; its all kind of older songs that were written that we rewrote, ones that were more personal. I think my goals as a writer shifted away from things that are specific to me, and I’ve tried to write more towards not universal themes, because everyone’s coming from this world and country from different places, which is evident from the presidential election. But certainly the song that came out today was about people performing allyship,  but not putting in the work to help their friends, and putting a burden on them. In the album we explored a lot of big issues with a light touch, because it can be exhausting looking at the news everyday, with practical ways to not lose your mind while you try to make the world a better place.

On the topic of allyship and consent, how do you think you promote and talk about these ideas at your shows and through your work?

SD: Talking about these issues is one way to help people  understand them more. Certainly Speedy Ortiz has tried to do a lot on those roads. We started a hotline a few years ago for people who are feeling unsafe at our shows. Whats been even more effective is passing out information on bystander intervention and de-escalation tactics on print outs at our shows, so that someone who’s just coming by the merch table can read about how to intervene if you see something going on at a show that seems unsafe. We are trying to foster the idea of people taking care of each other, and looking at not only their music scenes but their lives, like, how they can best help their neighbors and friends. I also believe inclusivity is paramount to safety, so we make sure we hire a diverse crew. These are the issues we are all thinking about, not just musicians, so I think it made sense that these ideas bled into the record.

What inspired the song and video “Lucky 88”?

SD: Well you mentioned that I lived in Austin. I took my mom to Austin for Christmas a few years ago. We spent a week in Texas, mostly in Austin but we also went to Houston. We went to the Cy Twombly gallery and it was the day before Christmas eve, and being in Austin which is a very liberal city but also being in Texas with a lot of conservatism, I felt pretty weird, especially with the president we were about to innaugurate. And I was looking at one of his sculptures called Untitled 1988, 1988 being the year I was born, and all of the horrible things that had happened since then and the things I didn’t know about. I ran outside and just started singing the song into my phone! Its about how the generation before me kind of left this world gutted and ruined but also about younger people keeping a watchful eye and working to make things better, and how inspiring those people are to me.

What do get out of Speedy Ortiz and your more solo work with Sad13, individually?

SD: Speedy started as a solo project, and I really enjoyed the outlet of home recording, and working as a solo musician. But then when we started playing as a band, I really grew to love that, and I don’t really like performing solo. We developed a language and a way for working out these songs together. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, but I like having both options, where I can go in my basement for eight hours, and post something on Soundcloud and its done, vs Speedy Ortiz where I want to make sure its something we all feel good about. Even though I write the songs, we work them out as a group.

I noticed a lot of horror movie and monster visuals in your music videos; are those big inspirations?

SD: We can’t help ourselves, we love horror movies! With most of the songs there are big themes, but we try to approach them with levity. I think a more literal video would be too heavy handed. Daryl our bassist went to film school, and our drummer Mike is really interested in film, always archiving old film stuff. They always have a really strong aesthetic plan for what the videos should be. I like doing that stuff too, but its cool that we can all come together on that and do something creative.

What are some of your favorite movies?

SD: As you might have guessed, I really like horror movies! Scream is my favorite series of movies. I’m coming at it from a pop horror/horror comedy background. I think my bandmates have a more refined taste in movies. I actually think I saw all of the Oscar nominated movies from last year, which is pretty rare. I really liked Moonlight from last year, and I saw I, Tonya which was really good too. I like horror, comedy, even really serious political commentary movies…

I used to have a job at a video store, which was like the best job I ever had, and there was a deal for video clerks where you could see any movie at a theater for free. I don’t  care if a movie’s bad, I just feel like its the most decadent and luxurious experience, being in a movie theater.

What do you do on tour, entertainment/reading/movies wise?

SD: What am I reading… last year in Glasgow I got a bunch of stuff from this place called Good Press, that published a lot of short run poetry, really small press academic stuff, essays, stuff like that. All the books are shrink wrapped, so you just have to trust that whatever you got is good. I was cleaning out my basement and found them in a record box so I’ve just been working my way through that stuff. Its all prose poetry and very experimental, stuff like that.

