http://therumpus.net/2012/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-97/

I believe someday you’ll know that in your heart. I think years from now you’ll look back at this time of your life and you’ll see that this was your growing up. One of the hardest things about doing that—I mean, really, truly, actually growing up—is that in order to do so we must come to terms with the past. And for a lot of us who didn’t get as kids what we needed to get from the people who were supposed to give it to us, we can’t really grow up until we find a way to give what we need to ourselves.
But that’s also one of the most beautiful things. Because we can. We have the power to heal what needs to be healed. We get to give ourselves that. We have the capacity to stand before the scorching flames and decide what to swallow and what to cast out. That’s where you are, Ashamed and Afraid. You have arrived at the fire. Here’s the bread. Grab a hunk.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dear-tv/broad-city-season-two-episode-six-the-matrix

My favorite episodes—“Hurricane Wanda,” “Destination: Wedding,” even the non-underground parts of “Knockoffs”—tend to be rooted in relatively realistic events that become exaggerated through Abbi and Ilana’s involvement. The hurricane party becomes a scatological murder mystery, a missed train ride to Long Island becomes an urban horror odyssey, a Shiva becomes a celebration of non-normative gender roles, a long wait at a Chinese restaurant becomes a closet drama, a lost car in a parking garage becomes a descent into hell, Mary gets her toe stuck in the faucet and we learn a lot about marriage. Broad City, like its situation comedy forebears, works well with baseline ordinary situations that allow our broads the widest possible latitude for zaniness and improvisation. We want so much to spend time with these women that we will return every week despite the lack of a narrative arc. Leaning too hard on the wacky scenario as a building block mis-recognizes what makes this show so great, so watchable and so moving sometimes.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dear-tv/dear-television-broad-city-season-two-episode-five-hashtag-fomo

I wouldn’t have guessed that teasing out the gap between Abbi-with-Ilana and Abbi-without-Ilana would make for compelling television. But it does, because Broad City strikes a balance between the broads’ perspectives, a kind of devil’s bargain we barely notice because its bias is so seductive. It’s this: We consistently get more access to Ilana’s bonkers experience of reality. Conversely, we get significantly more access to Abbi’s inner life. Abbi, as we know her, agonizes over the gaps between what she wants and what she feels she can say. Scenes where she babbles into her phone about stained underwear to avoid Jeremy are some of my favorites. Ilana’s psyche, on the other hand, is a lithe Mobius strip with a single side. Ilana can ask her boss for permission to leave early because she wants to go to a party and will him to say yes because she can’t imagine why he’d say no; Abbi still can’t bring herself to tell Trey she wants to be a trainer because she can imagine all the reasons he might refuse. Ilana’s id is on the surface. Abbi’s spurts out marvelously whenever she’s alone—and her insanity is consequently a lot more intense.
It’s a lovely but very particular dynamic, and it’s particularity became clear in this episode because we’re still—even now—seeing Abbi mostly through Ilana’s eyes. Think about it: Abbi, as we know her in Broad City, almost always appears weaker without Ilana. That makes sense if we’re mostly in Ilana’s POV; who doesn’t want to be needed? But what both Val and the Bed Bath & Beyond dancing suggest is that there’s a different Abbi—an Abbi so confident, joyful and full of hidden talents that Ilana’s concept of her, however loving, doesn’t square. Ilana’s FOMO is real and familiar. Who among us hasn’t been surprised by a version of a close friend that we never knew existed? Or wondered how we never saw that aspect of them before?
This is especially common in cases where friendships harden into Catalyst Friend and Follower Friend. We’ve all had it happen: A friendship develops along a faultline that results in one person becoming the designated cool one. She sets the agenda, her slang becomes the lingua franca of the friendship, and she socially engineers the joint experience. It can be a lovely thing, every bit as dynamic and magical as Ilana makes the world she and Abbi share. But it can also sacrifice the quieter magical undercurrents of the Follower Friend’s secret inner world. Ilana’s love is loud, external. Abbi’s lunacy is quiet, clitoral.
The show is mostly a celebration of the broads’ friendship, and this episode explores what the Catalyst Friend misses and that paradigm’s hidden costs. Abbi isn’t plagued by FOMO, but, as Follower Friend, she obligingly follows Ilana in search of “the Narnia of Party-as.” It doesn’t work out particularly well for her. Abbi wanted to stay at Trey’s to ask him for the trainer job. Ilana makes them leave. Abbi thought Trey didn’t believe her about the tapeworm, Ilana stared at her until she agreed he did. It may have been a magical night for Ilana, but for Abbi, it was kinda bleak: she’s hungover, late, and consigned to cleaning up after exercise balls covered in barf. She didn’t ask Trey to be trainer, and she might have missed her chance (although let’s face it, he probably did believe her about the tapeworm). Sadder still: She, like Narnia’s Susan Pevensie, has absolutely no memory of her glory days.

