but therefore

http://www.scriptmag.com/features/balls-of-steel-navigating-hollywood-11-ways-to-develop-your-hustle http://www.scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise http://www.scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-major-character-types-protagonist http://djchuang.com/2013/looking-for-more-asian-americian-christian-voices/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120301165144/http://reallivepreacher.com/everything?page=5 http://tertiumsquid.com/personal-reflection/story-so-far/ http://www.stubhub.com/los-angeles-dodgers-tickets-dodgers-vs-giants-4-16-2016/event/9444031/?sort=row+asc&cb=1&ticket_id=1184785480

Roy: I'll always worry about you, Al. I like worrying about you. That's the deal.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2016/03/jeff_nichols_midnight_special_with_michael_shannon_reviewed.html

So let’s dispel with this fiction that Jeff Nichols doesn’t know what he’s doing. Jeff Nichols knows exactly what he’s doing—he always has and he always will. Midnight Special is rather plainly a story about faith. Alton’s road trip really only takes us from one arbitrary point on the map to another, because the only journey that Nichols is interested in chronicling is our own. Taking us from obliviousness, to skepticism, and finally to belief, Midnight Special invites viewers to experience true surrender to the unknown (and, ultimately, the unknowable). The narrative trajectory is like a simulation of what it must be like to encounter a child like Alton, who seems pretty normal until a thick blue tractor beam shoots out of his eyes and offers anyone caught in its light a vision of … something. But all parents see their kid as the second coming; the challenge is in surrendering children to the world at large and trusting that the universe will do right by the next generation (and vice versa).
That’s a fraught emotional process, readying yourself to relinquish your child. The problem is that Nichols fails to dramatize it.

JN: This film is a culmination of a narrative experiment that I started with "Shotgun Stories," to try to remove as much exposition as I possibly could. Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; I built character backstories for all these people, and an entire story for this place Alton wants to get to, and then I made a rule – no character can speak about something that the other character already knows about.

http://www.indiewire.com/article/midnight-special-interview-jeff-nichols-michael-shannon-kirsten-dunst-joel-edgerton-20160309

Why do you and Jeff have such a strong bond?
MS: We kind of travel similar paths in life, we have similar points of view and perspectives and experiences that are common. Like our upbringing, where we come from, the South, our experience of being parents. I feel there’s an archetype that Jeff summons me to do, which is the inarticulate man who’s full of thoughts and feelings and emotions and yet not really capable of expressing himself. That’s something that I can recall from growing up, being around people like that.
JN: It’s different with the smaller roles he does for me, like "Mud" and the next film, "Loving." But in these lead roles he allows me to write more efficiently. He carries so much subtext on his face. He’s able to fill in all of the things that I want to purposefully leave blank, he understands the character and the situation and the context, and is somehow able to present all that without saying a word. And that’s a very unique quality. It allows me to write this way, because I know Mike will be there for me.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/jeff-nichols-talks-making-midnight-special-casting-and-why-adam-driver-is-the-most-important-actor-of-our-generation-20160322

And so I had to ask myself, “Why am I around as a father?” And the answer to that question, I think, is just to try to understand who my son is, to try to help him understand who he is, and try to help him become who he’s supposed to be and be happy. That’s what fatherhood is about, that’s what parenthood is about, and that became the trajectory for Mike Shannon’s character and Kirsten Dunst’s character through the film. Then all of a sudden, this kind of silly, sci-fi chase movie starts to feel a little less silly.

Todd Rohal, another indie director, agreed. “If the characters know more than we do, that’s an interesting mystery,” he said. “But if the movie clearly knows more than we do, then we get frustrated.” This is a central issue for Nichols. He is fascinated by an audience’s “threshold for ambiguity.” With less spelled out, viewers become active participants in the unfolding of the story, he said. “And that’s really cool, if you can get people to basically rewatch scenes in your movie in their heads while it’s still going on. What’s really important is the bigger themes and emotions that you’re trying to get people to access.”

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/jeff-nichols-midnight-special/

Nichols knew that there was a limit to how much confusion any audience could take. And he always bumped right up against it. In each of his previous films, he’d omitted an explanatory scene he’d believed was essential. He’d never regretted it. Case in point, Shotgun Stories: Nichols filmed a scene that explains how Shannon’s character got gruesome shotgun scars on his back. “Deleting that scene was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. The story got better, because the audience began building that story for themselves. And it clarified for me what my approach needs to be. Like, OK: no backstory,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that in removing much of the exposition in Midnight Special he’d “taken that concept possibly too far.”

You've cited Close Encounters and Starman as influences, and some of those setpieces have been kind of reinterpreted and recontextualized here. What about those elements was interesting to you? Well, there are a lot of aesthetic parallels and we can talk about those all day long, because I'm into them, obviously. But really it was about the way those movies felt to me when I was growing up. I'm a kid of the '80s, so going to the movies meant going to see a Spielberg film. And before I understood the mechanics, I understood how they made me feel, and I wanted to make a movie that felt like that, I wanted to make a movie that was mysterious and strange that then developed into this sense of awe. The problem is, you take all those original inspirations and you realize, you have to make them your own, you have to subvert them. You have to actually kill the thing you love. I did it in Shotgun Stories, and I did it here. I'll use [a scene from] Midnight Special as the example. They get in the car, the chase scene is about to start, and then they just hit traffic. And it's the dumbest chase scene ever. The most anticlimactic thing in the world, but because of the situation you understand how powerless [Michael Shannon's character Roy] is. Then all of the sudden it's not about "how well can Nichols direct a chase sequence?" It's about all of this tension that Mike Shannon has behind the steering wheel — he can't do anything, he's powerless. To me, it's a much more intense thing to watch than a well executed chase scene.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/13/11209378/midnight-special-jeff-nichols-interview-sxsw

JN: My son wasn’t old enough when I was writing this for us to have that conversation, but I imagined how heartbreaking it must be to hear your child say you don’t have to worry about me. In a way, it’s what we all want to hear, but I think, in that particular moment, the boy is trying to help his father, because the boy knows how hard this is on him. So the boy is trying to be the parent. And Mike’s character kind of takes that back. It just felt like something I would say to my son. It’s like, well, I know you’re trying to comfort me, I appreciate that, but here’s the deal: I don’t have a choice in this.
AVC: Did the movie start from that feeling? JN: No. This was a unique case in that it started on the genre side of things. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to say about parenthood. I knew I was feeling these intense things. When my son was 8 months old he had a febrile seizure. You know if you’re in the first year—my wife and I refer to it as the “darkness.” You’re just underwater. Your whole life is changed with that first child. Your social behaviors are all turned upside down, you’re sleep deprived, but eight months in my son had this seizure and it just woke me up to the idea that, oh no, this can end. And it can end in a way that will destroy you forever. I think that is when I felt an emotion palpable enough to insert into a film. It was odd that at the time I had a sci-fi chase movie built. But I’ve made enough of these things now that that’s how I roll. You take a genre structure and then you just dismantle it by making it specific and personal.

