been thinking...

"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:13:53 -0500

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

- Susan B. Anthony (via syntheticpubes, edkohler)

I knew there was a smart reason I loved bikes. And feminists.

“Folding Chair” - Regina Spektor Catching up on too...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:59:20 -0500

“Folding Chair” - Regina Spektor

Catching up on too much work…thankful for goofy, spirit lifting, perspective-bringing songs.

Come and open up your folding chair next to me
My feet are buried in the sand and there’s a breeze
There’s a shadow
You can’t see my eyes
And the sea is just a wetter version of the skies

Let’s get a silver bullet trailer and have a baby boy,
I’ll safety pin his clothes all cool and you’ll graffiti up his toys
I’ve got a perfect body, but sometimes I forget
I’ve got a perfect body, ‘cause my eyelashes catch my sweat
yes they do
They do

My Saturday morning roadtrip music! “If This is It”...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:14:52 -0500

My Saturday morning roadtrip music!

“If This is It” - Huey Lewis

(It was a tough call between this and “Stuck with You.” I don’t even know what to tell you about my musical inclinations this week…I’ve no good defense!)

"My grandfather has always loved his computer. When I was in college in the late ’90s he created an..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:05:56 -0500

“

My grandfather has always loved his computer. When I was in college in the late ’90s he created an account for Instant Messenger. Bypass82 was his handle, because his first bypass surgery was in 1982.

He used to I.M. me in college all the time, but he never quite got the hang of the short, conversational phrases typically used in that kind of communication. Our conversations went something like this:

Charles: Hi Grandpa, how’s Florida?

Charles: Hot?

Bypass82: Dear Charlie, Things are going very well here. The weather is clear and warm with a chance of some showers this afternoon. Your aunt is coming to visit next week and we are very excited. Love, Grandpa

* * * * *

HAVING a heart-to-heart with my grandfather over the phone is no simple matter. In addition to his slew of geriatric maladies, he is becoming increasingly deaf. A few months earlier, when he was hospitalized for what we thought was going to be his last heart attack, I called him in intensive care and yelled into my cellphone: “I love you, Grandpa. You really mean a lot to me.” To which he kept saying: “What? Who is this?” until I finally gave up and sent him a heartfelt fax to the nurses’ station.

This time, my grandfather apologized for having opened a Facebook account in the first place and told me he was deactivating it. I tried to talk him out of such a rash overreaction, but he literally wouldn’t hear of it. So much for my happy vision of him following his grandchildren’s lives by reading their wall posts and viewing their photo galleries; that was finished, collateral damage of my own Facebook-fueled meltdown.

Of course, it wasn’t lost on me that I should have been the one un-friending my ex and closing out my Facebook account. And someday maybe I will. But not today.

”

- I don’t even know which parts of this article to quote. It is funny and charming, so maybe you should just go read it.

via modern love

Just got home to find

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:19:00 -0500

Joseph Gordon Levitt on Jimmy Fallon.

Inappropriate crush affirmed!

sometimesagreatnotion: You Don’t Make It Easy, Babe - Josh...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:59:53 -0500

sometimesagreatnotion:

You Don’t Make It Easy, Babe - Josh Ritter

Here I am standing at your window again…

Hey, this is for you, friend. Try or don’t try, I don’t care. But thought it was applicable for your life soundtrack right now.

PS - Thanks for the recommendation, Chad!

“To Be With You” - Mr. Big So I took another long...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:19:00 -0500

“To Be With You” - Mr. Big

So I took another long drive with a music guy last night and this time, I got to pick the songs – and he would invariably find them on his ipod and grant my wish no matter how cheesy. And it is so much like Jr. High…not just because I chose Extreme, UB40 and Motley Crue but because it is sweet and easy and fun. He even let me request Christmas songs, and rolled through tiny prewar streets searching for the every 10th ambitious house that already has their lights up.

But of all the songs, singing along to this one was the highlight.

"Kevin Smith, like other great writer/directors (see: Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino), is a highly..."

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:11:23 -0500

“

Kevin Smith, like other great writer/directors (see: Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino), is a highly divisive character. Some people love his films, others think he’s a philistine who believes the conversations he has with his friends are worthy of being committed to cinema. I can understand the latter point of view, but (and perhaps this is a symptom of my demographic) I happen to love the banal conversations present in Smith’s films. Mallrats contains the most iconic examples, like:

T.S. Quint: But they’re engaged.

