tough cookie

I created this digie essay for a class. Look for familiar faces...

Baller of the Week

Read: Oh Christ I just wanted you to fuck me and then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me

...Ladies and....er, Ladies, Tracy Emin.

I just found out about this brilliant artist and am wondering where she has been all my life.

pleasures of the past, part one.

It is late summer and the sun is sad. It hangs in the lower in the sky just as my heart hangs lower in my chest. It’s still warm but not humid like it once was. The earth is gently setting us down from the summer high.

I walked down Loomis Street today. I’ve done it a million times before, although I’ve never almost cried like I did today. I headed to my old house to pick up mail but knew I wasn’t heading home.

My boots kicked dirt on the gray gravel driveway. Bikes crowd the wooden porch where mine used to belong there before it was stolen. I knock on the door where I once held a key. I enter a house where I once lived and breathed and loved. But today I am just picking up misdirected mail.

The approaching fall makes me intensely nostalgic. Nostalgia sneaks up on me just as the reds and the oranges sneak up on the green leaves. I have a longing to feel the past although my horoscope told me I ‘cannot fully embrace the exciting and daunting possibilities that loom ahead of you if you also insist on immersing yourself in the pleasures of the past.’

But today all I want are the pleasures of my past. I want to feel a warm hug from my sister. I want to taste the collective dinners and embrace the collective ideas. I want to wonder when I’ll stop giggling. I want to know that we’ll always be this happy; this young; and this close.

Every time has a season but I could live the pleasures of my past and the happiness of the sad fall forever.

blank walls

she's moved a thousand times and it's always the same: blank walls where her innumerable picture frames used to hang. dusty shelves where books and earrings and stationary used to gather. during each move (always in summer), sadness twists her heart into a knot that will surely burst and salty tears freely flow down her sticky summer-freckled face.

but this time is different. she's not crying. she can't cry. her age has rendered her emotionless or maybe it's her readiness.

still, i don't know why i took all the pictures down. i fucking hate blank walls.

It Wasn't Until Then

By Meredith Rivlin

It wasn't until i left your house that i felt the glass.

It wasn't until i left your house and decided to take the long way home,

past the painted water and mountains, on one of the sunny, earth-scented, spring days that could still be counted on one hand,

with an empty stomach because we didn't know if we should

eat breakfast or lunch

or stay in bed sleeping and fucking until the next morning.

It wasn't until then that i felt the glass.

It was sharper than a pebble in my shoe,

and was certainly not round.

It wasn't irritating like a pebble was, making you kick it

to the front of your shoe and keep going, or yelling

"wait up!" to your friends as they walked ahead.

Instead it was a sharp pain in my heel,

so painful that i walked on the toes of my left foot

until i got to a bench where i sat down and took off my shoe

and carefully peeled off my sock.

It wasn't until then that i saw the glass.

Well, i really saw the blood first,

where the glass had entered,

punctured through the calloused skin of my heel.

i nervously picked at it, desperate to get it out immediately

but thinking the worst:

It was lodged in deep;

it had broken into tiny pieces inside my body

i would need surgery;

sterilization;

this was an omen for more pain to come from you.

it wasn't until then that i wondered what had happened

to cause glass to be on my side of the bed, not your side,

where some of my clothes lay in a bundle,

a piece of glass sneaking its way into my sock.

i tried not to imagine you with someone else where i just

pretended to sleep while i really

looked at the spines on your bookshelf.

i didn't want to picture you with someone else,

having such wild sex that you broke glass and didn't even stop

to clean it up.
(I later learned that your landlord broke a bottle when repairing your refrigerator
and that you must not have swept it all up.)

It wasn't until then that i questioned whether i liked you

because of your hair and vulnerability

or because i was nervous that my number of sexual partners

could now be rounded up.

I grabbed the tiny point that hadn't been impacted

completely in my foot yet.

I scraped the skin around it in desperation,

close to panic.

I looked around to see joggers in spandex,

shaded people walking leashed dogs,

families on vacation.

How can they go on walking

when there is pain and metaphor happening!

It wasn't until i took a deep breath and pulled hard

at what had caused such pain

while Aesop's Fables ran through my head:

lions and mice and thorns,

unexpected friends coming

of stereotypical enemies.

It wasn't until then that i removed the glass.

I pulled out the triangular shard,

now tinted red

and a drop of blood

formed on my once impermeable heel.

But only one drop.

Love [is] the Drug

Walking to work this morning, actually walking to buy coffee from the cute new barista at Speeder and Earl's, I saw/smelled 3 people getting high on their ways to work. Got me thinking about getting numb before work to make it not as awful.
Maybe if you can't feel anything while you're entering data or doing things at your firm that people at firms do, maybe then it doesn't feel like a waste or a severe compromise.