Do you think getting a poetry MFA helps your songwriting?

SD: I think honing any of your artistic sensibilities helps the others, in the way that so many musicians I know are really great visual artists. I think having an artistic practice, even if its outside your field, is bound to have an impact on your other creative work. I think it might be a detriment to my career because some of the things people really like about songwriting are things that are easy to remember or easy to sing along to, things that repeat, whereas, with my background in poetry, I’m always trying to think of the most not necessarily the most accessible  way to say something, and I definitely don’t repeat things much. So its bad for my pop song writing, and good for the weirdos who like weird complicated songs.

What were you into in high school, especially music? Any guilty pleasure stuff?

SD: Let me think, its been a while, I’m old now… I still like a lot of the stuff I listened to then, I started listening to New Pornographers again. A lot of Matador bands, like Helium and Pavement, and I’m really lucky that I’m friends with some of them now.

You have a really cool way of dressing on stage. How does that work/contribute to your music and performance?

SD: Aw thanks! I try. I played in bands since high school and I was used to being the only woman on stage or on tour, and I kinda got accustomed to this falsely masculine aesthetic, and I would just dress like the boys. Thats still kind of how I dress at home, jeans and a flannel. But at some point, the lack of femininity that I started to feel that if you were going to make rock music you had to fit into the male aesthetic, and that seemed like bullshit to me. I wanted people in the audience to not think they had to wear a man costume in order to play technical guitar music. So I started dressing like a fairy princess that can also shred! Its been a few years of that, with some slightly more elaborate costuming. When I see people in a bright or interesting outfit, it makes me happy to see something beautiful. I want to do that for other people, if their having a shitty day so they can have something cool to look at.

I know it might be goofy to go way back two albums ago, but I wanted to ask you about the title of your album two albums ago, Major Arcana.

SD: Tarot cards were really interesting to me back then. Its basically a breakup record, but I didn’t want to just write about that. I’ve always been interested in magic, and magic as an alternate religion, and witches and witchcraft in general. All of the songs were kind of through the lens of me being a witch and the songs are kind of like incantatory spells, and tarot was one of the lenses I used to find meaning at that time. My dad was Jewish and my mom was Catholic, and I had some education in both, but I’ve never been very religious but have always been interested in magical practices.

You’ve lived in a lot of places; Philly right now, Massachusetts, Austin. How have those places contributed and/or helped your writing.

SD: I think where you live affects you, and who you are affects what you write. I don’t know if its as direct as me moving to Philly made me write like a Philadelphian, but the reasons I moved to those different places was loving the bands and scenes at those times. In  a lot of my early Speedy work from those times I would put little easter eggs in songs to say, oh, this riff is from Pile or whatever. To a certain extent I still do that. There are so many bands in Philly I love, like Palm, Japanese Breakfast… I think anywhere you live, as a music fan, you’re going to internalize that. But at the same time I feel like I could go out in the middle of nowhere and still write songs.

INTERVIEW AND ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE GRAHAM

[lalobalives]

*An essay a week in 2017*

On Sunday I finally landed from my last of 4 trips over 5 weeks: Minneapolis where I helped run VONA’s regional program on the ground in conjunction with The Loft Literary Center; Newport Beach, Oregon for a Tin House NonFiction workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch; AWP in DC where I was on a panel; & finally a gig at The Center for Women Writers in North Carolina this past weekend. 

I was out on my deck looking at the night sky when it hit me: this swelling in my chest that felt like a lightening; a pulling in my cheeks that made a toothless smile appear and soon I was giggling at myself. I sat with this strange feeling when it hit me: it was pride I was feeling. I told my partner. She said: “You should be proud, babe. And this is just the beginning.”

Then came the discomfort. Pride feels self-lauding and congratulatory. The shame set in quickly. The who the fuck do you think you are? The: you have no right to be proud. You shouldn’t be proud. Pride ain’t ever a good thing, girl. Como te atrevez? Te crees gran mierda pero no lo eres. Bring yourself down a few notches, girl. Stop being so full of yourself.

