(Source: fearandwar)
6od:
THIS IS A PERSONAL POST ABOUT MY PERSONAL LIFE. SCROLL ON IF YOU GIVE NO FUCKS.
I sat at this bar that’s so small it doesn’t even bother with a sign. Two of my best male friends sat across from me. We talked about food, good chefs, flavors, literature, shoes, fashion, commercialism and consumerism, and on and on. We talked about how half of our ultra-tight group of friends are “talkers” and the other half are “commenters.” Some carry on conversations, others simply comment when they feel they must.
I realized recently that, despite my often severe independence, I’m so lonely, sometimes I wake up with the sensation of it so heavy on my chest that I can’t take a first breath in the morning. This is a new realization.
My last boss said to me that the guy who will make me happy in the long-term is going to have to be both insanely intelligent and insanely open to new experiences, and, though I often detested her judgements about my personal life, no estimation could be closer to the truth.
My friends and I are close because we are open to almost anything—it is what buffets us close together. We take on anything as a unit. We talk about anything with each other. No topic off-limits, no situation too awkward or complex to parse. But that can be off-putting to someone coming into our circle from the outside. Conversations over beer can run the gauntlet from queer theory to Family Guy fart jokes, and it all happens so fast that you can feel like you’ve run a mental marathon by the end. And you can pry my friendship from this big family as soon as you pry the light from my dead grey eyes.
The few of us who are in relationships complain that their partners feel overwhelmed by my friends, that there is too much to keep up with and too much you have to know to converse. It’s just too much to be “jumped in” to.
The kind of guy who gets along with these people is so intellectually open, it’s like he’s splayed out width-wise like a tanned skin in the sun. Personally, I’m blunt and honest (and not always in the best way, i suppose), and my mind hops from subject to subject (even on a hefty dose of adderall) quickly. More than one Buddhist friend has called mine a “monkey brain.” We all have this problem with finding partners. Maybe it’s why we stick so close together.
And I let myself get excited about this boy with the ink because we sat outside in the freezing december cold and he kept right up with me as I jumped from atheism to church jokes to cocktail recipes to 30 Rock references to Alec Baldwin movies and back again to politics and he never missed a step. I got really excited when he nodded along as I dropped both “hegemony” and “genderqueer” into a sentence and then made a different point using the same words, and using them correctly.
As much as I love to fuck and to bite and to cum, more than anything, I love to talk—about everything. My life has become this jumbled mess of all these incredible things that I’ve done and that have happened to me over the years, it’s hard to not constantly wonder aloud about all the things that could happen next. I’ve sat in awe of a quarter-century of a life that some people won’t live in their whole lifetimes, and I crave so much more of everything that my desire to slash my way through another quarter-life of untamed world overwhelms me, but I don’t want to go it alone.
Meanwhile, so many men and women tell me that I’m the girl they’d want if they could create one from scratch. The mini-entourage of 40+ (years, not people) delightful midwest gay men I’ve inexplicably acquired are always offering to set me up with their straight friends in their 30’s who would “worship the damn ground you walked on.” My parents’ friends, young and old, ask me how the hell I am still single. Male friends my own age wish their girlfriends and exes could be more like me. And I want to shout back at all of them that they can stop pondering my singleness for sport and start bringing in all these fucking dudes who would supposedly be so “perfect” for me.
(James Deen and Billy Castro, by the way, still have yet to tweet back.)
So as so many people line up to tell me to lower my expectations, to aim for someone who wants a normal dose of suburban sedation and medium-grade life expectations, I’m still holding out 24-year-old naiive hope that I’ll stumble across someone who wants to run and fuck and fight and taste and talk and tumble through the rest of their short life with the same fervor as me. I’ve never wanted a story-book ending. I want an ending worthy of a whole new kind of story.
Life boils down to the things amazing enough to your senses to make your heavily-filtered brain right them down. Before I waste myself into an parboiled pot of beige experiences, I want to state for the record that I’m out to continue to be amazed by all of the things that have knocked me right on my ass so many times before. Life is not a bitch and then you die. Life is a beautiful blur, and then you sit back and sigh.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope that I can find someone who feels the same way, but there is not enough realistic positivity to go around. Maybe what I want is a long-term three-way: Myself in love with a person, and the two of us in love with the eternal spring that is the potential to find something amazing hidden inside the ordinary.
All of this sounds incredibly trite, so forgive me, but this is my way of saying “Fuck you” to the sudden influx of people telling me to expect less and settle more.
If it takes building a steel scaffold around my spirit to hold it open, well, fuck it. I guess that’s what I’ll do.