AVC: It takes a very long time before we learn the relationship between Roy and Lucas, the Joel Edgerton character—why they’re even traveling together or how they know each other. So if you’re thinking about character the whole time, are you giving the actors more than you’re showing? JN: Of course, yeah. You sit there and you tell everybody, this is where you’ve been. This is how you know each other. They need to know those things. The audience doesn’t need to know them. The characters need to know them because it has to exist in all the subtext of the scenes that come before. You need to know the relationship. Lucas needs to know his relationship to this boy, and to Mike Shannon’s character. All that stuff is built. The lack of talking about it just comes from a creative choice on my part as a writer. Something I’ve been dabbling with in all my films for a long time. This was kind of the extreme version of it, which is to just treat dialogue as behavior. In a film script, you have lines of dialogue, you have lines of action. “He crosses the room, he picks up the coffee mug.” You’re not going to say, “He picks up the coffee mug because his mother abandoned him when he was 3.” No writer would ever think to do that because it would be stupid. But for some reason writers think it’s okay to do that in the lines of dialogue. You have to treat the dialogue as behavior, the way you would treat the lines of action. So in that car, moving, they know why they’re there. There’s no need for them to stop and explain that to each other. And you have to create situations that make sense when people do talk. It made sense for me that Kirsten Dunst’s character would come outside and just say, “Who are you?” That felt like an organic moment in the film. But there was this great scene between Mike, Kirsten, and Sam Shepard’s character on the Ranch, when Sam Shepard’s character—before all this started, several years ago—came to them and told them that he was actually the real father of the boy and he was going to take the boy away from them. It’s a killer scene. But I could never find an appropriate place to have people talk about it. It always felt forced. AVC: And you weren’t going to do a flashback. JN: Never. I had to live with the rule. We just don’t get to talk about that. But you’ve got these really great actors, and you tell them that, and I think when they first meet you feel that there’s this sorrow between these two characters. Like they want to hug each other, they want to be together but they can’t be together because of this thing that happened. And they both obviously love the son, so it just makes you wonder what happened. And if I’m going to play by these rules as a writer, I have to be okay with being as much as you get. Maybe a better writer would find an organic way, but I didn’t.

AVC: Don’t sell yourself short there. I was leaving the screening with a colleague who also really liked it, and—speaking of the relationship between the Dunst and Shannon characters—that he thought that it was about the loss of a child. JN: That’s why Kirsten’s character is so important. Because she’s the stronger of the two. Mike is the one that’s kind of the relentless protector, but he’s not capable of one very important thing, which is understanding what ultimately has to happen—and Kirsten’s character does. Partly because of what has happened in their past, but also because she’s a mother. They’re the ones that bring these children into the world, and she understands where he needs to go maybe better than the father does. And it’s a weird narrative structure. It’s a weird thing to spend all this time with the father—it’s a father-son movie, and the mother doesn’t come in until 30 minutes in—and then you do this handoff for these final scenes. I felt like I could get away with it, though. Partly because it felt necessary, because it just didn’t feel like Mike Shannon was the one to do it. So you have this narrative gesture of him leading everybody away from the boy. And from that point on, his life doesn’t matter anymore. And I liked that idea. And that’s what made me feel like I could get away with this, you know, handoff, in the final moments.

http://www.avclub.com/article/midnight-special-director-jeff-nichols-keeping-sci-233781

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/how-tracy-morgans-near-death-accident-made-him-funnier-20160324

"Comedy is who you are, where you're from, and perfection." http://www.wired.com/2016/03/jeff-nichols-midnight-special/

Before Nichols wrote his first screenplay, he told his father that it would be about New York mobsters. Gently, his dad suggested that, instead, he write about “a place you know that others don’t.” The result was Shotgun Stories, set amid the cotton fields and back roads of southeastern Arkansas.

6. If you could tweak something about the way baseball (or sports) is covered, what would it be? I’d want to see more of an emphasis on original and creative thinking and less of an emphasis on daily minutiae. That can take many forms: It can be hard-hitting news reporting that nobody else has, a creative feature idea or even just a unique slant on a well-worn topic. For every journalist, a good day should be writing something that nobody else wrote. It’s coming up with something that nobody else came up with. Often, that means looking beyond the confines of the game on the field every day. Few fans — few, not all — genuinely care about which middling relief pitcher is getting called up to replace another middling relief pitcher. Few fans — few, not all — need daily coverage about a starter’s bullpen session. Almost all fans want something they’ve never read before, something they had never thought about or considered. I’m so lucky to work at a newspaper that values this sort of reporting, and is willing to let me ignore the small things and focus on bigger, different stories.

https://mvork.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/a-qa-with-the-wsjs-jared-diamond-covering-aroldis-chapman-listening-to-springsteen-and-twitter/

http://natejlee.com/san-franciscans-a-modern-day-epistle/

We are a generation that has forgotten how to wait. We are a people who love the idea of rising up on eagles’ wings and running without growing weary but we miss the part where we wait upon the Lord. Jesus in San Francisco means that sometimes, we wait. And sometimes waiting means not planting a church. Sometimes it means not evangelizing your neighbors until you’ve built up longstanding trust. Sometimes it means you stop instagramming stuff and saying how much you love the city. Sometimes it means you keep your mouth shut so that your neighbors can speak. Sometimes it means you do absolutely nothing but keep showing up in the same place again and again for 30 years until people learn that you are trustworthy. In San Francisco, a city run on instantaneous technological gratification, we will be a people who wait. And our waiting will be prophetic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Earwolf/comments/4aeky4/chris_gethard_here_ama/d0zp5lt

Remember that there are so few times in your life where you get to experience something new that you find passion and love for in a basic and genuine way. Let your improv experience be driven by the passion and love for as long as possible. Avoid the competitiveness, careerism, and social bullshit that can come along with the improv experience and remember that it is a young, exciting, evolving, love based art form.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/03/feeling-lonely-when-single-not-weakness.html?mid=twitter-share-thecut

An African proverb that I think of often says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I used to think it was an indictment of the solitary runner who wanted to go quickly until I realized that speed and distance are morally neutral objectives. There are times when we need to go fast and there are times when we need to go far. Some people need to do each more often than the other.

http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/20/mlb-media-roundtable-Alex-Rodriguez-Yasiel-Puig http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/01/three-strikes-cultures-strike-zones http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/03/14/469914141/in-tackling-bias-in-policing-zootopia-veers-into-the-uncanny-valley http://thechrisgethardshow.tumblr.com/post/31345619495/for-gethard-anonymous-asks-gethard-i-know https://everydaylouie.itch.io/dungbeetle http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/what-phils-having/recipes/pancakes/ http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-huckleberry-baking-book-for-even-non-bakers-20141016-story.html

phx 2016

airport working / catch were the best moments. thank you.
tupelo honey

http://natejlee.com/the-inner-city-needs-you/

“And that’s why I love Jesus. That’s why I love who he was and how he went about changing the world. It took the dude 30 years to set roots, to know people, to be known by people, to make the world his home, not just his mission field. And I love that we were not objects he just had to save, some amorphous group called “humanity” in the “inner city” of the cosmos that needed his “help,” but people that he joined and knew and loved and cried with and was betrayed by. The way of his salvation was not to simply cast a life preserver out for us to grab, but to dive headfirst into the ocean of brokenness that we were drowning in. Christ didn’t pull us out of our humanity, instead he came into it and took it upon himself with the fullness of all its joys, failures, sins, and sufferings. It is the most beautiful thing to me, and yet its implications on my life absolutely terrify me. If you want to really see salvation and transformation, stop talking, release your privileges, become one with those who suffer, and get ready for the long haul. Whoever tries to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses it for Christ’s sake will find it, and find it in the full.”