Brodie: Doesn’t matter, can’t happen.

T.S. Quint: Why not? It’s bound to come up.

Brodie: It’s impossible, Lois could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle the sperm?…What about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?

T.S. Quint: Sure, why not?

Brodie: He’s an alien, for Christ sake. His Kyrptonian biological makeup is enhanced by earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way he could bang regular chicks is with a kryptonite condom. That would kill him.

”

- filmosophy.: Mallrats (1995)

How did I miss this review of my all time favorite Kevin Smith film?! (I have low brow tastes, let’s be clear). No matter, here it is now - go check it out.

GPOYourHeartW Here are the nephews in whom half my heart now...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:39:00 -0500

GPOYourHeartW

Here are the nephews in whom half my heart now beats.

I think sometimes about the foreignness of motherhood. This world I’ve always been too uncertain to pursue…but respect intensely like a perfect suit not tailored for you. But when I stand on a football field in that bellowing fall sunlight and wrestle with these boys and feel the energy of the whole world coursing through them, I can’t imagine how a mother’s heart can hold it all. Even more.

And this is only half the wonder, this doesn’t even address the kinship I feel to two six year old nieces who are consuming literature like generals marching forward. Who will catch up to us and pass us in no time, who unhesitatingly promise to be authors and warriors and save Darfur. Who I will cheer for as they surpass me.

This is my heart.

"Preppies always get the last laugh!"

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:12:12 -0500

“Preppies always get the last laugh!”

- filmosophy.: Wes Anderson Week: Bottle Rocket (1996)

From Mills’ smart, funny review of the excellent “Bottle Rocket”:

“Walking back into prison, Dignan is still making plans, even if in jest, and it is only the expression he wears as he turns his head that suggests that the Scooby-Doo wrap-up isn’t as neat for him as it seemed.

“Slight hints of greater depths suffice here, especially since one is laughing for most of the movie. Indeed, the first time I watched it, I laughed so much that I was actually surprised to notice that at the end I felt real sorrow: amidst the pretending and the daydreaming, I’d not noticed childhood’s end at the chain-link fence.”

"There’s a real difference between being detached and being unattached but fully present."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:34:52 -0500

“There’s a real difference between being detached and being unattached but fully present.”

- Yoga instructor Gina, who always leaves me wondering how she got so wise, so young.

"We went and we held hands during couples skate to LeeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live (without you!..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:46:42 -0500

“

We went and we held hands during couples skate to LeeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live (without you! srsly!)” but we- like somehow, at 12, we managed to be in the sort of relationship gray area mostly tailored to people our age now! But much like now I was in no hurry to define things! I didn’t care about lousy titles! I just wanted to hold hands during the sad songs so I knew what it felt like and could yell at my mom that I knew what love was more than she ever would!…

He could never really know, you see, if he really liked me or if he just liked me because I loved him.

He said we couldn’t be together because he could never love me as much as I loved him.

No seriously, he did. This was like 1997 and he was emotionally unavailable.

”

- Life is hard. Here is someone.

In which Meaghan makes me cackle out loud, embarrassingly though I am home alone, and breaks my heart as she is uniquely able to do.

Wes Anderson Week: Rushmore (1998)

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:04:42 -0500

Look, they somehow let me write for Filmosophy again! This time, I wax inappropriate about my vast love for Rushmore in particular and all things Wes Anderson in general.

filmosophy:

I WROTE A HIT PLAY AND DIRECTED IT, SO I’M NOT SWEATING IT EITHER

by Erica

Max Fischer may be Wes Anderson’s sweetest character.

Son of a barber (though he tells his prestigious private schoolmates he is a neurosurgeon) and a dead mother, enthusiastic Jack of All Extracurricular Trades. Likely future cult leader, entrepreneur or coup d‘état organizer.

Max at 15 is larger than life and at the same time, socially and socio-economically insignificant enough to get lost in its cracks unless he rises and chooses to rage against that fate every day.