I like this girl.
This. All of this, forever.
I’ve never wanted a story-book ending. I want an ending worthy of a whole new kind of story.
I just want to have adventures, alright?
(Also: “I feel like sometimes I have a map in my pocket that folds up and I pull it out and it’s bigger than the table, and there’s 1,000 places to go with her.” -Tom Waits)
(Source: cal51)
So Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure today announced that they will no longer give any funding to Planned Parenthood.
This funding allowed Planned Parenthood to provide breast examinations and referrals for mammography and ultrasound to patients at their health centers, patients who were able to be seen and treated at Planned Parenthood regardless of income or insurance, because of Planned Parenthood’s sliding scale fees and commitment to treating as many people as possible.
In the aftermath of this, which has turned into a flurry of opinion and counter-opinion, deleted comments on Komen’s Facebook wall, and a tweetstorm of epic proportion, some salient points worth consideration:
While pressuring Komen to reverse this decision is an option (and there is already an online petition going for that purpose) it seems unlikely to be effective. I am decidedly pessimistic about Komen walking back from this precipice.
Komen has said that this decision arose from a new policy of not funding any organization that is under government investigation. Since Planned Parenthood was already under investigation when the policy was changed, it’s pretty clear that the policy was targeting PP.
Moreover, this Komen policy and the subsequent de-funding came quickly behind the hiring of Karen Handel as Komen’s Senior Vice President for Public Policy. Those in Georgia recall that in 2010 Handel ran for governor of Georgia with a extremely anti-choice platform. This woman is responsible for policy decisions for Komen, and she is clearly opposed to Planned Parenthood.
And we cannot forget that the founder of Komen, Nancy Brinker, has long been tied to the highest ranks of Republican politics.
Komen didn’t cave to external pressure from the right wing, because the right wing is intrinsic to the executive power structure of Komen.
Those who rely upon Planned Parenthood as their health provider, who still need breast examinations, who still need funded referrals when there is an issue, well, they’re collateral damage in a culture war that begin more than 30 years ago and has always had its sights set not just on Planned Parenthood but any organization that supported or affiliated with them.
So where do we go from here?
Well we give Komen the business. We email (news@komen.org), we tweet (@komenforthecure), we call (972-701-2168). We absolutely refuse to donate, not directly, not by buying pink ribbon festooned (and pinkwashed) products, not by sponsoring someone for a 5K or a 3 day walk. So long as Komen plays politics with human lives, they should not see another single penny of our money.
But more importantly, far more importantly, we do donate to Planned Parenthood, we go over and above the money that they will lose because of Komen, we get every penny we can to Planned Parenthood to ensure that no one will go without a needed cancer screening, no one’s life will be placed at risk because of where they get their medical care.
Planned Parenthood — and its clients, by extension — must be our primary concern and our primary focus. The political battle will always be there, it can be put on hold for a while. The patients whose care is hanging in the balance cannot wait.
We must keep our focus, we must redouble our commitment, we must step into the breech.
Join me in making a tax-deductible donation to Planned Parenthood right now.
FUCK YEAH, AMADI!
Fuck, man. Mumford and Sons.
I forget sometimes.
EVERYONE HAS TO WATCH THIS RIGHT NOW. EVERYONE.
Okay I tried to hold out but I failed and THIS VIDEO IS HILARIOUS OH MY GOD.
my friends want to make a choose-your-own-adventure version of the bible
ok then
The number 1 most quoted line at Hoofbeat? I’m thinking so.
And then there was this one time I was like, “I’m going to teach an entire riding lesson in my Bartok the bat voice!” and one of my students/RITs was like DO IT AND I WILL RUN YOU OVER and I was like come at me brooooooo except she was riding Meech who is a huge doofus and she actually ran over me.
I loved that job so much.
(Source: gif-database)
Senator Janet Howell, Baddass Bitch of the Day
To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
“We need some gender equity here,” she told HuffPost. “The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we’re going to do that to women, why not do that to men?”
(Source: somethingalltrue)
One time I was at a point where I was kinda getting into it with this guy but I was very determined to not have sex with him for a while and I discussed this determination with my friend about it via cellular phone on the way to a concerty thing and she was like “Be good.” and I was like “Of course! Don’t worry.” and then I went to the concerty thing and he played a hard cover of Wagon Wheel and looked at me when he sang the part about his baby who plays the gee-tar and I texted her and was like “Never mind.” and then I had sex with him later that night.
#I am the 99% #of Wagon Wheel Panty Droppers
THESE TAGS. ARE FLAWLESS.
(Source: pushharderstriveon)
