| Emily: | The problem with you is that you like girls. |
| Me: | How is that a problem for any man? |
| Emily: | It's because you need a woman more than a girl. Someone mature and in control of their lives. |
| Me: | Just because I'm in arrested development doesn't mean I need a mothering figure. |
| Emily: | That's exactly what you need. |
— Ira Glass
LOVE.
— Carl Sagan
(Source: whoisvioletbucket, via lotusmodern)
I have come to bury Jobs, not praise him. The gravity of his impact will come in the unborn generations in which his genius is silently woven within, through the credo he embedded onto the digital age; that desperate plea to Think Different that became the life force of Apple. His intense desire to change the world for the better more than once with a revolutionary product. His undying vision of the perfect communion of the mind, body, soul and machine. This is why the iPod is not just a music player, this is why the iPhone is not just a phone. It’s why Apple took one shot with the iPad while Microsoft spent a decade trying to sell a myriad of tablets. It’s why Pixar is not just a film company. This is why people fetishes their products and memorialized Jobs before he died. This is how the people who are crazy enough to change world does it. By giving you streamable porn of all kinds and the ephemeral moments of triumph in Angry Bird while you shit. And by making the ever growing sum of all human knowledge accessible from your pocket. And then by giving it an intelligence.
I miss you so much already. A part of me had been excised. My whole is not at all equal to the sum of our parts. Everything is duller. The lights of the city is faint almost to an impressionistic detail. Music is garbled at all frequencies and most things just remind me of you, and when they don’t, I would still think of you. Though when my soul wanders into the darkness, memories of you. Of us. Will shine brightly enough to lead me out into the light.
I wish we had more time together. I wish I told you how much I loved you. You might’ve known that already.
So someone wrote to me a couple of weeks ago on here that I should really see Midnight in Paris, and I laughed because my mom saw it and said, “Liv, you’ve got to see it, it’s like the Livia movie.” And some of my friends who saw it said the same thing. So I FINALLY went to see it tonight (IN CONJUNCTION WITH BUYING MY HARRY POTTER MIDNIGHT TICKETTTT) and I laughed so hard, because it IS the Livia movie, but more than that, it’s the Yeah Write Movie!
I was literally in tears every time Hemingway spoke (I thought of my grandmother telling me about her personal experiences with Hemingway—it seems Woody Allen and Granny agree), and Dahli, too. Oh my gosh. All you yeah writers have got to see it, it was fantastic.
Truth.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
David Foster Wallace
(Source: The Wall Street Journal)
Jumpstart is an organization operating under the AmeriCorps banner. The aim is to minimize the adult:child ratio in preschools in low-income neighborhoods so the children can receive the attention that they need. The fact that these children start school up to two years behind their peers is a pretty ugly reality. Once they enter school with that gap it could be almost impossible to bridge and they will potentially lag behind for the rest of their lives. The gap that these kids face will cause most of them to drop out of high school and perpetuate the vicious cycle and that is what we’re aiming to prevent. We’re an NPO funded by the federal government so we rely a lot on donations and volunteers. If you have time or money, it’d be much appreciated by us, the kids and their community alike.
I will meet the preschoolers I’ll be working with this coming Tuesday and I’m so fucking excited and equally as nervous. The fact that there’s a huge stigma (According to NAEYC 97% of Pre-K teachers are women, and only 13% of all elementary teachers are men!) with guys doing early education because it’s deemed feminine makes me want to do this even more just to prove how stupid that statement sounds. For the first time in a while I feel a semblance of meaning in my life. I feel like I’m at the point where one usually finds a calling. Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? I’ll see how this internship goes but I have a pretty good feeling I’ll come out of this with a desire to do Early Childhood Education. I guess I’ll have to visit my guidance counselor. At least I’ll be surrounded by women in graduate school.
The cult of masculinity that we perpetuate as a society can be blamed for the lack of male teachers in ECE. Being a teacher for the most formative and demanding years of a child’s life should not be seen as feminine because of the nurturing nature of the job. Let’s change that, I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger made for a terrible teacher in Kindergarten Cop, I feel that I can do him one better.
Longreads.com has been doing a great series of roundups on its Tumblr, highlighting the best...
More dancing X-Men! I AM EASILY AMUSED
Automatic Lofts
Chicago, IL