I am constantly found guilty of the sin of words. Vulgarity is not my downfall, though I am vulgar. My sin is having words that are far more beautiful than my life. How graceful are those whose lives outshine their words. Perhaps my life will catch up to my mouth someday. Perhaps my body will catch up to my heart, my hands to my eyes, my feet to my soul. Gordon Atkinson

http://natejlee.com/im-the-biggest-hypocrite-of-2015/

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/togetherness-not-so-together-216021

Realizing that one day of pre-K isn’t actually going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference in the development of his daughter, especially compared to a quality day with her dad and her brother, Brett wisely takes his kids to the beach, and has the best day he’s had in a while. (Sophie’s nod to her brother in the back of the car is about the cutest moment in the entire season.) For Brett, you can also feel a palpable relief, after all his rejection from Michelle, that at least somebody in his family wants to spend some time with him.
As far as the Togetherness of the title goes, that’s the togetherness that’s the most valuable. The kind that is unforced, the kind that we need. Brett and Alex fall into this category as well. The kind when we are actually better for being with these people. ... Alex was probably at our lowest point at the beginning of the season: evicted, unemployed, considering moving back home. Now he’s third-billing in a movie, getting flown to New Orleans, and able to admit his love to Tina. She still rejects him, but he was strong enough to say it (and to make the effort to bike all that way to find her). Like Brett, he is now in a place to realize what really matters.

I have one prediction for the next season or future seasons of the show. Based on personal experience (with pretty much the same exact situation, minus the marriage), I see a way that this could play out and continue to be a very non-together togetherness: Alex & Tina will get together. Brett & Michelle will break apart. Alex's relationship with Brett will suffer because of his newfound loyalty and association with Tina. The prospect of having to spend time or even see or hear about Tina on a regular basis, will keep him at a distance, because of his profound sadness from losing Tina's sister, Michelle. Tina doesn't upset him, but it is too close to home and a constant reminder of the life he once had and wants to have back. Through this process, he loses a wife (whom he realizes he loves, yet too late) and semi-loses a best-friend, which will be a double-whammy for someone trying to reconcile who they are and what their life has become. It won't be Alex that doesn't want to see Brett, it will be Brett that doesn't want to see Alex, because of the sadness that their reversal of roles brings with it. Of course, maybe that's just my own stupid sadness talking.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/togetherness-not-so-together-216021#comment-1896175940

There’s this line from The Accidental Tourist that’s always stuck with me: “It’s not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you’re with them.” With Brett, as much as she tries, Michelle appears to be an ungrateful wife who doesn’t appreciate her husband (remember last week when she kept calling him ”nice”? Death knell). With David, she’s a kick-the-can champion.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/togetherness-kick-can-215246

But really the word I'm looking for is "forced." As in, most of the drama around the marriage feels forced; most people who are this far into the woes of being together have long since split.
Relationship advice: it should feel natural - all of it, the physical, the communication, the whatever. When you make it weird, make it unweird. If you can't make it unweird, it's not you, or them, it's y'all.

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/togetherness-houston-we-have-problem-214844#comment-1843042267 MD: What I would like to do is be Therapy Man. I would like to be able to fly over cities and sprinkle dust on people. And when the dust hit them, I would turn them into sensitive, emotionally involved humans who know how to listen and validate the feelings of their loved ones. http://www.avclub.com/article/mark-duplass-why-mcdonalds-better-bad-rewrite-job-215650 Erik Charles Nielsen olivececile • a year ago I mean, as a fat young non-balding weirdo, I had a few friendships like this. Chaotic women befriending me, pushing me out of my comfort zone, with the attendant infatuation. I've seen them happen with other people too.
I'm going to go ahead and say that Tina is fully aware of the attention, and likes it -- not saying she doesn't enjoy Alex's company, but she also likes feeling like she's doing something good for a guy down on his luck, and she likes the fact that that guy feels devoted to her. I'm not saying it's malicious, or at least it hasn't usually been when I've seen it. But I will say that if what I've seen is any indication, if and when Alex gets his act together, Tina will probably be weirdly territorial about it. Not saying that's the way this is going, just saying that I can map out a version of it in my mind that seems pretty realistic. http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/togetherness-insanity-214076#comment-1822311668

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1sk5ok/what_baseball_groundskeepers_do_during_the/
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/46r9hs/first_weird_spring_training_injury_dodgers_micah/

i will also submit that switching the lead from nick to judy is a win for addressing feminism but not for addressing racism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_the_Planet_of_the_Apes http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v21n1/v21n1-3to6.pdf http://verysmartbrothas.com/the-way-we-talk-about-athletes-is-dumb-as-fuck-understandable-but-dumb-as-fuck/ http://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2016/2/26/11118176/warriors-vs-magic-video-analysis-2016-highlights-stephen-curry-doesnt-try-for-50-points https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/23/best-childrens-books-death-grief-mourning/ http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2005/09/13/leonard-chang-the-terminator-john-updike-and-asian-americana/events/the-takeaway/

the god that can never be appeased is a demon

overabundance of resources / endless sources of entertainment: keep us from figuring out what we need what bitterness, spirit of vengeance, pride, anger, self-centeredness. what idolatry is still rooted / enough.

hallelujah it's spring forward and i can start thinking about bed at 6 now instead of 4
spring forward: as far as i'm concerned, this is the first day of the year.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/food/the-most-important-taco-of-the-day/ http://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleylcarter/70-essential-classic-black-films-everyone-should-see-at-leas

http://www.stubhub.com/los-angeles-dodgers-tickets-dodgers-vs-giants-4-16-2016/event/9444031/?sort=row+asc
http://store.nba.com/Stephen_Curry_Kids
http://nerdist.com/school/puzzle/

http://uproxx.com/life/travel-inspiration-experiences-vagabond-adventure-vacation/4/

Mark Twain once said that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime.”

2016: ask god for the things that you need?

blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12845975/ambidextrous-nashville-sounds-pitcher-pat-venditte-rarest-mlb-skills

PAT VENDITTE, IN jeans and a T-shirt, stands in an empty one-bedroom apartment with his wife, Erin, and the woman with the keys. They drove here from their temporary digs in downtown Nashville in their red Jeep, Nebraska plates, stuffed with their clothes and his golf clubs. Venditte looks around for less than a minute before he announces he's happy. Erin agrees. "We've found a home," Venditte says. He laughs, remembering his shadier accommodations over the course of his minor league career, four players wedged into a two-bedroom, his air mattress blown up under the dining room chandelier, a clutter of lawn chairs in place of couches. He recalls one desperate stretch when he and his roommates found an electronics store that would take back a TV, no questions asked, within 30 days of purchase. They bought a lot of TVs for 29 days.