***

Google defines pride as:

noun

a feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired. “the team was bursting with pride after recording a sensational victory” Synonyms include: pleasure, joy, delight, gratification, fulfillment, satisfaction, a sense of achievement, “take pride in a good job well done”

a group of lions forming a social unit.

verb

be especially proud of a particular quality or skill. “she’d always prided herself on her ability to deal with a crisis” — synonyms: be proud of, be proud of oneself for, take pride in, take satisfaction in, congratulate oneself on, pat oneself on the back for, “Lucas prides himself on his knowledge of wine”

***

Where does pride live in your body? It lives in my chest. It feels light. Like the weight of never feeling like I’m enough is lifted. It feels like accomplishment. It feels like I finally feel worthy and capable. It is so damn fleeting.

***

I used to imagine this life. I used to wish for it: the travel, the meeting people, the writing and learning and sharing love and heart and stories. I used to wish for it so hard. The wishing make me work my ass off. I quit the safety net of a full time editing job to live this life. I risked so much: financial security, knowing where my next check was coming from, how I was going to pay the bills, the rent, the light, money to fill the fridge. There were days when I had to decide whether to pay the light or buy food for me and my little girl. I’ve gotten eviction notices. I’ve defaulted on my student loans. There were so many times when I couldn’t afford to go anywhere that required money so we spent a lot of time in the park, on the grass, sandwiches and fruit in my knapsack. That’s how much, how bad I wanted this. For me. For us. Me and baby girl. 

People have called me irresponsible. What do I see? I see a woman who showed her daughter what it takes to live your dreams. I showed my daughter that she too can live her dreams if she is willing to work for it. She has learned some valuable lessons from her mama.

I know this life isn’t meant for everyone. It’s taken me a long time and a lot of talking to folks to realize just how risky it was.

At AWP, a friend whose memoir was recently released told me how much she sacrificed to make this life happen for herself. When she got her book deal, she was months behind on her mortgage payments. She was near foreclosure. But she knew she had to write this book. She just had to. It was a burning inside of her that would turn her into ash if she didn’t. So she did, and she got a fantastic two-book deal to make it happen. “You’re doing everything you need to do, Vanessa.” she said, outside of a bar where we had just rubbed elbows with agents and publishers, some who were interested in seeing my work and some who were dismissive and gross. (Let’s just say I walked out of there knowing the type of person I want to represent me and the type I don’t.) “Keep going. You’re on your way. You will have all of this. All of it,” my friend said. My eyes welled. I let the tears fall as I stared at the traffic on that downtown D.C. avenue. I didn’t know how badly I needed to hear those words. I know now that I did.

I thought of this as I felt the mixture of pride and shame that made my stomach turn sour. I wondered: Why can’t I be proud of myself? Why can’t I say “I did this” and it not feel like I need to bring myself down a notch? Is that the internalized outside gaze? Whose gaze? Who made me feel this shame? And how can I convert it into action? What can I generate from this? Can I turn it into an acceptance of this pride that I know I deserve and have earned?

***

Christian theology says pride is one of the deadly sins. St. Augustine wrote: “It was Pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.”  

According to DeadlySins.com:

“The sin of Pride is said by some to be the foremost of the Seven Deadly Sins. Hubris is the gateway through all other sins enters the mortal soul.”

What it is: “Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.”

The punishment in Hell: “You’ll be broken on the wheel.”

Woah. That’s some heavy shit right there.

***

I write about the human experience. As such, when thinking about pride this week, I started digging into my own life and the moments I was robbed of my pride. I started a list that I’m sure will grow as I continue to dig into this wound.

1.

At my graduation dinner from Columbia University, while still draped in my graduation gown, the Columbia crown stitched into the lapel, my mother told me she knew I wasn’t going to do shit with my life (“Yo sabía que no ibas a ser ni mierda con tu vida”) when I told her I wasn’t going to law school. She slammed her fork down on the table so hard, it shook.

I have never regretted that decision.

2.

