This guy
This fucking guy
Lamebook? More like Fuckingawesomebook.
Did you know, you can quit your job, you can leave university? You aren’t legally required to have a degree, it’s a social pressure and expectation, not the law, and no one is holding a gun to your head. You can sell your house, you can give up your apartment, you can even sell your vehicle, and your things that are mostly unnecessary. You can see the world on a minimum wage salary, despite the persisting myth, you do not need a high paying job. You can leave your friends (if they’re true friends they’ll forgive you, and you’ll still be friends) and make new ones on the road. You can leave your family. You can depart from your hometown, your country, your culture, and everything you know. You can sacrifice. You can give up your $5.00 a cup morning coffee, you can give up air conditioning, frequent consumption of new products. You can give up eating out at restaurants and prepare affordable meals at home, and eat the leftovers too, instead of throwing them away. You can give up cable TV, Internet even. This list is endless. You can sacrifice climbing up in the hierarchy of careers. You can buck tradition and others’ expectations of you. You can triumph over your fears, by conquering your mind. You can take risks. And most of all, you can travel. You just don’t want it enough. You want a degree or a well-paying job or to stay in your comfort zone more. This is fine, if it’s what your heart desires most, but please don’t envy me and tell me you can’t travel. You’re not in a famine, in a desert, in a third world country, with five malnourished children to feed. You probably live in a first world country. You have a roof over your head, and food on your plate. You probably own luxuries like a cellphone and a computer. You can afford the $3.00 a night guest houses of India, the $0.10 fresh baked breakfasts of Morocco, because if you can afford to live in a first world country, you can certainly afford to travel in third world countries, you can probably even afford to travel in a first world country. So please say to me, “I want to travel, but other things are more important to me and I’m putting them first”, not, “I’m dying to travel, but I can’t”, because I have yet to have someone say they can’t, who truly can’t. You can, however, only live once, and for me, the enrichment of the soul that comes from seeing the world is worth more than a degree that could bring me in a bigger paycheck, or material wealth, or pleasing society. Of course, you must choose for yourself, follow your heart’s truest desires, but know that you can travel, you’re only making excuses for why you can’t. And if it makes any difference, I have never met anyone who has quit their job, left school, given up their life at home, to see the world, and regretted it. None. Only people who have grown old and regretted never traveling, who have regretted focusing too much on money and superficial success, who have realized too late that there is so much more to living than this.
Wunderkammer: Did You Know (via creatingaquietmind)
I read this every single day
(via midsaturday)
That’s nice and all, but do you know how much airfare costs? What about if you get sick or hurt? How are you supposed to make money to live on? It’s hard to get a job. If you quit the job you have, what happens if you need money and can’t get a new one? What about if you have no one to bail you out (figuratively or literally) should you get in trouble? What if it wouldn’t be safe for you to travel (for medical or other reasons)?
I want to travel, but I can’t right now. It’s not because I’m succumbing to materialism. It’s not because I want comfort or $5 coffee (why do people assume everyone buys expensive lattes?) or a chance to climb the corporate ladder. Frankly, it’s arrogant to assume those are the only things keeping people from traveling. Real life is not Fight Club; “free soul who’s rejected corporate culture” and “mindless, superficial wage slave tied to possessions and a desk” are not the only options.
Yes, I put my degree before everything, because a part of me would die if I didn’t. Even if it weren’t because of that, even if I studied because I wanted money, or because people expected it of me, there wouldn’t be anything shameful about that.
There are plenty of people in the world who are not like you, and have had completely different experiences. These experiences may mean they can’t travel, or at least can’t travel now. There’s no need to make assumptions about why. If someone says they can’t travel, then they can’t, and there’s absolutely no reason to make them feel bad for that. Maybe they can’t afford transportation. Maybe they have health problems. Maybe they have family members whose needs they have to put first. Maybe they’re already sacrificing. Whatever the reason, it’s not yours to question. They know their own lives better than you do.