Val is the antidote to Ilana’s FOMO—and is so present in the present that she speaks in palindromes. “You’ll never know if you never try, and you’ll never try if you never know,” she says at the roof party, as she starts transitioning (her red cup has turned into a giant plastic goblet). “Val about town, town about Val,” she mutters as she’s leading them underground to the speakeasy. Once inside, she’s wisdom itself and a maker of moments: Ilana reaches for phone to text Jaime, but the bartender stops her and tells her she can’t, and, anyway, why would she, when there’s Val to experience? When Ilana says—for the nth time—that her FOMO’s through the roof, Val says, “if you worry about missing out all night, you never bother to actually live.”
“I feel like a different girl,” Abbi says hopefully to the trainer who wants to dish about the lame cleaner who got her nose pierced. “You didn’t recognize me, did you?” Abbi’s so sweetly proud of the different version of herself she’s produced through that piercing. By the end of the episode, she’s right: She is a different girl—a girl who loves diamonds so much that she can’t help but eat them. (How great was that moment?) By morning, though, she’s thrown it all up. The diamond’s gone from her nose (and stomach), the tapeworm’s gone from her anus and Val’s gone underground again. Unlike Evan, though, I suspect she’ll be back. Now that Ilana’s gotten a glimpse of her, maybe Abbi’ll meet her too when she occasionally come up for cigarettes.
This episode is—like all episodes of Broad City—a love story. What Ilana learns this time round is that they can chase parties all night, but there’s no place like Val.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/id-girls

She and I were wandering through Chelsea Market. Glazer was on lunch break from the writers’ room. She stopped at a grocer’s for some peppers and other veggies, which she loaded into a sack. She likes to cook and to work out, but finds very little time these days to do either. In my presence, she was reserved, thoughtful, solicitous. She said hello to people—a guard by an elevator, a man stacking pineapples—and ran ahead to open a door for a woman pushing a stroller. She told the woman seating us for lunch that she admired her earrings, and the woman, blushing, explained that they were cufflinks—family heirlooms. “Good job, dude,” Glazer said. She got preoccupied by a preteen girl who was having lunch with her parents next to us, and who was quietly crying. She often notes children, dogs, and old people when they walk by. Willa Paskin, in Slate, compared her to Bill Murray, for the combination of deep-seated kindness and insouciance, devil-may-care mixed with we-are-all-God’s-creatures.
She says that she wants women to like her. “Men, I don’t care.”

http://grantland.com/features/broad-city-season-2-comedy-central-abbi-jacobson-ilana-glazer/

But at its core, Broad City is still a love story — just one about two hapless, pot-smoking, sexually experimental, striving, swearing, struggling, inseparable young gal pals running amok on the streets of modern-day New York City. The main characters, Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler, are completely, unshakably obsessed with one another. They are intoxicated by (and often in) each other’s presence, full partners in crime and life. Their New York is the New York that can be experienced only as a duo: a kaleidoscopic playground made for two, the kind of cinematic, heightened fun-house version of the city that accompanies the most epic, swooning romances. Abbi and Ilana live separately but share nearly everything: drugs, stomach issues, sexual fantasies, shattering ego blows, visions of grandiosity, and high-stakes capers to solve low-stakes problems. They staunchly refuse to judge one another’s outsize behavior; instead, they practice radical mutual acceptance. Between them there are no boundaries, no topic too taboo. Consider a scene from the new season: As the pair sit snuggled in the same blanket, on the same bed, drinking the same type of iced mocha lattes, Abbi expresses horror about potentially pooping herself one day during childbirth. Ilana soothes her, telling her that “if it happens to me, you have my permission not to look.” Abbi sighs: “I’m going to see you give birth, then?” “Bitch, duh,” Ilana says. “Who else would be my focal point?” They are codependent, co-obsessed, copilots.