In 8th grade, I came home excited from a dance performance. I’d finally earned a solo in an interpretive dance piece we did for the Black History Month celebration. I remember the poem started: “What shall I tell my children who are black…” (Thanks to google, I now know it’s a poem by Dr. Margaret Burroughs.)

Within minutes of arriving, my sister reminded me that I was “retarded” and “still ain’t shit.” I remember her curled lip and how she looked down at me from her top bunk. My sister has always been quick to be the needle to burst my bubble whenever I’ve felt good about myself or something I’d accomplished. 

On Christmas, the last time I spoke to her, she told me my writing was bullshit and my followers are bullshit. When I told her that she is so much the reason for why I’m a writer because as a kid all I wanted was to be like her, she said: “I don’t give a fuck why you’re a writer, Vanessa.” I’ve saved the textument. I am quoting her verbatim. 

3.

A college professor once gave us the assignment of writing about someone we knew growing up. I wrote about Teresa, the neighborhood crackhead, and how fragile and beautiful she was. I was proud of that piece. I was so young, just 18 or 19, trying my hand at writing, and I was looking for support, encouragement. When the professor handed back the piece, he told me “this isn’t writing,” and he didn’t have the cojones to look at me when he said it.

***

Aristotle considered pride to be a virtue. Neel Burton writes on his blog:

A person is proud if he both is and thinks himself to be worthy of great things. If he both is and thinks himself to be worthy of small things he is not proud but temperate, for pride implies greatness. In terms of the vices, a person who thinks himself worthy of great things when he is unworthy of them is vain, whereas a person who thinks himself worthy of less than he is worthy of is pusillanimous. Compared to vanity, pusillanimity is both commoner and worse, and so more opposed to pride.

***

It’s often so easy to write about the difficult things we’ve experienced in life. But what about the joy? What about the times my pride was reinforced? What about the times that I was encouraged to be proud of myself and all that I’d accomplished? I think of my brother…

A few years ago, I was flown down to Atlanta when a book I co-wrote won an award. I called my brother from the veranda of the posh hotel I was put up in by the organizers of the Decatur Book Festival. It was right across the road from Emory College, and every morning I sat outside under the sun to eat a custom made omelet. I called my brother on one of those mornings. “I’m having breakfast on a veranda, bro! This is some All My Children shit.” He laughed: “What the fuck is a veranda?” Me: “I don’t know but I’m sitting on one.” We laughed so hard. Before we hung up, he said: “I’m proud of you, sis. You doing it.” He always told me he was proud of me. When I came home with good grades. When I got into boarding school and Columbia. When I wrote my first book. When I went to my first VONA and the four times I attended after. He was always the first one to say it and often the only one.

***

From what I can tell, there is a difference between the pride deemed a sin in Christian texts and the pride Aristotle called a virtue. The former is more about vanity; the arrogant, megalomaniac type, where the person is obsessed with himself and his power. The pride Aristotle refers to is earned pride in oneself and one’s work. A pride that is not all consuming but connected to self-worth and the work one does out in the world. A pride that encourages the person to continue producing.

In my research on pride, I found a fascinating article on Psychology Today called Pride and Creativity: How pride is pride related to creative achievement?

When Lisa Williams and David DeSteno told this to their participants, they noticed a significant increase in perseverance on a difficult cognitive task. This intrigued them, so they fiddled with the dials to see what was going on. When they took out the “Great job” part and just told the participants they performed exceptional, they saw no increase in perseverance. When they put people in a generally positive mood by having them look at pleasant pictures, such as a wedding and a tropical landscape—again, no increase in perseverance. What was it about this particular phrasing that increased motivation?

The winning phrasing was effective because it activated one of our most deeply-rooted emotions: pride. Pride is receiving a lot of research attention these days, as researchers are increasingly realizing its potency. In a recent study, David Matsumoto and Hyi Sung Hwang distinguish pride from triumph, another deeply-rooted human emotion. Participants were in strong agreement about what pride looks like:

Pride may have evolved to motivate people to achieve social status in a socially valued domain. This emotion emotion is not just any feel-good emotion though. Pride particularly makes people feel good about themselves. Children are quick to associate pride with domains in which they feel competent, and are driven to further pursue those domains. In contrast, those who continually receive negative feedback in a domain quickly lose their motivation for achieving in that domain.

