themaebee

[themaebee]

[themaebee]

If I mispronounce your name because it is foreign to my tongue, correct me.

I don’t purposefully allow the accents of your name to fall flat on my tongue like the European English demands or the language to sound chopped and misheard.

If I don’t say your name correctly, don’t shrug and say it’s ok because people have been doing it all your life. Your mother worked hard to name you that name, with all its syllables and apostrophes and hyphens and inflection.

I don’t want to disrespect your heritage, your culture, your great grandmother or grandfather and their struggle.

If I mispronounce your name, forgive me, but don’t let it happen again. Make sure everyone knows your name.

[themaebee]

my favorite picture ever is the one that says “HELL IS FULL, BITCH” and then it has the national suicide prevention hotline on it. it makes me smile every time 

[themaebee]

aunt may does right by her nephew. 

[themaebee]

Y'all need to stop saying shit like “songs with the same bpm”

Beats per minute is a unit. The word you’re looking for is tempo.

If two songs have the same tempo, their bpm are equivalent.

You wouldn’t say two people of the same height have “the same inches.” You would say height. So stop saying two songs have “the same bpm” when you can just say tempo

I’m an assistant band director don’t argue with me

[themaebee]

people who buy pitchforks:

farmers

30% of everyone in a mob

[themaebee]

[themaebee]

i think the coolest thing would be to see a new color

[themaebee]

there’s a ton of shit you can get in life if you’re willing to submit yourself to the mortifying horror of asking for it.

[themaebee]

Maybe medieval people happened upon a T-Rex fossil and came to a relatively logical conclusion that dragons existed.

[themaebee]

[themaebee]

“My students still don’t know what they will never be. Their hope is so bright I can almost see it. I used to value the truth of whether this student or that one would achieve the desired thing. Now I don’t value that truth as much as I value their untested hope. I don’t care that one in 200 of them will ever become what they feel they must become. I care only that I am able to witness their faith in what’s coming next. I no longer believe in anything other than the middle, but my students still believe in beginnings. Ask them, and they will tell you that everything is about to start in just a moment, just one more moment. That beginner’s hope, the hope that ends with the first failure—when I was with the baby I felt that hope all the time.”

- Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness.

[themaebee]

“These people are never just people, they’re deliberate choices held up as icons for some purpose greater than their simple existence, and like most things humans do, the act of choosing says much, much more about the choosers than the choices. The act of anointing Joan Didion as our favorite, our best, our everything, is the act that reveals what we’re trying to say: that we’re cool, that we’re educated, that if we are not young and white and slender and well-dressed and disaffected and sad and committed to the art of writing as an arduous and soul-sucking process that must be endured yet Instagrammed simultaneously, then we will be, at least, as close as possible to those identifiers even if it kills us. Joan Didion, as a writer, is the perfect cipher for the writing process: that mythical time of creation where you are consumed by a painful, wrenching, autonomous urge to lay bare your thoughts, and the resulting sentences are beautiful enough to take away the breath of anyone lucky enough to read them. They remove all oxygen from the writer, leaving only a shell of a woman at her most beautiful: frail, small, weighted down only by a silky dress and nothing as obtrusive as actual human flesh. But it is not, I maintain, Didion’s responsibility to correct this mob mentality. And it is not by any means her fault, despite the opinions of her detractors. In 1979, Barbara Grizzutti Harrison published her essay railing against Didion, ostensibly—though it seems like an indictment of the people who like Didion more than a critique of Didion herself. “Didion’s ‘style’ is a bag of tricks,” Harrison writes, and then produces a series of sentences parodying Play It As It Lays; she accuses Didion of only ever writing about herself, even when she’s supposed to be reporting on a crime; and at the end, Harrison concludes that “Didion’s heart is cold,” the ultimate crime for a woman. The whole thing is smart, and well-written, but it reads like Harrison lost a dinner party debate and is listing all the things she wished she had remembered to say when a chorus of friends and colleagues jumped in to defend Didion. For me, the cruelest sentence is the first: “When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer—not entirely facetiously—that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator’s having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtains.” This is almost unbearably painful to read for reasons I’m sure Harrison would have me executed for: there I am! Right in that sentence! There’s my Instagram account, with the page of the Sontag journal I’m currently reading held just so you can see my fresh manicure; there’s my collection of zines propped up conspicuously on the dresser in my bedroom, so visitors can see my eclectic taste; there’s my writing, carefully constrained sentences that hint at my mental health issues, my sex life, my recreational drug use, revealing my inherent coolness while pretending to casually conceal it. My sympathies lie with my aesthetics, my possessions, my personality bending to material whims and tasteful trends, and not the other way around.”

— Haley Mlotek, Free Joan Didion

[themaebee]

So many pretty princesses!

[themaebee]

[themaebee]

x

[themaebee]

Play Pals — Mother Simulator (pt 2)