Thus Broad City was born in 2009 as a scrappy YouTube web series. The first episode is just two minutes long and shot on zero budget. In it, Ilana gives a homeless man a $10 bill and tries to get change back so she and Abbi can still afford bagels. Even the early webisodes establish their comic interplay: “Ilana” is the feisty tomboy, an imp with untamable curly hair, an eternal optimist in the way that certain con men are: The world can always be manipulated for her pleasure. She dresses like a combination of a ’90s fly girl and a postmillennial health goth, tiny shorts and basketball jerseys, her belly button constantly exposed to the open air. She hates work and is always broke, but still considers herself to be on a mogul trajectory. “Abbi” is the dreamer. She wants to be a famous artist. Her hero is Oprah, whose likeness she has tattooed onto the small of her back. She is not the straight man, but instead is just neurotic in a more subdued way; she channels her anxiety into a rich imaginative life. She wears shabby cardigans and low-top sneakers, the uniform of a girl who can only afford big box stores (the one time she decides to go on a shopping spree, she tells the saleswoman that she will be returning the dress within the month). Both women medicate, meditate, and celebrate with marijuana. Both have faith in each other’s inherent greatness: They are each the best person the other has ever met. This is where the comedy comes in: They never, ever say no to each other. It is only, always, “yes and … ” And then the high jinks ensue.

“Look, sometimes it is still hard,” sighed Glazer. “Some people are scared of us, and some think we are dumb little girls. But the way we combat that is just being ourselves in meetings. And having a partner makes that so easy, because when all else fails, I’ll just talk across the table at Abbi like we are chilling by ourselves.”
“Honestly, we regularly forget that other people are in these meetings with us,” Jacobson said.” We are so used to just talking to each other. We do it all day long, all night long. I’m on Skype with Ilana when I go to bed and then again when I wake up. It’s not like we never have disagreements, but we also just really like talking to each other the most.”
“And it freaks people out!” said Glazer. “There is so much power in being able to look comfortable in a conference room, and I’m not sure dudes in suits are used to seeing women do that.”
You can see how Glazer and Jacobson would intimidate anyone in a room with them: They talk so quickly that they seem to share a stream of consciousness. They talk like all BFFs in the era of instant messaging, sending verbal links back and forth about things they saw or read, saving little bits and pieces for later. They traffic in pop-culture references and Internet slang; they are each other’s favorite IRL Twitter feed. Ultimately, snippets of these conversations will end up in the show. They are doing work even when they are not working, building on their banter, winding in and out of silly voices and secret handshakes. Their chemistry is electric, but also familiar. Anyone with a best friend would recognize it.
When you hang out with Glazer and Jacobson, it doesn’t take much to spark the verbal chain of chemical reactions that can keep them bouncing back and forth with obscure facts, gossip, and ephemera for hours. All you have to do is set the top spinning. When Glazer ordered hot water with lemon at the diner, I mentioned that this was a very Hollywood thing to do.

It went on like this for the rest of the hour — when Glazer stopped, Jacobson started, and neither is more high-energy than the other; instead, their conversation flowed in an ever-shifting osmosis. They often go off on fluttery tangents, sounding stoned even when they aren’t. Apropos of nothing, Jacobson started to talk about art school. “I know this is, like, really abstract or whatever, but my favorite teacher once said that the painting isn’t the art, but the art is the space between the viewer and the painting. So when we make the show, we are always talking about how the show is really in between what we make and what the viewer thinks of it.”
“You are so right, dude,” Glazer said. “We just want people to feel less lonely after watching it.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/id-girls

“The rule is: Specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked,” Amy Poehler, the show’s executive producer, told me. “There’s something about them that’s really watchable and organic and interesting. There aren’t enough like them on TV: confident, sexually active, self-effacing women, girlfriends who love each other the most.”

“Women always have to be the eye rollers, as the men make a mess,” Poehler said. “We didn’t want that. Young women can be lost, too.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books put them in the tradition of “unruly women,” like Roseanne and Lucy: “Unruly women have unruly bodies—they’re too big for their clothes, their hair refuses to stay down. They talk too much, laugh too loudly, say things ladies shouldn’t. They fart and burp and poop; they make themselves known, refuse taming.”