The normally silent magician Teller, when asked to explain how he is able to perform his stupefying tricks and sleights of hand -- illusions that seem to defy any rational explanation -- answered: "Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12500579/giancarlo-stanton-takes-325-million-contract-play-miami-marlins Part of scouting is espionage, so Marlins scout Tim McDonnell sat in his car in the parking lot beyond left field at games, watching through binoculars, careful not to give himself away. He surveyed the stands, looking for other scouts, because another part of scouting is determining the opposition. Either he or his assistant attended every game of Stanton's senior year, and they wrote down the name of every scout they saw. The list was short. McDonnell would put his binoculars on his lap and ask himself, "Am I crazy?"

http://therumpus.net/2010/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-42-no-is-golden/

No is golden. No is the kind of power the good witch wields. It’s the way whole, healthy, emotionally evolved people manage to have relationships with jackasses while limiting the amount of jackass in their lives.

http://therumpus.net/2010/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-41-like-an-iron-bell/

It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.

http://therumpus.net/2010/03/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-28/

mmejoy · 2 days ago I spend a lot of time with very new adults, who are champions at saying or doing staggeringly stupid things with the best of intentions*. It is an interesting and constant reminder that a) when working as an educator, it is a good idea to assume that people have good intentions, b) having good intentions is very different from being a good person, c) I really don't know what "being a good person" means at all, and d) assuming that someone has good intentions means you also assume that they would want to be held accountable for a disconnect between their intentions and the actual effect of their choices. So you hold them accountable for it. All of this is to say that good intentions excuse us from precisely nothing, should make us more profoundly accountable for our words and actions, and my job is exhausting most days. * - They also say or do staggeringly stupid things with terrible intentions, but that requires a different approach.

http://the-toast.net/2016/03/08/on-race-good-intentions-benefit-of-the-doubt/#IDComment1015103585

what's hope for

"you're learning not to dwell on the things you can't control"

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

http://therumpus.net/2011/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-64/

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/

There was nothing wrong with my ex-husband. He wasn’t perfect, but he was pretty close. I met him a month after I turned 19 and I married him on a rash and romantic impulse a month before I turned 20. He was passionate and smart and sensitive and handsome and absolutely crazy about me. I was crazy about him too, though not absolutely. He was my best friend; my sweet lover; my guitar-strumming, political rabble-rousing, road-tripping side-kick; the co-proprietor of our vast and eclectic music and literature collection; and daddy to our two darling cats. But there was in me an awful thing, from almost the very beginning: a tiny clear voice that would not, not matter what I did, stop saying go. Go, even though you love him. Go, even though he’s kind and faithful and dear to you. Go, even though he’s your best friend and you’re his. Go, even though you can’t imagine your life without him. Go, even though he adores you and your leaving will devastate him. Go, even though your friends will be disappointed or surprised or pissed off or all three. Go, even though you once said you would stay. Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone. Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does. Go, even though there is nowhere to go. Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay. Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough. Get a pen. Write that last sentence on your palm, sweet peas—all five of you. Then read it over and over again until your tears have washed it away.

I imagine that’s what it boiled down to for your former partner too, Trying. That like me, he came to trust his truest truth, even though there were other truths running alongside it—such has his deep love for you. You ask: “Why can’t ‘the terms of the relationship change’ from within?” And my answer is that they can. In successful long-term relationships they usually do. But in order for that to work all parties involved must be willing and capable of making that change. And for some reason they sometimes aren’t, no matter how hard they try or wish to be able to.

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/

While you’re probably in no mood to be philosophical about the devastation your boyfriend’s leaving has caused you, Trying, I think it’s worth saying that it’s far better to be alone and therefore open to new, more fulfilling love, than it is to be involved with someone who half wants out. If your former boyfriend didn’t ultimately love you the way you love him his leaving was a kindness that someday, far from now, you’ll be grateful for.

It wasn’t until I’d been married to Mr. Sugar a few years that I truly understood my first marriage. In loving him, I’ve come to see more clearly how and why I loved my first husband. My two marriages aren’t so different from each other, though there’s some sort of magic sparkle glue in the second that was missing in the first. Mr. Sugar and my ex have never met, but I’m certain if they did they’d get along swimmingly. They’re both good men with kind hearts and gentle souls. They both share my passions for books, the outdoors and lefty politics; they’re both working artists, in different fields. I argue with Mr. Sugar about the same amount as I did with my former husband, at a comparable velocity, about similar things. Others have praised both of my marriages as admirable; in each, I’ve been perceived as one half of a “great couple.” And in both marriages there have been struggles and sorrows that few know about and fewer still were and are capable of seeing or understanding. Mr. Sugar and I have been neck-deep together in the muckiest mud pit too. The only difference is that every time I’ve been down there with him I wasn’t fighting for my freedom and neither was he. In our nearly sixteen years together, I’ve never once thought the word go. I’ve only wrestled harder so I’d emerge dirty, but stronger, with him.
I didn’t want to stay with my ex-husband, not at my core, even though whole swaths of me did. And if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can only ask the four women who wrote to me with the same question: will you do it later or will you do it now?

JUST LEFT SAYS: April 13th, 2014 at 11:30 pm I recently ended a 3.5 yr relationship. One day I acknowledged the emptiness in the pit of my stomach. I had felt it when we went on hikes and ate dinner. I realized half the time I didn’t enjoy hanging out with him unless we were with other people. I thought his love for me was all that mattered, but I realized his feelings weren’t more important than mine. Even though I know it was the right thing to do, it hurts knowing I broke his heart. I hope he’ll see this article and understand there was nothing wrong with him. It just wasn’t right.

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/#comment-564892

Strange as it sounds, I don’t think you’ve done that yet. I can hear it in the pitch of your letter. You’re so outraged and surprised that this shitty thing happened to you that there’s a piece of you that isn’t yet convinced it did. You’re looking for the explanation, the loop hole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course. Any one would be. It’s the reason I’ve had to narrate my own stories of injustice about seven thousand times, as if by raging about it once more the story will change and by the end of it I won’t still be the woman hanging on the end of the line.
But it won’t change, for me or for you or for anyone who has ever been wronged, which is everyone. We are all at some point—and usually at many points over the course of a life—the woman hanging on the end of the line. Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.

http://therumpus.net/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-76-the-woman-hanging-on-the-end-of-a-line/

http://therumpus.net/2011/08/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-82-the-god-of-doing-it-anyway/

I don’t think you know this yet, sweet pea, but I’m pretty certain you aren’t writing to me to ask if it’s okay that you write about your passion for Jesus Christ and whether the generally heathen lit world will accept you into the fold. You’re writing to me for the same reason Elissa Bassist did last year, though you use different language. You’re asking me if it’s okay to be you. You want me to give you permission to write your truth with honesty and heart because doing so scares the living crap out of you. I’m here not only to give you permission, but also to say that you must. There is no other way.
I know because I’m right there beside you, walking down the same path. And so is every other writer on the planet, every other artist, every other person who ever felt outside of who they thought other people believed they should be.
In life, we have to make ourselves. In art, we have to make that self over and over again and present it to the world. We have to put it up on the wall or down on the page or project it on a screen or allow it to resound or glide or crackle across the room. And each time we do that, we must endure the sense that perhaps all has failed, that no one wants this, that we are too much that.