An impossibly young Jason Schwartzman plays Max, with all his quirk and tender intensity and insanity, perfectly. Bill Murray’s Mr. Blume is good, but a bit of a dime story Virgin Mary candle to Max’s Christ the Redeemer statue thundering over Rio….or Rushmore, as the case may be.

I realized halfway through a recent viewing of Rushmore just what it is I love about Wes Anderson movies – other than the style, wit and imagination. I love that the characters are slow and awkward; weird and uniquely broken. And how comforting, how heart clutchingly magnetic does that sound? Because I don’t know about you, but I am tired of saying the clever thing on dates and in meetings. I would like to say nothing at all or too much and not have to measure and calibrate it all. To have courting be so simple as, “Yes, I’ll have one of your carrots.” To just be my peculiar unrestrained self everywhere and never have to learn that sharing stories about the time your best friend forgot a very critical “L” in the title of a legislative report on “public health care” (which is hilarious, right?) too early will encourage a man to never respond to your email. Ever. And not that that happened recently but it happened once and my heart is SO TIRED OF POISE, you know? Ahem.

Anyhow, we meet Max as he is the reigning king - or at least administrator - of Rushmore. Captain and Founder of most clubs on campus. Radical idea generator, director, playwright, bee keeper, debater, year book publisher, fencing enthusiast, wresting alternate. Universally respected if not purely popular.

Max meets Mr. Blume – a school benefactor, businessman and unhappy father of beastly twin teenage sons – when he serves as the guest speaker in chapel, offering inappropriate, monotone advice on taking down the rich and well bred in society.

Max is captivated and a mentorship is born. Though it’s never entirely clear if the point is for Mr. Blume to coach Max on guerilla-success in business or for Max to teach Mr. Blume how to regenerate passion, purpose and well, Joie de vivre (as long as we’re using snooty foreign phrases).

Enter Mrs. Cross – the young, beautiful, English-accented grade school teacher Max falls unrestrainedly in love with over discussions of Jacques Cousteau quotes, Romance languages, and her drowned husband.

Early on, we get the premise: Rushmore is both a cautionary tale on all the wrong forms of love and a gracious admission that we’re going to choose them anyway. And it will be ok. We’ll find our way.

Max sets out to win the heart of Mrs. Cross with the same gusto and deafness to sense with which he approaches every school project. For her, he mounts a successful petition to save Latin classes at Rushmore, raises funds to build a full saltwater aquarium on the school baseball diamond and eventually, is kicked out of Rushmore for this unapproved construction project.

In other words, Max loves Rushmore more than life, until he loves Mrs. Cross more than Rushmore and loses everything he values most – the adored school he’s attended on scholarship for ten years, his chance for a more illustrious life than his father – in the doomed pursuit of a woman he must understand he can never have.

“Has it ever crossed your mind that you’re far too young for me?” she asks Max at one point.

“It crossed my mind that you might consider that a probability, yeah,” Max says with his usual undefeatable confidence.

So oddly charming and driven is Max that you understand Mrs. Cross’s occasional waverings. The way she drifts and looks at him once in a while as if he might really be the clumsier reincarnate of her dead husband, Edward Applebee.

Inadvertently, Max brings the miserably married Mr. Blume together with the mourning Mrs. Cross – both having become his age-inappropriate friends. And as we know it will, a sort of romance blossoms between the two (no pun intended).

And our next lesson becomes this: Which is worse? Hopeless, intoxicating but unrequited love? Or messy, ill-founded love that both parties suspect is damned from the start.

Rosemary Cross loves Edward Applebee, who is irretrievably gone. And she loves Max and Mr. Blume each a little, despite the wrongness of each of them on legal, ethical and guilt-stricken grounds.

Max Fischer loves Mrs. Cross, whom he can’t have. His father, though he’s too ashamed to admit it. And Rushmore, in whose safety he doesn’t yet realize he cannot remain forever.

Herman Blume can’t love himself, his sons or his wife, but is in love with the possibility of loving Mrs. Cross. Of loving anything again.

Max and Mr. Blume – who first loved each other in an odd strike of mutual identification – lose each other to jealousy. Betray one another, sabotage a marriage, wreck a bike, cut break lines, burn each other’s lives to the ground.

