"Whenever I’m in a crowded place, I always fall in lust with the face of a beautiful stranger I see. That same night I find myself laying in bed dreaming about the person I saw earlier and, by the time I wake up in the morning, they disappear from my mind. It’s an endless cycle."
"There were no sex classes. No friendship classes. No classes on how to navigate a bureaucracy, build an organization, raise money, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what was important to me. Not knowing how to do these things is what messes people up in life, not whether they know algebra or can analyze literature."
"I’m still writing about you and you haven’t read a word."
"She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word."
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That’s a very interesting topic because it’s one that really upsets a lot of people in one way or another. I probably shouldn’t talk about it - I shouldn’t talk about it. In fact, that should probably be the right answer. I shouldn’t talk about it. No comment? Plead the fifth?
There is clearly a very, very profound bond between the two. And I will leave it to you to read into that what you will, because I don’t want to be accused of queerbaiting or any of these other things that I am not doing.
Doing something like this, you have the opportunity to reach a lot of people, and that’s a really gratifying and lovely experience. You also have the opportunity to very easily piss off a lot of people. That can be lovely as well. But I sometimes have to resist the temptation to engage, like, “Hold on you fuckers, that’s not - “
I did a convention in Seattle. I don’t know what it was I said or what transpired, I don’t know what it was. But people got upset and I feel like it was really unfair, what was said.
First of all, I think the term “queerbaiting” is not accurate. It pissed me off, because I feel like a real champion of that community with all those letters [LGBTQA] - you know, I’ve officiated gay weddings. Also, I don’t know understand what the term means.
At the same time, it’s imbued with a lot of meaning in a lot of ways and there are a million different interpretations open. I hesitate to call it an artform, but it is one, especially when Ben [Edlund] is writing. It’s a lot of things. It’s deep and meaningful.
Is it love? Probably. What does that mean? It’s a million different things. At the very least, it’s a complex relationship. One of them is a celestial wavelength of intent, which is obviously a difficult kind of being to have a relationship with. “Yeah, you know, my boyfriend, he’s great, but he’s a celestial wavelength of intent. So a lot of times, when he sleeps over, I don’t know what’s going on. Because he’s there and then he’s not there and then he’s back again and then he’s in my head, literally in my head”
So yeah, it’s a very intense relationship. Let’s leave it at that. What is that? Am I a politician? They love each other, but it’s purely sexual.
"Misha Collins on the relationship between Dean and Castiel, queerbaiting, LGBT+ rights, and the difficulties of dating angels
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Our education systems are failing. People aren’t excited to leave college with a degree anymore. They’re scared. College graduates are having hard times finding jobs that pay anything beyond minimum wage. They’re overqualified. There’s nothing for them. There is so much anxiety about the future and our traditional methods aren’t fixing it. And more and more, people like me are burying ourselves in student debt only to feel trapped by what we’ve invested so much time and energy into. I think there are a lot of us in our late 20s who did the math and realized we’d be more financially well off if we opted out of college and worked at McDonald’s after high school. I have brilliant friends with college degrees who don’t feel any better off for it because they’re working a job that isn’t fulfilling. The only difference is that they HAVE to work that unfulfilling job now because they’re chained to debt; debt that was incurred so they could be happy in their work from day to day. It’s not delivering and people are restless.
And I could be wrong. But there’s a thing inside of me that looks at all of the anxious, depressed people around me and it hits me that in a lot of ways our generation is completely lost and bottoming out. And bottoming out is a magical thing. When a person bottoms out they start from zero. They get to recreate the rules. They don’t feel pressured to get a job that uses their degree so they don’t feel like they’ve wasted time. They get to dream up new rules. When an entire generation bottoms out, they change the world and dream up a new way to look at it.
"Long ago I realized that no other person would be to me what you are."
"You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful, and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it."
Street Lit
Putting a message on a wall can be a much more effective way to reach the masses than expecting them to go find a book and learn it themselves. Some men just want to watch the world learn, regardless of medium. This collection of street arts details some memorable lines from famous books, hit the pictures to see which author and title, if you didnt already recognize them immediately.
(via: BuzzFeed)
"Within the South Korean literary tradition, women poets are called yŏryu siin (female poet). Male poets are simply called siin (poet). According to Kim Hyesoon, this gendered terminology results in the marginalization of women poets’ authentic voices, as yŏryu siin are expected to write pretty, sentimental verse that speaks in a passive voice. It’s not a stretch to see this, as Kim does, as an extension of Korean gender norms that define “acceptable” behavior for women according to three rigid roles: ch’ŏnyŏ (young unmarried woman/virgin), ajuma (middle-aged woman/mother), and halmoni (grandmother). Each role requires the woman to serve a different master, Kim has noted: “She must first obey her father, then her husband when she becomes an ajuma, and finally obey her son as a halmoni. Any woman who violates or lives outside of these roles is called a ch’angyŏ (prostitute).”
In direct contrast to the sentimental and gentle poetry of the yŏryu siin, Kim Hyesoon’s work functions like the body of a female grotesque; her poetry seeps from the page, protruding with images of violence, vomit, trash, bodily decay, and death. Kim’s poems consistently resist the pressure to beautify; they take instead the subjects deemed appropriate to Korean women—family, motherhood, romantic love—and defile them with the violent expressions of an oppressed identity. However, this grotesqueness is no mere aesthetic choice; as Kim tells me in the interview that follows, her work serves as a kind of conduit for a collective voice: “Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.” Thus, for Kim Hyesoon, poetry engages directly in a political struggle in which Korean women articulate a “new voice” that allows them to inhabit multiple and fluid identities free of restrictive gender norms. It’s an incredibly powerful tool in women’s struggle for equality because it is only the “language of [a] poetry that has schizophrenia” that can force the “father language down from power."
"When I was a little girl, growing up in france, my mother worked sewing tapestries. Some of the tapestries were exported to America. The only problem was that many of the images on the tapestries were of naked people. My mother’s job was to cut out—the genitals of men and women and replace these parts with flowers so they could be sold to americans. My mother saved all the pictures of the genitials over the years, and one day she sewed them together as a quilt and then she gave the quilt to me. That’s the difference between French and American aesthetics."
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How hard is it to be a female human being in the media? Anne Hathaway is a pretty good measure. She learned everything she could about sex trafficking and prostitution to play Fantine, and knew only too well that modern-day Fantines were probably living within blocks of the Academy Awards. As she said in her acceptance speech, ‘Here’s hoping that someday in the not too distant future the misfortunes of Fantine will only be found in stories and never in real life.’
Did that get coverage? No. Instead, the huge and expensive media beast speculated on her nipples. In a way, that makes Anne’s point. No wonder there are still Fantines, so many in the media think like pimps, traffickers and johns.
"Gloria Steinem (via alittlecoconuttart)
❝ The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity - it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. ❞ — Yann Martell