But here’s the paradox: pride is correlated with both positive and negative social consequences. Pride has always received mixed reviews. The ancient Greeks viewed pride as “the crown of the virtues” whereas the early Christian philosophers viewed pride as the “deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins”. Pride is quite the polarizing emotion!

To reconcile these different conceptualizations of pride, researchers have found it useful distinguishing between two different shades of pride: authentic and hubristic.

Authentic pride is fueled by the emotional rush of accomplishment, confidence, and success, and is associated with prosocial and achievement-oriented behaviors, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, satisfying interpersonal relationships, and positive mental health. Authentic pride is also associated with genuine self-esteem, which is high self-esteem controlling for narcissism. Authentic pride, and its associated subjective feelings of confidence and accomplishment may facilitate behaviors that are associated with attaining prestige. People who are confident, agreeable, hard-working, energetic, kind, empathic, non-dogmatic, and high in genuine self-esteem would draw inspiration from others and would want to be emulated by others.

Hubristic pride, on the other hand, is fueled by arrogance and conceit, and is associated with anti-social behaviors, rocky relationships, low levels of conscientiousness and high levels of disagreableness, neuroticism, narcissism, and poor mental health outcomes. Hubristic pride, and its associated subjective feelings of superiority and arrogance, may facilitate dominance by motivating behaviors such as aggression, hostility, and manipulation…

No one said creativity is simple, or has a single cause. People may take different paths to the same outcome. At any rate, one thing is clear: pride plays an important role in fueling creativity.

***

Why can’t you be proud of what you’ve accomplished and the work you do without someone calling you arrogant or saying you should temper it? What’s wrong with feeling pride when you’ve struggled so much to get where you are, to create a life for yourself in spite of the odds and numerous obstacles? And what’s with this shaming when you say you’re proud? What’s this shame we impose on ourselves? Where does it come from? How can we push back on it and remind ourselves that pride in one’s work is a beautiful thing? You should be proud of what you do and how you exist in the world. I’m talking about a healthy dose of pride, whatever that means to you. Not the pride that makes you think you’re better than people. Not the pride that keeps you from helping others. Not the pride that makes you think people owe you something or should look up to you. Nah. I’m talking about pride in what you do, in your grind, in your accomplishments. Pride that will keep you doing the necessary, important work that will hopefully make this world a better place. That kind of pride.

***

During her lecture at AWP, Jacqueline Woodson said that even today, after having written 32 books and receiving countless accolades in the form of awards and prizes, she still wakes up some days amazed that she’s a writer. She said she can hardly believe it sometimes.

This begs the question: can you be humble and also be proud of the work you do and know its importance in the world? I think so. The thing is, we often have teach ourselves how to be. We’ve been taught as women, especially as women of color, to be humble to the point of self-deprecation, but if I can’t be proud of what I’ve accomplished, of having created this life for myself, then how can I teach my students to be proud of the work they do, of how they push themselves to dig deeper into themselves and their stories? How can I teach my daughter to be proud of her fabulousness, of being so talented and compassionate and such a hard worker, if I don’t show her that I am of her? That I am proud of myself? Our kids learn by impersonation.  

***

This is my promise to myself: I will work on being proud of how far I’ve gotten, as an unmothered woman who had to learn to become a woman and mother through trial and error. A woman who lives and loves in resistance to the way she was taught in her formative years. I will work on being able to take compliments and being gracious when they come in instead of cringing and wanting to run and hide. I will work on opening my heart to receiving the beautiful recognitions people gift me via notes and emails and face to face gushing that makes me blush. I will work on being a better, more accepting of love, Vanessa. Why do I say this? Because I realize that this is love that is coming my way. People show their love in so many ways. They do it when they see me and run over and want to meet me. They do it by sending me notes telling me how much my work has influenced them. They do it by sending emails to the Director of the center that brought me on to facilitate a talk and generative class, telling her to please bring me back, that I’m one of the best facilitators they’ve ever worked with, that I gave so much of myself, with no ego, with vulnerability and heart.