Years ago, I saw Rushmore a half dozen times with a man I was head over sense in love with, despite the arrangement being wrong for 100 reasons. Nobody ever laughed at Max Fischer like he did, no one ever got this movie and how sweet and brilliant and funny it is like he did. I hated him for a while after we fell apart, but now he is married with kids and the thought of him cradling his stomach over this movie, repeating its lines in gasps - “NICE NURSE’S UNIFORM, GUY!” - makes me smile. Makes me think of him so fondly and without any tie or expectation or heartbreak. Now, in a much more distant way, we are friends again.

And that is exactly the point of Rushmore.

We’ll get it all wrong until we accidentally find our way to something right. And if we’re good to ourselves and each other in the process – if we can forgive and forgive and forgive – the pieces will keep shifting until something beautiful comes of the mess and we won’t have to sacrifice the ones that didn’t fit the way we needed them to.

We’ll just admire them from two pieces over, knowing we are both where we belong.

Erica writes, works in non-profit development, and plans travels from Minneapolis. She tumbls here.

"So we met on OkCupid.com. He had noticed that one of my photo captions mentions Hayward, WI, and..."

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:51:15 -0500

“

So we met on OkCupid.com. He had noticed that one of my photo captions mentions Hayward, WI, and messaged me to query about whether I had lived there or just visited on vacation. I told him that I had lived there in my early twenties, he tells me he grew up there, so great, we have something in common. From his pictures he looked like a cross between Carrot Top and Shawn White, which was actually kind of intriguing in a way. You ever meet someone that you, at first, think is really super ugly, and you’re like, “NO WAY”, but you keep an open mind because you dig the whole personality thing and you’re hoping that, in time, his face will grow on you? Yeah, that’s how I felt about my last boyfriend when I first met him.

And look where that got me.

So we’re exchanging messages and he tells me that his name is Timbre, and do I know what that name means? First off, don’t do this, guys. Don’t do the thing where you think you’re asking a fun and challenging question but only because it requires that she learn more about you. I understand that sometimes our childhoods were not that great, and that our moms didn’t always come up to our rooms at the end of the school day to sit on our bed and to listen to us talk about our 3rd grade hopes, dreams, and lunch table interactions, but if you feel like there’s not enough people in the world who are interested in who you are, start a blog and force it upon them. Don’t kill it before it’s even gotten out of the gate by making it clear that you only want to find someone to date so you can have someone with which to talk about yourself more.

”

- My friend Amber writes the funniest thing you’ll read on the internet this month right here.

You're nice to ask.

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:11:05 -0500

Man Sitting Next To Me at My Sketchy Neighborhood Coffee Shop: Hello.
Me: Uh. Hi.
Man: So are you Muslim?
Me: Nope.
Man: Christian?
Me: Yep.
Man: Oh. How was Christmas?

"Some days the Republican Party seems to be going crazy. Its public image is often shaped by people..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:28:00 -0500

“Some days the Republican Party seems to be going crazy. Its public image is often shaped by people who appear to have gone into government because they saw it as a steppingstone to talk radio.”

- I love David Brooks — and his next faith-giving comment that “deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations.”

Republican or Democrat, you have to hope this is the case. You have to hope we’re moving beyond persona, rhetoric, opposition alone. I’m a lifelong moderate Republican, which makes me a bit of an oddity on Tumblr, but I believe that we’re not actually out of ideas. We’re just letting the wrong people speak for us. I’ve known good statesmen (and women) and big thinkers in the party and I truly hope we’re ready to esteem, listen to and follow them again one of these days.

via

“So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” – Simon and GarfunkelThis song has...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:50:00 -0500

“So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” – Simon and Garfunkel

This song has been in my mind for a week, dancing through in this gentle dreamy trance. It may be the very sweetest tune in my childhood soundtrack.

Today

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:12:40 -0500

Using Jedi Mind Tricks to stave off new work assignments until I can catch up a bit. At least until this afternoon, I am not the droid you are looking for.

hipsterdiet (via bunkercomplex): Stars - “The Aspidistra...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:15:00 -0500

hipsterdiet (via bunkercomplex):

Stars - “The Aspidistra Flies”

If a song could break a heart - in the best possible way - this one comes close.

Nice, Will!

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:31:27 -0500

“We can never know what to want,
because, living only one life, we can neither
compare it with our previous lives
nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (via beautifulordinaire)