At first glance, Ilana is the alpha (the banana man) and Abbi the sidekick (the feed), but, in defiance of double-act convention, Jacobson and Glazer frequently subvert these roles, big-sis status shifting between them, or vanishing entirely, in part because, in the context of “Broad City,” neither aspires to it. The extent to which their characters are established and yet constantly surprising each other gives their interplay a kinetic unpredictability that may or may not owe something to their background in improv, or perhaps to the fact that they really are making it up as they go along. In real life, neither, it seems, is the dominant one. Jacobson is more confident and shrewder than her character on the show. Glazer is much more resolute. “This feels like a marriage, in the way that marriage is basically a business decision,” Glazer said the first day I met them.

And it strikes me that it’s a very loving and tender one. Everything about the episode visually, from the focus on one specific place to the long camera shots, was about lingering. And in that regard, the formal qualities of the episode seemed to be a sort of response to another ongoing topic of conversation: death, loss, time slipping by.
This is clearest in the episode’s focus on Ilana’s will. It’s a strange sort of insight into Ilana’s character that, on her birthday, she starts thinking about death! And I think it’s an interesting question, how we’re asked to respond to her childlike 23-year-old anxiety. Are we supposed to share it? On the one hand, it’s clearly a manifestation of Ilana’s ridiculous self-involvement that she treats 23 as the beginning of the end. But on the other hand, she’s not wrong that that part of life goes by quite quickly. The lingering formal qualities seems to validate, at an emotional level, Ilana’s sense of time passing and our sense of nostalgia; as in the “Knock Offs” episode, I was impressed by the show’s ability to register a sadness and a tenderness that sitcoms can’t often accommodate.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dear-tv/dear-television-broad-city-season-two-episode-ten-st-marks

Sarah: Well, let me answer that on an anecdotal level: I take pleasure in the Peeing Millennial precisely because she signals freedom to me. It’s a freedom that’s closely associated with one of the main pleasures I take in watching this show in general: It is mindblowingly pleasurable to watch women—it’s usually but not always Ilana—completely fail to follow the rules of feminine propriety and to escape unscathed. Like, there are no repercussions. (Here, following up on your Sister Carrie reference, let’s think about how Ilana is absolutely the opposite of Lily Bart. Or Tess. Or Edna Pontellier. All variously unruly women who die. That’s what’s usually happens to unruly women!)
As a woman, I think I have a very strong ingrained sense that if you don’t keep everything together, and spend a rather considerable amount of energy making yourself attractive to other people, shit is just going to hit the fucking fan. Like, no one will ever love you and no one will ever hire you or take care of you and you will not be okay, in a vague but nevertheless terrifying way. (And I say that as a woman who really carries my femininity very lightly!) So to watch this woman just not give a shit and be fine – yes, that does signal freedom!
But the condition of her being “fine” is her discovery, or her confidence, that she’ll be okay even without the safety net of public approval. Or, rather, she is fine because of the security that comes from knowing you have other ways to marshal care and comfort. That is a security which people of color, in the U.S., have typically been denied.
Which brings us more concretely to race. Another example of unruly/abject behavior is Ilana doing the “tongue thing” at—or, I guess, about—the handsome black man she passes on the street. How do you read that? At the most basic level, I think it’s a moment that “knows” that Ilana is safe in deploying her “tongue thing” in a way that the black man is not. That’s a moment, I think, about the power differential around race. Yes?

As you noted above, this episode is an ethnographic encounter with themselves. It marks their privilege, marks their feelings of touristic superiority over their surroundings, at the same time that it refuses to validate that superiority.

So, how do you know whom to trust? People worthy of your trust are happy to earn it. It’s the truth. Everyone in my inner circle never once expected me to trust them blindly, nor did I expect them to trust me. We demonstrated our worthiness by consistently being loyal and dependable. Actions matter. Words matter. Loyalty matters.
Good people exist in this industry, but it takes time to find them. Be patient. They’re worth the wait.

http://www.scriptmag.com/features/balls-of-steel-navigating-hollywood-11-ways-to-develop-your-hustle

http://thealdentedentist.tumblr.com/

for cooking http://www.npr.org/event/music/378668756/we-cant-just-settle-broad-city-meets-sleater-kinney

you may just need some time away from your own perspective.

“22 was pretty great for me. I mean, that was the year I met you.”