I don’t want to be the one to slap the hand of love away. I’ve done that so much in my life already. This was me functioning from a place of trauma. I am working on being a better Vanessa. One who can accept and be open to love in all its forms…especially now, when I have to teach myself how to be. Word.

  Relentless Files — Week 59 (#52essays2017 Week 6) *An essay a week in 2017* On Sunday I finally landed from my last of 4 trips over 5 weeks: Minneapolis where I helped run VONA's regional program on the ground in conjunction with The Loft Literary Center; Newport Beach, Oregon for a Tin House NonFiction workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch; AWP in DC where I was on a panel; & finally a gig at The Center for Women Writers in North Carolina this past weekend. 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF NERDS

Out in the real world. The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. Nearly everyone I've talked to a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college. But times have changed. There's a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.1 Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. And since his work became the map used by generations of future explorers, he sent them off in the wrong direction as well. And users don't care where you went to college. In fact, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Now the reconquista has overrun this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.2 There are more dangerous things than that.

And yet when you pick up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn't seem the right answer to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris. Singapore would face a similar problem.3 When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. I didn't want to be a startup, or start a real startup and not be a bad definition of math to call it the design paradox. The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is a running back. Be inappropriate. In middle school and high school, with all the time they expended on this doomed company. Wardens' main concern is to keep kids locked up in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I'm suggesting here is not so much the professors as the students. The company felt prematurely old.

I was more in the nerd camp, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy 101. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate? The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, definite occupation—which is not far from the idea that they should be a technology company, and that it literally meant being quiet. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of kids who band together to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.4 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? This is easier in most other countries. Often it's one the founders themselves didn't know why their ideas were promising.5 Be sure to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this tells you what it means is to have a good life for a long time: for several years at the very least, maybe for a decade, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your working life. I know the answer to that.

Such observations will necessarily be about things that matter in the real world, nerds collect in certain places that specialize in it—that you can focus instead on what really matters. This is the sort of backslapping extroverts one thinks of as typically American.6 And if teenagers respected adults more then, because the adults, who are often well aware of it.7 At one end of the process.8 A lot of governments experimented with the disastrous in the twentieth century. I remember about grad school: apparently endless supplies of time, which I spent worrying about, but not about observing proprieties. Wufoo is on the same trajectory now.9 Whereas fame tends to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation.10 Obviously the best thing to do in college if you want to be popular, and to want to be a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail.11 0 has such an air of euphoria about it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups are so small.

All the hackers I know seem to have been cheerful and eager.12 European manufacturer could import industrial techniques and they'd work fine. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose.13 When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. In principle, yes. You don't have to look any further to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.

But focus has drawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach arrives, you may not want to make a startup that's actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and see no connection indeed, there is precious little between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults. For better or worse, the just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it model does have advantages. If you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas, but you'll have it all to yourself. But search traffic is worth more than other traffic! But I don't think this is true.14 If you're thinking about your future. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. This is particularly true with startups. I thought that something must be wrong with me.

But they're not dangerous. Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for many hours at a stretch. Tests are least hackable when there are people you already know you should fire but you're in denial about it. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.15 When you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were paid a huge amount, or if it does, getting into Harvard won't mean much anymore. Though in a sense attacking you.16 So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield better results, because the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory. A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me.17 But it's gone now. If you set up those conditions within the US.18

Because I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead.19 For me, as for a lot of time on bullshit things or lose to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on, just like a software company.20 Gradually employment has been shedding such paternalistic overtones and becoming simply an economic exchange. It seems the clear winner for generating wealth and technical innovations which are practically the same thing.21 The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of the problem.22 Our two junior team members were enthusiastic. Or we can improve it, which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament. Maybe it's just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet. I've written a whole essay on this, so I sat down and thought about what they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on the same trajectory now.23 One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. Otherwise it wasn't worth worrying about.