This is the reason I laughed when I came to the line in your letter that wonders if you should prepare yourself “to start out without an audience and with a handicap.” Yes, darling, you should. We all start out without an audience and with a handicap. And many of us end up that way too. But the whole deal with making art is you have to be brave. Which is different from not being afraid. You have to dare to inhabit the alternate universe of your original mind and create something for us from that and then stand by and hear what we have to say. The other side of fearlessness is fear. The other side of strength is fragility. The other side of power is faith.
You think writing this column doesn’t terrify me? You think I don’t have a constant loop of horrible words running through my head about all the things one could mock and condemn about my writing and life? You think I’m not self-conscious about my passions and obsessions? Every time I write about my mother, there’s a little voice in my head that says, Oh for the fucking love of God, would you please shut up about this! We know you loved her. We know she died too young. How many times can you hash this over? Enough!
And yet, at least so far, there seems to be no limit to the number of times I can hash this over when it comes to my mother—(look: here she is! even now!).
I had to struggle to be okay with this, to do what I call trusting the heat, to write what must be written in the way only I can write it. And everything about what you’re asking me has entirely to do with that, Paradoxed. Your Jesus is my mother is someone else’s turtle. Show us his light. Do it so righteously that we can’t help but look. Don’t worry. Don’t apologize. Don’t cower behind the defeated security of there is no “room for someone like me.” There isn’t room for any one of us. It’s up to you to make a place for yourself in the world. So get to work. I went to graduate school with a small group of very talented writers. We wrote in a range of styles about a variety of subjects and we spent a lot of time discussing whose style and subject was most interesting or valid or important or artistic or financially rewarded or culturally sanctioned or critically condemned. I felt delicately crushed by many of these conversations, but now I see that they were good for me. They complicated my path, but they clarified the way. You could say those contrary, brilliant people baptized me. They pushed me to answer the question at the core of your question, Paradoxed—is it okay to be me?—and they compelled me to assert that the answer was yes often enough that I went ahead and became her: the writer of plainspoken prose who would not shut up about her grief.
Many of my grad school mates went ahead and became who they had to be too, as all of the writers I most admire do. They wrote about turtles if they were obsessed with turtles. They put their faith in the magic of heat. They worshipped the god of doing it anyway, even while their doubts and fears ran constantly alongside them. The thing that is so apparent and so very cool is that, regardless of our differences, we are the same. The thread that connects our work is that we did the work we had to do. Our writing rose out of necessity and desire and whatever it was that wouldn’t let us go.
And that’s a stronger thread than any of those things we argued back in the day.
I hope you’ll grab hold of that thread too, sweet pea. It’s yours to for the taking, but only if you have the guts to give us everything you’ve got. Doing that is more vital, more real, more sacred than anything.

SUZ SAYS: March 29th, 2015 at 11:22 pm I remember reading this post a couple of years ago and thinking to myself how lucky I was to be in a relationship with someone in which our communication was so good that if/when extra-relationship attractions came along we would be so ready to talk it through. We got engaged almost exactly a year ago and our wedding is in three months. Well, it was going to be anyway. My girlfriend cheated on me, with a friend/work acquaintance who lived far away. They talk regularly and had developed a writers’ friendship outside work. We saw this woman together a few months back when she was crushed by a breakup and I invited her to come visit our sweet little home. I voiced my suspicions about this person and her general personality that made me uncomfortable (fake was, bad boundaries, minor manipulations) but told my partner I trusted her. And then at then end of this woman’s visit, my partner cheated on me when they were at a sort of work retreat. I am devastated. And not sleeping. At about 2:46 am this morning I remembered this post and I looked it up. It reminded me how hard I’ve worked to live my life as a compassionate person with an open heart. It doesn’t comes easily to this Scorpio, let me tell you. My girlfriend/fiancé was the first person I have ever fully trusted, my family included, for most of my life anyway, which is a longer story. I love the shit out of my girlfriend. I spent the last few days in a cabin, hoping to clear my head, and Cheryl’s advice hit me so hard. I came back home today and yelled and cried and punched the sofa where that woman’s shitty perfume somehow still hangs. I cancelled the wedding. That I am sure about. But tonight my former fiancé-now-girlfriend opened up in a way I’d never seen her do before. She told me some challenging things about her past, her way of lying to hide the uglier parts of herself. She’d never lied to me before, and for some reason that’s the only thing I wholeheartedly believe out of her mouth today. I was shocked to find that I didn’t want to leave her completely. Shocked. I know I’d be fine without her–sad for a long time, but ultimately fine. I do fine on my own. But the truth is, while I think she is as fucking stupid as Mr Sugar was, I also the she is every bit as sorry. And she is saying all the right things about how she plans to regain my trust, even nothing can right the wrong. I got up and made a sandwich. I thought, ‘I should make her a sandwich, too.’ And I took out more bread. And I then I put the bread away and cried. And then I took out the bread slices out again and knew that if I could just make her that fucking sandwich that I wouldn’t leave her today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. This is all to say that love is way more complicated than I ever dreamed and might include being willing to make yourself vulnerable to something truly terrifying. The easy thing for me would be to walk away and toss a match over my shoulder at the far end of the bridge. I am very skilled at that. Yet, here I am. Alone in my house while my former fiancé is sad and remorseful at a hotel. But with every bit of me, I am here.

http://therumpus.net/2011/08/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-81-a-bit-of-sully-in-your-sweet/#comment-802664

9. Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/

14. The word obliterate comes from the Latin obliterare. Ob means against; literare means letter or script. A literal translation is being against the letters. It was impossible for you to write me a letter, so you made me a list instead. It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.
15. It’s wrong that this is required of you. It’s wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.
17. You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to. We say, “I couldn’t go on,” instead of saying we hope we won’t have to. That’s what you’re saying in your letter to me, Living Dead Dad. You’ve made it so fucking long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.
18. More will be revealed. Your son hasn’t yet taught you everything he has to teach you. He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.
24. You go on by doing the best you can, you go on by being generous, you go on by being true, you go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on, you go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days, you go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
25. Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating and fostering and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
26. The entire premise of your healing demands that you do let go of expectation. You must come to understand and accept that your son will always be only the man he actually was: the 22 year-old who made it as far as that red light. The one who loved you deeply. The one who long ago forgave you for asking why he didn’t like girls. The one who would want you to welcome his boyfriend’s new boyfriend into your life. The one who would want you to find joy and peace. The one who would want you to be the man he didn’t get to be.
27. To be anything else dishonors him.
28. The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
29. Your grief has taught you too, Living Dead Dad. Your son was your greatest gift in his life and he is your greatest gift in his death too. Receive it. Let your dead boy be your most profound revelation. Create something of him.

BARBARA SAYS: February 20th, 2012 at 7:08 am Dear Living Dead Dad – 1. I do not know what it is like to loose a child. I lost two children through miscarriage, but that is not the same as losing a living child. I grieve for all the times that never were. I have no times to remember, because they never were, except in my dreams and hopes.I grieve for them to this day, although it has been over twenty years. 2. Nobody’s grief is the same as anothers. No matter how similar the circumstances all grief is personal and unique. We can feel empathy but still never know exactly how another feels. 3. I lost the man I loved for more than 35 years to alcoholism. He struggled for many years to overcome it, but in the end this disease defeated him.He was a kind, talented and sweet man who never understood how much he was loved by others, how much he was loved by me. Thank God he never got in a car and killed anyone else because that is a grief I do not think I could have born. 4. When this man died I thought I would die also. Grief was a black field of quicksand in which I was drowning. Because he and I had never married and had not been in close contact at the time of his death I felt I had no right to my grief. That made it worse. 5. I sought help. The help helped a little. People helped some. Time helped more. 6. Now I am in a relationship with a wonderful man. He is capable of giving me all the love that my alcoholic friend could not. My relationship with him is everything I hoped my former relationship would be, but wasn’t. I am very happy. I still grieve. 7. Grief never goes away. But it changes with time. Grief broke me open, created room for more love, made me appreciate love more deeply…..I still grieve. 8. I can only imagine what it is like to loose a living child. I can only imagine the depths of your grief. You can only imagine the depths of mine. 9. I do not know you, but I hold you in my heart. I pray your broken heart remains open. Do not allow your pain to close you down. 10. You will grieve for the rest of your life. I hope you find a way to turn your grief into a gift – to use your grief to love more fully and completely than you ever loved before. In doing this you honor your son. 11. I pray you find peace. Love, A Fellow Traveler Through Life and the Living Death of Grief http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/#comment-285489