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/fargos-second-season-premiere-everyone-hears-stori-226733#comment-2304401567

Lifeless Husk • 4 months ago The second Ed and Peggy sat down to dinner, I turned to my wife and said, "There is nothing more dangerous in this world than an unimaginative man who loves a discontented wife." Then she made a lot of personal comments that I won't get into here, but I stand by that assessment.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/fargos-second-season-premiere-everyone-hears-stori-226733#comment-2305070500

York • 4 months ago It's interesting how both seasons of Fargo (and the movie to a large extent) undermine our usual expectations about protagonists. Think of how often we're rooting for ambitious, hard-driving, uncompromising, cynical characters in modern TV shows. That's especially true in shows centering on police officers. Fargo, in contrast, seems to praise the idea of not being ambitious -- of being happy with a small but satisfying life with family, and of being generally kind to people. We see that in Marge Gunderson's happiness with her sweet but unglamorous husband (and her in aborted half-date with her former classmate, who seemingly promises a more exciting life but turns out to be a mess). We see that in Gun Grimley being fine in Season 1 with giving up the police work he isn't cut out for and becoming a mailman. And we see it this season in Lou Solverson's eagerness to let local law enforcement investigate the case. These are usually decisions that a TV show would use to identify a character as a boob who lacks the drive needed to succeed. Fargo, in contrast, treats these all as commendable decisions.

https://medium.com/higher-thoughts/bring-the-quiet-with-you-152c5dae43d8#.2hgmixpei

bring the quiet https://medium.com/higher-thoughts/friends-like-this-9c3b22a010f2#.nigh7tqct

withheld feeding when every day was a gift...

http://variety.com/2016/tv/features/television-race-diversity-ratings-1201712266/

Barris and his writers have wrung an admirable number of pointed jokes from the way the white and black characters talk past each other and cheerfully treat Dre with a combination of condescension, friendly obliviousness and needy insecurity (everyone wants Dre to be their token black friend).

"the most salient thing about you is responsibility"
value of anticipating needs vs "ask for what you need"

c taco truck

keepaway = thinking of you? hmm

the martian (2015)

tell them that i love what i do, and i'm really good at it. and that i'm dying for something big and beautiful and greater than me. tell them i said i can live with that. and tell them thank you for being my mom and dad.

Some_fan NCDancer • 3 months ago I'm not quite there yet with the show, but admittedly I find Jane increasingly irritating as well. When that nanny refused to work for "someone like you!", I cheered. Having to eat some humble pie with the professor served her well, too. Finally somebody teaches her some boundaries - having been the 'adult' in her family for so long clearly distorted some perceptions there. The most grinding might be the psychology embedded in the whole virginity-thing - the assumption that there is a 'perfect' version of everything. In a way the people around her seem more or less just a cast for the fantasy play in her head, and she is judging people on whether or not they fit the assigned role, not on who they really are. Even herself. Immature indeed. ›

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/jane-virgin-stumbles-tearing-down-relationships-th-228886#comment-2376208474

can't have both?

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2014/apr/14/broad-city-comedy-genius

Abbi and Ilana don’t just reject the exacting standards most women feel they have to live up to, they still feel great about themselves. And their self-esteem is probably directly attributable to their unflinching support of each other and the pleasure they take in each other’s company. This is my true feminine ideal. Not checking off a series of boxes in a race to “have it all,” but recognizing that nothing is ever going to be perfect and investing in each other is always a safe bet. “I dreamed of a world on the screen that looked like the real one, populated with chill women who refer to everyone as ‘dude,’” writes Grantland’s Molly Lambert. “Broad City is that world. May it run forever.” For ever and ever. Amen.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/tina-amy-and-the-female-fckup-a-filmography/ http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/the-triumph-of-the-platonic-rom-com/463200/