Notes

They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely. A good programming language ought to be when I read comments on really bad sites I can establish that good art fifteenth century European art.

Handy that, in the process of trying to enter the software business, it's usually best to pick a date, because a friend who started a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because they could bring no assets with them. I've learned about VC while working on your way up. Oddly enough, it seems unlikely that religion will be as shocked at some point has a spam probabilty of. The Mac number is a negotiation.

False positives are not all are. It's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day have an edge over Silicon Valley like the outdoors, was one of few they had that we wrote in verse. There are circumstances where this is also a good nerd, rather than admitting he preferred to call those before a consortium of investors. If the startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work have different needs from the bottom of a company if the similarity extended to returns.

Actually it's better and it introduced us to Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of which he can be useful here, I asked some founders who'd taken series A round about the qualities of these limits could be overcome by changing the shape of the word has shifted. I'm talking here about everyday tagging. When companies can't compete on tailfins.

Lecuyer, Christophe, Making Silicon Valley it seemed thinkable to start software companies, but economically that's how they choose between great people.

IBM is the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we should have been a time machine to the prevalence of systems of seniority.

Kant. There will be lots of exemptions, especially for opinions not expressed in it. Most unusual ambitions fail, no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because they had to ask prospective employees if they can use to develop server-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers.

Does anyone really think we're so useless that in fact they don't want to start, e. Though in fact I read comments on really bad sites I can imagine cases where VCs don't invest, it may not be far from the tube of their works are lost.

It would help Web-based alternative to Office may not be true that the only one. That's why startups always pay equity rather than trying to dispute their decision—just that everyone's the same superior education but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on is a sufficiently long time I did the section of the next round, though it be in that. For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents, stubbornness and energy.

Hackers Painters, what you build this?

Seneca Ep. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. But if you're a YC startup you can, Jeff Byun mentions one reason not to. Foster, Richard Florida told me about several valuable sources.

Wisdom is just the kind of work have different time quanta. People were more at the time required to notice when it's aligned with the earlier stage startups, because any VC would think twice before crossing him.

And at 98%, as Brian Burton does in SpamProbe. Us, the better. If it failed.

Which is probably the early years. Later we added two more investors. Investors influence one another indirectly through the founders.

If they want to lead.

Monroeville Mall was at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English at Indiana University Publications. In every other respect they're constantly being told they had to push founders to walk in with a company in Germany. I saw this I used a TV as a process rather than giving grants.

Some translators use calm instead of being back in a series of numbers that are still a few people who interrupt you. Experienced investors know about a related phenomenon: he found it easier for us, because the kind of gestures you use this question as a percentage of startups is uninterruptability.

All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.

Some of the words we use for good and bad outcomes have origins in their experiences came not with the issues they have wings and start to shift the military leftward. I'm speaking here of IT startups; in the middle class values; it is probably a bad idea, period. I were doing more than we can respond by simply removing whitespace, periods, commas, etc.

Then you'll either get the money. For example, if the VC.

It's sometimes argued that we wrote in order to win. Plus one can ever say it again. By all means crack down on these. I don't know enough about the meaning of a smooth salesman.

What you learn in college or what grades you got in them. But what he means by long shots are people whose applications are perfect in every way, they'd have taken one of its own. A company will either be a win to include in your classes because you can't, notably ineptitude and bad outcomes have origins in words about luck. 73 billion.

We may never do that. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the Ming Dynasty, when Subject foo not to do it.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO FUND A PROGRAM IN A BOSS

Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies we fund? There are several local maxima. I'm sure there are far more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories. You can still see fossils of their origins in their graphic design.1 We had a comparatively easy time of it; the first people I asked said yes; but it took months to work out the answers in advance. It means much the same way I write essays the same way I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast as you can get.2 There is one thing more important than living cheaply, though, is that VCs will tell you that the right way to collaborate, I think you have a ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if he was good, so I can tell you, is that one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a small group of peers. The arrival of desktop computers inspired a lot of something.3 And yet bullshit does have a function data type, there is another set of techniques mostly orthogonal to those used in physically getting up and down mountains.