There’s a part, I think, in many of us that feels that to ever let go of the devastation is a betrayal; that it might, in some way, show we didn’t really care that much. That’s a feeling to resist, or to let pass if it can’t be resisted. I don’t think grief can be sustained at the same pitch forever without severely damaging us. It is normal for that grief to be transmuted – by *love* – into something we can hold tight to us without bleeding too dreadfully. There will always be spikes of pain, of course. My father had a friend, an older woman, who had, in a year’s time, lost her husband, her son, and her livelihood. She told him that decades later there were still times all she could do was to howl into the wind. And there is so much emotional change to work through. My father wrote a letter after my brother died in which he said that you expect parents to die, and when your brother dies, you learn you too can die, but that when you lose a child, your dreams die. I think being able to allow a new dream, a way to honor your son, any growth in the blasted center of your life, hurts just unbearably, but is one way you find yourself able to take your son with you — in your heart, and who you are, and the choices that you make, the ways you honor him, as you have in the list you’ve written right here. I can tell your son was a man worth loving.

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/#comment-168560

This is the hard part, of course. The part where you don’t get to simply float along in the la-la land of your true love while hoping what’s really not good at all will get magically better. This is the part that numerous others have confronted with their own beloved partners who must change in order for their relationships to survive—people who have said you must stop abusing alcohol to be with me, or you must stop snorting cocaine, or you must learn to manage your anger, or you must not belittle my ambitions, or you must be honest or this just isn’t going to work.
These ultimatums require us to ask for something we need from another, yes, but ultimately they demand the most from us. They require us to acknowledge that the worse case scenario—the end of a cherished relationship—is better than the alternative—a lifetime of living with sorrow and humiliation and rage. It demands that we look ourselves squarely and hard in the eye and ask: What do I want? What do I deserve? What will I sacrifice to get it? And then it requires that we do it. In fear and in pain and in faith, we swim there, to wherever that is, in the direction of real life.

http://therumpus.net/2011/10/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-87-in-the-direction-of-real-life/

I’ve written often about how it is we have to reach hard in the direction of the lives we want, even if it’s difficult to do so. I’ve advised people to set healthy boundaries and communicate mindfully and take risks and work hard on what actually matters and confront contradictory truths and trust the inner voice that speaks with love and shut out the inner voice that speaks with hate. But the thing is—the thing so many of us forget—is that those values and principles don’t only apply to our emotional lives. We’ve got to live them out in our bodies too.
Yours. Mine. Droopy and ugly and fat and thin and marred and wretched as they are. We have to be as fearless about our bellies as we are with our hearts.
There isn’t a short cut around this, sweet pea. The answer to your conundrum isn’t finding a way to make your future lover believe you look like Angelina Jolie. It’s coming to terms with the fact that you don’t and never will (a fact, I’d like to note, that Angelina Jolie herself will also have to come to terms with someday).
Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It’s one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before. It’s the man who opts not to invite his abusive mother to his wedding; the woman who decides to spend her Saturday mornings in a drawing class instead of scrubbing the toilets at home; the writer who won’t allow himself to be devoured by his envy; the parent who takes a deep breath instead of throwing a plate. It’s you and me standing naked before our lovers, even if it makes us feel kind of squirmy in a bad way when we do. The work is there. It’s our task. Doing it will give us strength and clarity. It will bring us closer to who we hope to be.
You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be “hot” in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.
You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, I’m right here.

http://therumpus.net/2011/09/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-86-tiny-revolutions/

What’s at the root is the fact that you failed to recognize and honor your own boundaries. You tried to have it both ways. You wanted to be the woman who could be friends with a man she’s not over, but you are not that woman. I understand why you want to be her, darling. She’s one cool cat. She’s the star of the show. She doesn’t take anything personally. But you are not her. And that’s okay. You are your own fragile, strong, sweet, searching self. You can be sad a guy you sort of fell for didn’t fall for you. You don’t have to be a good sport. You don’t have to pretend you’re okay with sharing your interesting and beautiful friends with The Foxy Fellow, even if you feel like a puny asshole not being okay with it. You can say no.
But the thing is, you have to say it. You have to be the woman who stands up and says it. And you have to say it to the right person too. Not to the lovely friend who can’t possibly keep the promises she’s made to you while swimming in the shared waters of your wishy-washy ache for affirmation and orgasms, but to the man himself. Yes, The Foxy Fellow. The one who is, but who is not, your friend. You have to live with the uncomfortable reality that it’s from him—not her!—that you need time and space. And then you have to take it, hard as it is, come what may.

We all like to think we’re right about what we believe about ourselves and what we often believe are only the best, most moral things—ie: of course I would never fuck The Foxy Fellow because that would hurt my friend! We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It’s the reason we have to fight so viciously over the decapitated head of the black-haired plastic princess before we learn how to play nice; the reason we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came the closest to ending.

http://therumpus.net/2011/09/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-85-we-call-this-a-clusterfuck/

I wish all the time that the right to space and time to heal, solitude to re-center and sovereignty over doing what one has to do was treated as exactly that: a right, a fundamental right that each person has in the aftermath of a break-up or betrayal. I understood a long time ago that I am not the cool cat who doesn’t take things personally: I engage intensely, and must disengage cautiously.
It isn’t selfish to do this. It’s self-preservation.

http://therumpus.net/2011/09/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-85-we-call-this-a-clusterfuck/#comment-180569

Yes! I wish all the time that the right to space and time to heal, solitude to re-center and sovereignty over doing what one has to do was treated as exactly that: a right, a fundamental right that each person has in the aftermath of a break-up or betrayal. I understood a long time ago that I am not the cool cat who doesn’t take things personally: I engage intensely, and must disengage cautiously.
It isn’t selfish to do this. It’s self-preservation.
Not all my friends and lovers have understood this. Not everybody understands that amputation isn’t about cutting someone else out – but cutting away the part of yourself that contains your obsessive, lovesick, heartbreakingly powerful need to burn yourself down with the torch you hold for them. It isn’t seen as the socially acceptable thing to do. But strangely enough, that porch metaphor is the same one that visually occurs to me whenever I have to. I know that, when the hurt heals, I may set places at my table for everybody ever involved in the interest of fun and bounteousness and the sheer love of life. But who remains, after the party, sitting on my porch with just me and a nightcap – what I see when I imagine it, now that IS my moral compass.

http://therumpus.net/2011/09/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-85-we-call-this-a-clusterfuck/#comment-17846

MICHELLE CHAVES SAYS: July 14th, 2011 at 10:03 am Dear Dad, Keep writing.

LYNNE SAYS: July 8th, 2011 at 9:20 pm Thank you for speaking the truth about your life to us. Even anonymously, there is something powerful about speaking the truth– not only for us readers, but for you. The tightness in the throat eases a little. You find you are not as alone as you thought. You are upheld by invisible hands. You sound like a writer. I want to tell you that there is something you can do that can be particularly helpful for writers; I know this from my own experience. It’s this: every day, write a letter to your son. Try it for a month, maybe, just to see. Your daily letters might turn into something else at times– who knows what– and you can let that happen, paper is safe. But start out with the love and the letter to your boy. And please know that love is never wasted.