The women’s partnership, crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives. Which is also to say that Abbi and Ilana are co-stars in a rom-com that is rom-y in every way but the most basic. That they don’t sleep together is, in their world, very much beside the point. The broads of Broad City are straight, for the most part (though “sexuality exists on a continuum!” Ilana points out during the new season). They sleep (or, often, try to sleep) with guys. Ilana has a boyfriend, kinda. Abbi is looking for a boyfriend, kinda. All that is B-plot. The guys (and, occasionally, girls) here fill the traditional rom-comic role of “the best friend,” ranging from the boring-but-supportive to the wacky: They’re around, but they’re very much not the point. Instead, the women’s mental and emotional energies—and those of the show that contains them—are focused on each other. There Abbi is, to help Ilana remove the 12-pound bike chain whose key she has lost and that she’s had belted around her all day. There is Ilana, to soothe Abbi (“Yankee Candle Store, Vanilla Bean; B, B, and B, right when it opens”) after the competitive streak in Abbi streaks a little too hard. (“How DARE you lie to your wife!” Ilana says, when Abbi initially demurs about her participation in Soulstice’s pseudo-Olympics. “I hear your teeth grinding through the phone! You’re at a competitive event, aren’t you?”) There they are, as they always are, to stop everything and help each other out. Their lives revolve around each other. So much so that Ilana’s pseudo-proposal to Abbi after their brushes with tragicomic deaths comes across as not only fitting, but fated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/health/21well.html

Aristotle, in his foundational treatise on friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics, wrote that a close friend is “another self”—a person you love for who they are, not for the pleasure or usefulness they give you.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/308654/

But as the 19th century progressed, and especially with the sexualization of marriage in the early 20th century, these older social ties were drastically devalued in order to strengthen the bond between the husband and wife—with contradictory results. As Coontz told me, “When a couple’s relationship is strong, a marriage can be more fulfilling than ever. But by overloading marriage with more demands than any one individual can possibly meet, we unduly strain it, and have fewer emotional systems to fall back on if the marriage falters.” Some even believe that the pair bond, far from strengthening communities (which is both the prevailing view of social science and a central tenet of social conservatism), weakens them, the idea being that a married couple becomes too consumed with its own tiny nation of two to pay much heed to anyone else. In 2006, the sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian published a paper concluding that unlike singles, married couples spend less time keeping in touch with and visiting their friends and extended family, and are less likely to provide them with emotional and practical support. They call these “greedy marriages.” I can see how couples today might be driven to form such isolated nations—it’s not easy in this age of dual-career families and hyper-parenting to keep the wheels turning, never mind having to maintain outside relationships as well. And yet we continue to rank this arrangement above all else!

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/01/marriage-and-two-kids-a-most-scandalous-fantasy.html http://www.colorlines.com/articles/little-known-black-history-facts-talks-outside-family-so-what

http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinebienkowski/how-to-make-the-perfect-stock#.fta5kJw5G

gq.com/story/r-kelly-confessions

When Robert Kelly was 3 years old, growing up poor with a single mother on Chicago's South Side, construction started on a building a few miles away in the center of town. It was to be called the Sears Tower, and for nearly 25 years it would be the tallest building in the world. The tower—which was actually renamed the Willis Tower in 2009, though many Chicagoans, including Kelly, still refer to it by its original name—would also come to play a complicated role in the psychic geography of the 48-year-old man sitting up here now, looking down upon the city and to Lake Michigan beyond. When Kelly was about 9, he and two friends rode their bicycles in from their neighborhood, and when they arrived, they challenged one another to stand next to this tower. “A lot of kids were scared to do it because it actually felt like it was moving and falling over,” he remembers. Also, Kelly's elder brother had told them that if they got too close, it really would fall on them. The way he remembers it, his friends chickened out, but not him. “I actually did it,” he says. “I put my hands up to the Sears Tower and I stood up and looked dead at it. I stood there for a long time. That's why I wanted to do this interview here.” And what did you think when you looked up at it? “I said, ‘I'm coming for you.’ ” What did you mean? “The top of it. The height, the massiveness. You know, the strength that it carries. I remember wanting that, somehow.” In what way? “In my life, I wanted to feel tall. I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to be tall as the Sears Tower. I wanted to be on top of the Sears Tower. I wanted to be as strong as the Sears Tower feels. When my mom would be on the highway, I would always look at the Sears Tower as: That's where I want to go, that's where I want to be.”

Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are, or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery. […] Compassion is one of the purest springs of love.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/anne-truitt-humility-compassion-righteousness/

https://medium.com/@jamievaron/breathe-you-re-okay-a5644c4e96e4#.salpayf0d

I want you to know that you can try to be better, you can work hard, you can do all the things you think you need to do, but none of that will do anything to prove to you that you are worth your space in this world. The only person that can decide that is you. You. You decide how much space you get to take up. You decide how much your voice is worth. You can work yourself ragged and accrue everything you ever thought you needed, but if you don’t believe who you are underneath the glitz, nothing will matter. A fevered mind has a funny way of turning gold into dust. I want you to know that there’s nothing to prove, that even if you do all the things that you or someone else told you that you couldn’t do, there will be no glory in it. There is no glory in living a life in search of undoing a feeling.