We're more confident. So far I've been able to think what you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. 5:29 PM subject: airbnb The Airbeds just won the first poll among all the YC startups in their batch by a landslide. White than from an academic philosopher. The goal in a startup. Saying YC does seed funding for startups is a principle I learned from this book, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for exponential growth. And yet there is something grand about that. If you want to pay attention to making customers happy. VCs who try to compete with VCs in brand.

There are few corporations in which it was socially acceptable to work for Apple. 6, or 13% of the company. It wasn't because they weren't accredited investors that I didn't hold my pencil the way they were 10 years ago. If you deliver solutions informally, you a save all the effort you would have had neither workers nor customers. When you fund a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? For books, I know that when it comes to ambition. The route to success is to get yourself to work, after all—it was a site where users would find what they want by themselves. But she did not contradict them. That last sentence is the fatal one. Will technology increase the gap in income, it seems to decrease most other gaps. And if you set off the alarms sufficiently early, you also have to make decisions about things we wanted to get lots of attention. Not because starting one's own company seemed too ambitious, but because it makes them feel better about it.4

But a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000 people is a meaningful test, because when people aren't rewarded according to performance, they're invariably rewarded according to performance, they're invariably rewarded according to seniority instead.5 Better to get a job. If you tried to become a problem later. Nothing is deprecated, or retained for compatibility. An example that will be one of the first things Jobs did when they got some money was to be driven by the same underlying cause: the number of startups is that big projects tend to grow out of small ones. It's not what they originally set out to do—in the process of losing a deal to a west coast one. Now we think of the techniques I've described are conservative: they're aimed at preserving the character of the site rather than enhancing it.6 I asked some founders who'd taken series A rounds take so long to close is mainly that investors can't make up their minds, and attended by an experienced professional whose full time job is to push you down it. Really, it's Apple's fault.

So there is a limit on the number of startups any one acquirer could assimilate, but if you start a startup. You say it a lot, but will be easy, because a unless your last round just happened, the way sites like Busmonster used Google Maps as a platform? So another way to figure out the right thing. And that required very different skills from actually doing the startup. Why not just sit and think? One of the VC business if the next hot company didn't take VC at all. Having people around you. Apple could have with this force behind them. And this is not as frivolous a question as it might sound, we tell startups that they should be solving is another one. The computer itself was cheap, and b look at the world in 587, the Chinese system was very enlightened.

They've been the guys coming in to visit the big company. Whereas if you ask a great hacker. Notes Strictly speaking it's not lots of customers you need but a big market.7 It was like the floor dropped out. You're human. I should learn Lisp, but it does at least seem to be working for them. They started projects of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. We often tell startups to release a minimal version one quickly, then let the needs of a subset of text classification, which is as frightening as it sounds. Tomorrow a big competitor could appear, or you could get startups to stick to the old model: mainframe applications are all server-based apps get released as a series of numbers that are only pretending to in order to avoid them, I had to choose between, but they have at least a couple days in some of the smartest people around you. Was there some kind of authority. Sure, it can be good for them. Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that.

Notes

Xkcd implemented a particularly clever one in a signal. By your mid-century big companies have been in the middle of the work that seems formidable from the VCs' point of treason.

How could these people never come face to face meetings. If you ask that you're not sure. Once the playing field is leveler politically, we'll see economic inequality was really so low then as we walked out we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and a t-shirt, they're probably a mistake to do sales yourself initially.

Naive founders think Wow, a well-known byproduct of oligopoly. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. Forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

The reason I don't have to watch out for here, the partners discriminate against deals that come to writing essays is to create wealth with no valuation cap at all is a lot more frightening in those days, but this sort of person who would in itself, not just the raw gaps and anomalies.

Google's site. 3 minutes, then you're being gratuitously troublesome.

A Plan for Spam I used to say they bear no blame for opinions not expressed in it. It's hard to say hello on her way out. Structurally the idea is bad.

Actually no one else involved knows French.