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Posted 3 weeks ago
You want a job, a vacation, heath insurance, validation, a back rub, a scalp massage at the place where you get your haircut, people who are jealous of you, an ex who won’t stop texting you when they’re drunk, Twitter followers, happiness maybe sorta, someone to buy you lunch at a fancy restaurant, a mentor who can tell you what the hell to do with your life, a reliable internet connection, a reliable human connection, a gift card to the grocery store, dinner parties with friends where everyone will pretend to have their crap together for just one night, a nice flirty text message to wake up to every morning for the rest of your life, for everyone to like you even if you don’t like anyone, and one of those nights that doesn’t end till 9 AM and reminds you what it feels like to be young and alive. Oh, and $$$. That’s all. Think you can get that for me? For us?

Oh, and a nice wardrobe, general attractiveness, good credit, and good health. Also for our politicians to stop being douches, and probably to have some token friends of each race.

Ryan O’Connell on What 20-Somethings Want, via Thought Catalog.

Quote 82
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Posted 1 month ago

There’s a lot of anger, but people don’t know what they’re angry about. You know, from the end of the Vietnam War all the way up to 9/11, for the most part everyone was fat, dumb and happy. Then 9/11 happened and shattered all that. People became scared and anxious and out of control. They’d go to Wal-Mart and realize that everything they’ve been buying says ‘Made in China.’ They see the complete ineptitude of the federal government during Hurricane Katrina. They see some guy [Bernie Madoff] within the shadow of the SEC running a $50 billion scam - and who the hell is watching out for their $10,000 IRA? And then the banks melt down, the auto industry is taken over, and we pass this huge stimulus. All of this builds up and they’re saying, ‘What the hell can I possibly do about a $14 trillion national debt?’

But then it gets to health care. And they’re saying, ‘That’s me. That’s mine. It’s the first big issue that’s personalized. And that’s why we’re getting all this pent-up frustration and anger. Because when you explain the bill to ‘em, they say, ‘Well that doesn’t sound too bad.’ But it doesn’t matter. All their anger is focused on this, because it’s personal.

Madam Speaker, what you need to do is break the bill down. Have a bill that covers preexisting conditions. Pass that - or make the Republicans vote against it - and then move onto another part. But you do this omnibus approach, they won’t know what the hell’s in it. And they’ll keep yelling at it.

Rep. John Tanner (D-TN), to Nancy Pelosi in August 2009, on the Affordable Care Act. This quote is from Robert Draper’s Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives.

I think there are varying degrees of truth here, depending on 1) where you land on the political spectrum, and 2) how much faith you have in the collective mindset of the American people.

I think the biggest downfall of the Affordable Care Act is the length of time between its passage and when the final, major provisions take effect. That’s a 10-year spread. It’s bittersweet, of course, because ACA is a massive undertaking that likely needs a full decade to enact. However, the longer it takes for provisions to take into effect - and the less effort the administration puts into promoting and notifying the public about said provisions - the more likely opponents will succeed in dismantling the legislation. The point could be moot now, since the Supreme Court may rule the legislation, or at least the individual mandate, unconstitutional.

I’m not so confident that breaking the bill into several pieces of legislation would ultimately give us as many provisions as the omnibus does now, but I don’t doubt that this strategy may have made the public more aware of what the legislation contains. Would there still be angry people? Of course. I just think there’d be less vague outrage (“Government takeover, death panels and socialism, oh my!!”) and more tailored, specific grievances against provisions that are supposedly freedom-denying, liberty-hating government initiatives.

(via pantslessprogressive)

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Quote 4325
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Posted 1 month ago
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (via fuckyeahfeministartandliterature)

(Source: helplesslyamazed)

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Video
Posted 2 months ago

“…The crazy part was that even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career- you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in. It didn’t matter, you see, whether you had an IQ of 170 or and IQ of 70, you were brainwashed all the same. Only the surface trappings were different. Only the talk was a little more sophisticated. Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up with a giant prick spouting sperm, soap-suds, silks and satins, and, of course, money. Nobody bothered to tell you what marriage was really about. You weren’t even provided, like European girls, with a philosophy of cynicism and practicality. You expected not to desire any other men after marriage.

Then the desires came and you threw yourself into a panic of self-hatred. What an evil woman you were! How could you keep being infatuated with strange men like that? How could you study their bulging trousers like that? How could you sit in meetings imagining how every man in the room would screw? How could you sit on a train fucking total strangers with your eyes? How could you DO that to your husband? Did anyone ever tell you that maybe it had nothing whatever to do with your husband?

And what about those other longings which marriage stifled? Those longings to hit the open road, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head, to discover whether you could manage to survive in a cabin in the woods without going mad; to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something. 

Five years of marriage had made me itchy for all those things: itchy for men, and itchy for solitude. Ithcy for sex and itchy for the life of a recluse. I knew my itches were contradictory— and that made things even worse.”

-Eric Jong, Fear of Flying

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to believe in happy marriages.


Quote 143
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Posted 4 months ago
The balance is not in the stillness
but the way
the water pours from you
as you move from the sea.
Paavo Haavikko, from “Trees, Their Legacy of Green,” trans. Richard Sieburth

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Photo 720
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Posted 4 months ago

(Source: heypoliscigirl)

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Photo 40018
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Posted 5 months ago

(Source: bitchyoustolemyurl)

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Link 40
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Posted 5 months ago

Musings of an Inappropriate Woman: Guest post: Body love

rachelhills:

This is a guest post by Muireann Campbell, first published at her brilliant blog Bangs and a Bun.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw an article in The Evening Standard that had three female athletes done up to the nines (the go to fashion shoot for female sportswomen – ‘let’s make them…

via rachelhills
Video 3
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Posted 5 months ago

WOW.

Quote 269
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Posted 5 months ago
As the vowels and consonants of an alphabet interact symbolically to make a certain written word, so writer and reader bring together two halves of one meaning, so lover and beloved are matched together like two sides of one knucklebone. An intimate collusion occurs.
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (via proustitute)
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