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-78-the-obliterated-place/#comment-152960

http://therumpus.net/2012/01/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-94-the-amateur/

Way up high on the list of the values and truths I most deeply hope to convey in this column is the fact that something is always at stake. Our integrity. Our internal sense of peace. Our relationships. Our communities. Our children. Our ability to bear the weight of the people we hope to be and forgive the people we are. Our obligation to justice, mercy, kindness, and doing the stuff in bed (or beneath the bathroom sink) that genuinely gets us off.

http://www.therumpus.net/2011/10/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-88-the-human-scale/

RACHEL SAYS: http://therumpus.net/2011/10/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-88-the-human-scale/#comment-204190 October 24th, 2011 at 10:49 pm The American version of believing in God reminds me of the American version of believing in Hard Work: We often think that if we have enough faith and also work hard enough we’ll be saved from suffering. Then when something bad happens, such as an unexpected illness or job loss, we think it’s our fault for not being virtuous enough, or we try to blame the most convenient deity. Yet the reality is that things happen for a lot of reasons. How we choose to react to those things is where miracles can occur.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/the-aquarium

On Wednesday afternoon, I left the hospital and went home to be with Ella, as we’d promised to take her to our neighborhood farmers’ market. It was essential, in the ongoing catastrophe, that we keep our promises.

Before we followed Isabel into the pre-op, I put the cannoli in the fridge that was in her room. The selfish lucidity of that act produced an immediate feeling of guilt. Only later would I understand that that absurd act was related to a desperate form of hope: the cannoli might be necessary for our future survival.
The surgery was expected to last between four and six hours; Dr. Tomita’s assistant would keep us updated. We kissed Isabel’s parchment-pale forehead and watched her being wheeled into the unknown by a gang of masked strangers. Teri and I returned to Isabel’s room to wait. We alternately wept and were silent. We shared some cannoli to keep ourselves going—for days, we’d had very little food or sleep. The lights in the room were dimmed; we were on a bed behind a curtain, and for some reason no one bothered us. We were far away from the world of farmers’ markets and blueberries, where children were born and lived, and where grandmothers put granddaughters to sleep. I had never felt as close to another human being as I did that night to my wife.

The human sense of comfort depends on repetitive, familiar actions—our minds and bodies strive to become accustomed to predictable circumstances. But no lasting routine could be established for Isabel. An illness like A.T.R.T. causes a breakdown of all biological, emotional, and family order: nothing goes the way you expect, let alone want, it to. In addition to the sudden disasters and emergency-room visits, there was the daily hell: Isabel’s coughing seldom ceased, and often led to vomiting; she had rashes and constipation; she was listless and weak; we were never able to tell her that things would get better. No amount of repetition can inure you to these things. The comfort of routines belonged to the world outside.

Meanwhile, Mingus allowed Ella to practice and expand her language. He also gave her the company and comfort that Teri and I were barely able to provide. On the mornings when I drove her to school, Ella would offer run-on tales of Mingus, the recondite plots of which were sunk deep in her verbal torrent. Now and then, we’d witness her playing with Mingus—the alien version or the imaginary one—administering fictional medicine or taking his temperature, using the vocabulary she had collected on her visits to the hospital or from our discussions of Isabel’s illness. She’d tell us that Mingus had a tumor and was undergoing tests, but was going to get better in two weeks. Once, Mingus even had a little sister named Isabel—entirely distinct from Ella’s little sister—who also had a tumor and was also going to get better in two weeks. (Two weeks, I recognized, was just about the length of the future that Teri and I could conceive of at the time.) Whatever accidental knowledge of Isabel’s illness Ella was accumulating, whatever words she was picking up from our experience, she was processing through her imaginary brother. And she clearly missed her sister, so Mingus gave her some comfort in that respect as well. She longed for us to be together as a family, which was perhaps why, one day, Mingus acquired his own set of parents and moved out with them to a place around the corner, only to return to us the next day. Ella externalized her complicated feelings by assigning them to Mingus, who then acted on them.
One day at breakfast, while Ella ate her oatmeal and rambled on about her brother, I recognized in a humbling flash that she was doing exactly what I’d been doing as a writer all these years: the fictional characters in my books had allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything). Much like Ella, I’d found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I’d needed narrative space to extend myself into; I’d needed more lives. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums. I’d cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me—they did what I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do. Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination—and therefore fiction—was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.
Whatever knowledge I’d acquired in my fiction-writing career was of no value inside our A.T.R.T. aquarium, however. Unlike Ella, I could not construct a story that would help me comprehend what was happening. Isabel’s illness overrode any form of imaginative involvement on my part. All I cared about was the firm reality of her breaths on my chest, the concreteness of her slipping into slumber as I sang my three lullabies. I did not want to extend myself in any direction but hers.

Without Isabel, Teri and I were left with oceans of love we could no longer dispense; we found ourselves with an excess of time that we used to devote to her; we had to live in a void that could be filled only by Isabel. Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-last-man-on-earth/253412/last-man-on-earth-writers-room-walkthrough-part-3

Was it always this bacon incident to bring Tandy and Todd back together? Did you guys weigh other options, or did it all come down to food in the end? We had been talking about frozen food since last year. I kept pitching it as a quest – like they see a photo in a magazine article about some government bunker, like a missile silo, and the only photo that the magazine was allowed to publish was a pic of the kitchen. And Tandy’s looking at this old magazine and he sees a frozen pizza in the photo. And he reasons that the freezer is probably still working, so he leads everyone on a Goonies-style quest to find that frozen pizza. And that, I’m afraid, is the Community experience coming out of me. That’s a pretty typical start for a Community story, but not Last Man. I must have pitched that 25 times and it never got any traction. But the idea of a working freezer had some staying power, so it morphed into this bacon idea. As I remember, it took some fiddling to try to get the idea of a bacon freezer to be the thing which bonds Tandy and Todd. It could have gone any number of ways. But a shared secret seemed to win the day. A shared secret is a pretty great way to repair a relationship. I’m filing that away for future me when I’m stuck on a story.

As nice as it is to have these cows be a part of the show, are they just the absolute worst to film with?
No no, absolutely not. They come with this guy named Scott, a total cowboy who wears a hat and everything. We’re like, “Hey, Scott, can Will slap her on the butt? Will she freak out?” And Scott will be like, super quiet, man of very few words. He’ll just look at us and say with an assured understated drawl, “She’ll be alright.” And a sense of cowboy calm comes over all of us, and the world gets simple, and everything that’s hard in this crazy concrete jungle just melts into a single sweet soulful harmonica note ringing out across the endless starlit prairie.
Incidentally, our cow is named Cat, and she is the most beautiful magnificent cow you’ve ever seen and she is in the Chick-Fil-A commercials.

Along the same lines, this episode spends a lot of time on Tandy and Phil repairing their volatile relationship. Why was that particularly important to you guys?
It was important to Will, which made it important to us. Will likes to explore male relationships – the way men size each other up and compete, and the way they can barely express feelings to each other. And I’m sure a squadron of therapists could explain why he likes that theme, but the short answer, in my opinion, is that it’s really funny when Tandy is losing a dick-measuring contest. And what we get out of all this Tandy/Phil stuff is a set-up for a tearjerker. In some ways, Phil was to Tandy this year as Melissa was to him in the early part of last year. They’re both mountains for Tandy to climb. So we wanted Tandy to get up to the top of that mountain before losing it.