I want you to know that if you need to feel loved, please look around at your life and see the magic everywhere. You may not have a thousand friends or a perfect family, but you have your people and they matter, even if the number of those you can count on is in the single-digits. Don’t throw that away looking for more. I know it seems like admiration, fame, social validation make you feel the love you may not feel for yourself, but it’s so fleeting it’s dangerous to stake anything on. Attention is not love. Double-taps are not reminders of your adequacy. Favorites, likes, followers are not an indictment of your value, no matter how big or small the number reaches or falls. If you’ve found yourself entirely too consumed with the digital trail of admirers you do or don’t have, you need to remind yourself that you are valuable, as you are, with nothing or no one paying attention. Your value exists without condition. I want you to know that strength is not what you think it is, what the world has told you it is. Strength is not your loud voice, your angry rally cries. Strength is in keeping a positive heart in a negative world, a sensitive soul in a cruel world that often feels beyond the realm of soulless. There is a strength in not letting this world swallow you and spit you out as someone who thinks preaching their opinion off the highest mountain is what brave people do. Courage is listening when your knuckles are going white from clenching down on the arms of your chair. Courage is respect and not letting any number of heartbreaks sour you from believing that there is good, there is love, there is something in this mad world to have hope for. I want you to know that, within you, lies something integral to this world. You’re a puzzle piece that fits into the grander framework of humanity. Today is a whole new day and you can turn it all around in one quick decision to do something, anything different than how you’ve done it before. Change comes slowly and then all at once. You will think you’re going down the long tunnel of darkness until it happens, until you’re renewed. Trust that it’s coming. Trust that something bigger is forming. Trust your tender heart. Trust your wild ideas. Take the chance. Say no when it doesn’t light you up. Follow whatever within you tells you that you’re doing something that makes you come alive. I want you to know that the only waste here would for you to sleep through your life. The only thing you could do wrong is to opt-out of who you are, to forgo whatever fights to come out of you.

https://medium.com/@jamievaron/why-you-can-t-think-your-way-into-self-acceptance-66ee793d5b47#.my698o15e

There will be so many people like you once you start sharing who you really are. You will start writing the truth, not some “branded” version of yourself zipped up perfectly for public consumption. No, this will be messy, weird truth and you will sift through your past to dig up even juicier, messier, weirder truth and you will keep sharing it. It will free you.

You will learn how to be the perfect woman: accommodating, chill, nice, deferring. Then you will meet an older woman who busts through your life and demands you stop being these things. You will then disappoint a lot of people and it will feel uncomfortable right before it feels so fucking freeing you can’t believe it took you so long to use the word “no” in a real way.

You will have to give yourself permission to be great. You keep wanting someone to come along to give you permission to share all your gifts with the world, don’t you? You think big names, big websites, fancy titles, and fancy paychecks actually permit you to be talented and loved, but they don’t. You permit you. You tell yourself what you’re worth. You determine your value. Then, you make demands.

All your big ambitions will be nothing if you are not joyful and happy in the mundanity of life. You will avoid the mundane for so long that you will feel a constant dissatisfaction, unless you are doing Big Things and making Big Announcements. Eventually, you will simplify and you will find joy in the little things. It will be a fucking revolution and it will be the only thing which will give way to those bigger ambitions. You will thrive, but only by tiny, everyday steps, the ones you’ve avoided for most of your life.

https://medium.com/@jamievaron/20-real-things-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-when-i-was-a-teenage-girl-8d04ec9291b0#.h0bigolcl

http://ntrsctn.com/elevate/2016/01/2016-resolutions/changes

A right-when-you-wake-up routine doesn’t need to be 20-steps-long to be effective. It just needs to keep you mindful, present, and aware that you’re taking care of yourself and putting your own needs at the forefront of the day.

Identify the 1-3 things that would drastically alter your life if you did them consistently.

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/courtney-martin-new-friendship-is-the-last-great-romance/8367

While my oldest friends know who I’ve been, my new friends help me understand who I’m becoming.