I hate feeling like the bad guy for thinking about whether I can afford things, or for caring about money. It’s a fact of life. If I did whatever I wanted and didn’t think about money, I’d have a few hundred extra books in my apartment. I’d go to movies, try new foods, and go exploring a lot. Sounds great, right? Except when I ran out of food and the rent was due, I’d be in major trouble. So I keep track of how much money I have. I’m very careful not to run out. Meanwhile, everything I don’t absolutely need to spend goes toward someday studying abroad.
There are other potentially squicky things in this, but I’ll leave them to someone more qualified to comment. Just… don’t assume everyone can travel, or that the only reason for not doing so is “focusing too much on money and superficial success.” Other people know their own lives and situations better than you do. You’re not them. And making them feel bad about their lives, or forcing them to justify themselves to you, is just wrong.
(via inconvenient-carrot)
i love this so much because even though pubert isn’t the child she wanted him to be, she stills accepts him and loves him, and even reads him this book because that’s what he would want. god i love the addams family so much.
If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: you’ve gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women and that the worst women writer can write a better man than the best male writer can write a good woman. And it’s just the minimum. Because the thing about the sort of heteronormative masculine privilege, whether it’s in Santo Domingo, or the United States, is you grow up your entire life being told that women aren’t human beings, and that women have no independent subjectivity. And because you grow up with this, it’s this huge surprise when you go to college and realize that, “Oh, women aren’t people who does my shit and fucks me.”
And I think that this a huge challenge for boys, because they want to pretend they can write girls. Every time I’m teaching boys to write, I read their women to them, and I’m like, “Yo, you think this is good writing?” These motherfuckers attack each other over cliche lines but they won’t attack each other over these toxic representations of women that they have inherited… their sexist shorthand, they think that is observation. They think that their sexist distortions are insight. And if you’re in a writing program and you say to a guy that their characters are sexist, this guy, it’s like you said they fucking love Hitler. They will fight tooth and nail because they want to preserve this really vicious sexism in the art because that is what they have been taught.
And I think the first step is to admit that you, because of your privilege, have a very distorted sense of women’s subjectivity. And without an enormous amount of assistance, you’re not even going to get a D. I think with male writers the most that you can hope for is a D with an occasional C thrown in. Where the average women writer, when she writes men, she gets a B right off the bat, because they spent their whole life being taught that men have a subjectivity. In fact, part of the whole feminism revolution was saying, “Me too, motherfuckers.” So women come with it built in because of the society.
It’s the same way when people write about race. If you didn’t grow up being a subaltern person in the United States, you might need help writing about race. Motherfuckers are like ‘I got a black boy friend,’ and their shit sounds like Klan Fiction 101.
The most toxic formulas in our cultures are not pass down in political practice, they’re pass down in mundane narratives. It’s our fiction where the toxic virus of sexism, racism, homophobia, where it passes from one generation to the next, and the average artist will kill you before they remove those poisons. And if you want to be a good artist, it means writing, really, about the world. And when you write cliches, whether they are sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, that is a fucking cliche. And motherfuckers will kill you for their cliches about x, but they want their cliches about their race, class, queerness. They want it in there because they feel lost without it. So for me, this has always been the great challenge.
As a writer, if you’re really trying to write something new, you must figure out, with the help of a community, how can you shed these fucking received formulas. They are received. You didn’t come up with them. And why we need fellow artists is because they help us stay on track. They tell you, “You know what? You’re a bit of a fucking homophobe.” You can’t write about the world with these simplistic distortions. They are cliches. People know art, always, because they are uncomfortable. Art discomforts. The trangressiveness of art has to deal with confronting people with the real. And sexism is a way to avoid the real, avoiding the reality of women. Homophobia is to avoid the real, the reality of queerness. All these things are the way we hide from encountering the real. But art, art is just about that.
Patrick Stump Fan Vid - Killing me softly
“Strumming my pain with his fingers, Singing my life with his words, Killing me softly with his song”
Nuance by Marco-Antoine Locatelli
Gifs of an amazing light and movement performance featuring dancer Lucas Boirat. The interpretative performance presents a push and pull between the human silhouette and a shape-shifting abstract energy.
energy bending
light & shadows
sabellart