She’s just not dishing in the way that Todd is. She’s also harder to read by design. I mean, the flipside is that January plays her very subtly and we do like that. It feels right that Melissa is somewhat of a mystery. In this episode, what we intended was basically that Melissa wants what she wants and doesn’t want to pay much of a price for it. She likes Todd but she doesn’t like opening up to people, and she’s really turned off by neediness. She likes Todd when he’s fun and she’s turned off when he wants something deeper. It’s a bit of a role reversal here. Todd is the needy chick and Melissa’s the dude who doesn’t want drama. I think we could have made that clearer with one additional scene of them alone together. But that’s hindsight. And we’re all really proud of some Melissa stuff coming up. Stay tuned. Melissa’s head will be opened.

http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-last-man-on-earth/253426/last-man-on-earth-writers-room-walkthrough-part-4 http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-last-man-on-earth/253431/last-man-on-earth-writers-room-walkthrough-part-5

You, sir, are a father. You have created more love in the world. I, speaking for the world, express our gratitude. http://joeposnanski.com/katie-the-prefect/#comment-5100 FYI, houses of Harry Potter in baseball terms: Hufflepuff: Kirk Reuter Ravenclaw: Greg Maddux Gryffindor: Brian Wilson Slytherin: Roger Clemens http://joeposnanski.com/katie-the-prefect/#comment-5113

taiwan

http://www.fashionwaltz.com/?p=24193

on gossip

http://therumpus.net/2012/01/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-95-the-dudes-in-the-woods-debacle/

http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2016/2/24/11103160/stephen-curry-confidence-warriors-highlights-shooting

one unforeseen fantastic effect of the whole world watching the warriors is that my relatives in taiwan now know how to say my name (curry. i'll take it)

(also, my mom thinks riley is the one who plays point guard. you know, cause then they both have kids named steph. "no, mom," i tell her. "she's the one who's gonna be president.")

# if it's easier, just remember both stephs have weak ankles

http://www.goldenstateofmind.com/2016/2/26/11109842/nba-2016-golden-state-warriors-andrew-bogut-bill-simmons-podcast http://imgur.com/a/XpAOZ

tina on stern: https://www.howardstern.com/film/24886-tina-feys-oscar-night-her-take-chris-rock-caitlyn-jenner-and-more/

first time i've thought "this is nice." and rested

headphones are crazy. it's weird that i'm listening to the top gun theme right now and no one has any idea

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/shouts-murmurs/the-sims-you-left-behind http://velamag.com/bookmarked-elissa-bassists-five-female-humor-writers/

“The point of a humor piece,” said New Yorker writer Ian Frazier about New Yorker writer Veronica Geng, “is that it defy gravity, that it dance.” Yep.

“I have a picture of me with Johnny Carson in 1993; we’re both wearing silver suits with red ties, which is just an accident. We’re both laughing, and I look like a 14-year-old girl,” O’Brien says, smiling at the memory. “I love that photo because I look at that sometimes and think: ‘You have no idea what you’re in for. But it’s all going to be fine. It’s going to be bumpy, but it’s going to be fine. And you’re going to have a lot of fun.’ ”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2016/03/03/conan-obrien/

timmy

http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2016/2/19/11073574/tim-lincecum-sf-giants#360551949

Tim Lincecum represents so much of what we love about baseball—the underdog, the everyman, perpetual youth, freedom of spirit. You mentioned 2010, but 2012 was so very much what we love in that guy, too, the way he was humbled and yet still contributed in a specific and very impactful way.

http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2016/2/19/11073574/tim-lincecum-sf-giants#360612533

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.
We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.
We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

http://therumpus.net/2012/02/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-96-the-dark-cocoon/

You have to go somewhere else, sweet pea. You have to move beyond despair. You have to find the next version of yourself, the more evolved iteration of the woman you used to be.
You don’t do that by choosing between accepting your misery with one man you love or giving way to the fantastical idea of another. You do that by coming to terms with who it is you’ve become and doing the emotional work it requires to let that woman fly. That’s where I was on that day in 1991 when I truly thought I was going to die: a woman about to lacerate the shit out herself while pushing away her own cocoon. When that SUV left the road, it wasn’t just any day. It was the last day of the year in which my mother had died and everything that year had changed.
I was on the brink of being forced to change too. I left a man I loved so much I was content to die beside him. I did it because my purer revelation—more pure than my love for him—was that I couldn’t be the person I’d become while committed to him. In another time, in my marriage with Mr. Sugar, I’ve had transformations that led me in the other direction—toward a richer, more profound commitment, and a happier one too.

in her own life, Fey is the stable one, just as Mary Richards was on TV, anchored among oddballs in her Minneapolis newsroom. Outside her comedy, Fey does not want drama. When I ask her if she ever gets the urge to straighten out Lindsay Lohan, who starred in Fey’s movie Mean Girls, or to counsel Tracy Morgan or Alec Baldwin when they hit tempestuous passages in their personal lives, she says, “I have no enabler bone in my body—not one. I’m sort of like, ‘Oh, are you going crazy? I’ll be back in an hour.’” She is the Obedient Daughter, the German taskmistress, the kind but firm maker and keeper of rules. And what Tina wants, Tina gets, sooner or later, because she works and works and works for it.
So what does she do with what she calls her “15 minutes,” now that she’s got America’s attention and a $5 million deal for a humor book?
Her manager, David Miner, whom she met when he was in the coatroom at Second City, has no doubt she’ll continue to call on the way up to his office and get a latte for his assistant. “She never looks at the world and says, ‘Give me this,”’ he says. “She adapts and rolls up her sleeves.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/tina_fey200901

Carlock isn't sure about his first memory of Fey (overalls may have been involved), but he's clear about one thing. "In my five years writing for SNL, a very competitive place, I never saw anyone figure out a way to have their voice be part of what the show wanted so quickly," he says. "I certainly never totally figured it out."

When I ask Fey to describe her relationship with Carlock, she replies, "Two obedient people working themselves to death." Her punishing work ethic comes, she says, from her parents: the Greek women on her mother's side and the German and Scottish on her father's. I ask Carlock if Fey is as bossy as she claims. He laughs. "She tends to get what she wants, and unfortunately—or fortunately—she's usually right." But it's more than just being right; she's a savvy strategist. "Tina picks her spots," he says. "Writers love to talk and throw out all their opinions. She's very good at having already thought about objections beforehand. She's disarming and very open-minded, but she does not come unprepared. She brings a gun to a knife fight every time."

"I think my husband would tell you that I'm constantly angry. Not at him, just angry," says Fey, who has two daughters with director and composer Jeff Richmond: Alice Zenobia, 10, and Penelope Athena, 4, who may be a chip off the old block. "Alice has a first-child thing, where I don't think she lets herself get mad," Fey says. "But oh my god, I can't stop the little one from being angry. It's funny: She was a very screamy, grouchy toddler, and now she's bigger and has more language, and sometimes she'll say, 'I feel mad now.' In the middle of nothing. One of her babysitters says to her, 'You can be mad, but you can't be mean.' Which has been helpful to her. I didn't learn that until much later in life."

http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a5146/tina-fey-interview/

carnitas jones
b. labrador

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. – Frederick Buechner