This especially resonates with me because I feel it's the connection we seek through others that makes us feel like we belong to and with them, like the romance and magnetism of the unknown you describe with female friends.

“The real bittersweet aspect is young adulthood begins with all this time for friendship, and friendship just having this exuberant, profound importance for figuring out who you are and what’s next,” Rawlins says. “And you find at the end of young adulthood, now you don’t have time for the very people who helped you make all these decisions.” http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466/

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/-em-girls-em-is-right-friendships-are-more-dramatic-than-romances/283874/

There’s no handy script in place for downgrading to just “friends” or “acquaintances,” so, often, you don’t cease to be someone’s best friend until they decree as much. That last part is what I think Girls is portraying so well. Marnie and Hannah, the central best-friendship of the show, are at a point where maybe their partnership has run its course, but there’s no established way to do the “polite friend breakup”—so Marnie’s trying to fix it, while Hannah’s just trying to duck out of it. This part, certainly, resonates with me. I’ve found myself in that position of awkwardly wanting to quit being friends but not become enemies in the process—just wanting to make the “slow fade” happen faster, then part ways and leave it at that. Is it a turning point in their friendship? That’s tough to say—but it’s certainly a turning point in how I as a viewer understand the show’s portrayal of their friendship. One thing I can’t stop thinking about is how Hannah says “It’s not like the four of us have had any real fun together in the last, like what? Two years?” Looking at the timeline of the show, we met these four friends in the pilot episode somewhere between one and two years ago. .. But even as a woman—and even as someone who strongly endorses supportive, patient, close female friendships—I say, for goodness sake, prune your friend tree rationally and often. Don’t let sentimental attachments keep you surrounded by people who stress you out. .. Girls isn't just about girls. It's about the strange, maddening evolution of friendships between young people who change. .. now, it's clear what’s been going on. She's “so fucking sick” of her friends, and she wants a new life.

respect:

it's frustrating to watch hannah steamroll over marine. hannah seems to feel that because marnie is so uptight, she doesn't deserve any respect - the only way hannah can deal with her is to ignore marnie's plans/needs, and steamroll over, because in hannah's eyes, marine is being so ridiculous, that there's no other way. Marine is so far in one direction, hannah acts completely the opposite. now, i see both sides here. marnie is ridiculously uptight and difficult to deal with. BUT, she planned this great, nice weekend for her friends, and she deserves the courtesy of hannah respecting those plans and the space of marnie's mom's friend. i don't think they will stay friends---- they are completely different! marnie needs to find friends who will appreciate weekends planned like that, and hannah needs to find friends who are OK with her self-involved ways.

http://therumpus.net/2012/01/transformation-and-transcendence-the-power-of-female-friendship/

This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love.

half

lesson of the day: "you never know who you're dealing with"

playing god. that's ultimately what it is. pride saying i know better, i know best, let me care with all this meddling legalism was in me already, church just draws it out. now it's finding the right fit for one i don't trust he will take care of ____ without me. how do i translate that to this new context?

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/31/how-to-love-thich-nhat-hanh/

BEST MOMENT last night was chelsea peretti nailing a joke and then high-fiving a million angels. followed closely by her reveal that she's an entp sometimes

mr robot 107

it's so strange. i miss us. why is that strange? because i never thought i had to. to 20:22

http://luckypeach.com/fantastic-mr-fox/

The name Ubuntu, Dawson tells me, comes from an ancient word and philosophy that means, “I am what I am because of who we all are.” It’s an apt way to describe any restaurant, but especially this one.

After Fox and I finish talking, I stick around for dinner. I order the lavender-sugared marcona almonds—the same almonds that Frank Bruni ate at Ubuntu{12}—I wonder what it would have been like to eat them in Napa in 2008, instead of in Santa Monica in 2014, and I wonder if they would have tasted different, or more perfect somehow. And it occurs to me that maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe food is supposed to disappear, and a meal shouldn’t be around forever—shouldn’t live on in thousands of Yelp reviews and eGullet and Eater posts and photographs—analyzed and praised and hyped ad infinitum. Maybe a night should be allowed to be over, and a meal should be allowed to end.

chrissy on characters

writers are crushing ego and insecurity and schizo: have to become best friends - more than real humans, they live in my head so i have to fully believe in them and who they are while knowing their fatal flaws