Or maybe you only feel truly creative when you're high and then you can come up with really good names for files and titles for spreadsheets, meanwhile sketching trippy patterns and phrases that you will later transfer to a canvas and your journal. And then maybe you don't feel bound to anything; you feel free and light and part of the earth and the trees from where the paper in your printer came.

Maybe you've been smoking since you were a freshman in high school, or even in 8th grade, and now you can't function without weed; it feels more like you're on drugs when you're off them. You like the way your head feels and the way that music sounds and the culture and the experiences that you can't always remember.

And you forgot your lighter at home because you weren't stoned first, or else you would have remembered, so you pack your swirly-colored, hand-blown glass piece and use the matches you keep in your car for cases like this. And while you're stuck in traffic and listening to talk radio and news headlines, experiencing the truly tragic on your 15 minute ride to work, you strike the match and burn your essential green and inhale and hold the smoke in your lungs long enough to make you cough--that's the really good high--and now you're ready for work. Ready like having done your hair. Ready like having packed a 32 ounce thermos of strong Starbuck's coffee with low-fat half-and-half. Ready like having masturbated in the shower in the morning. Ready like having shaved your face. Ready like having put on lipstick and then having put the tube in your purse for touch-ups during the day. And you're ready to hold this vestige, this secret from coworkers, which would surely have you on the streets with little chance of being hired anywhere if anyone found out. And God knows, you don't want to end up like people like that.

The Senses of a Burlington Spring

(Photo and writing by Meredith Rivlin)

It snows in spring here too
when forsythia recalls foliage
and tulips bloom the rusty red
of fall when we
don't want to dread what comes next
and we sing and believe
when Simon and Garfunkel tell us
the green leaves will turn brown.

It snows in spring here too,
long after we've put away
boots and fleece and
wool and liners;
and long after we can't
remember the cold
digits turned purple from red
to white and back to purple again.

It snows here in spring.
Mid-spring, actually,
when you still need a blanket and
maybe to close the window at night.
But during the day as you ride
your bike uphill--
always up-Goddamn-hill--
a gust will spread the dandelion seeds.

And when it snows here in spring
it's just a flawed simile
because these seeds will replant
themselves in fertile soil and,
new, will soak up sunlight and live
on to have their seeds
blown in a gust of wind
or by someone making a wish or
trying to remember what wet snow smells like
but can't.
But the snow will stop. And start. And melt.
And thaw. And I wonder,
for another four months,
is it really connected?

but I hate short stories

Today went to Powell's, headed for the small press section. Am wearing hoop earrings, and as I was walking down the street I realized no one who I want to love me will love me if I'm wearing hoop earrings. Also feeling self-conscious about wearing a black hoodie from Old Navy that my neighbor was getting rid of.

Bought Barthes for Beginners, since I need to have even less faith in signs and signifiers. Thought of buying the newest Believer, but its dense columns of text written by people doing with their lives what I would like to be doing with my life seemed like steel mountains to climb. Originally had gone for the Tao Lin, but it was $14 to where the darkest channel of my brain doesn't need to go to. Almost picked up an old Paris Review, but I hate short stories and it's only full of dead white ghosts whose 20th century trials seem trivial now. Finally settled on the $8 zine my own name is in, to send to someone or something, and the Barthes was an impulse buy sitting at the counter for less than five bucks. By the time I check out at Powell's, every time, it's all I can do to look the cashier in the eye, I'm so crippled with the words I've scanned and the new truths I've drafted in my head and my own brain is left seeping on all the shelves I've touched.

I always see Miss Lonelyhearts/ Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, read it when I was 18 and home for a while and put myself on a strict reading schedule and lived at library book sales, left with paper bags full of paperbacks from 1959. Brought West on a family vacation to Athens, Georgia to see parents friends. Mark has a Ph.D in American literature, he's a high school teacher, published, but still hasn't written the Great American Novel. He saw my book, commented what seemed pleasant surprise, maybe that some girl with high heeled sandals seemed to give a fuck about what people his age used to when they were my age. Anyway, the book features a particularly 1960s brand of apocalyptic despair, which now seems like a pretty cozy place to lie.

So now I've got the Barthes, a companion guide to Semiotics for Beginners I bought almost a year ago at a fantastically musty and dirty over-stocked used book store on an island off of Washington state, with my mom and more parents' friends. The husband doesn't believe in evolution, his reasoning explained over breakfast when he looked at a blueberry and wondered how we could possibly be related. Luckily I'd just almost passed bio and remembered that all living organisms are joined by a protein called WNT or something, a seemingly important fact that about 20 people in the world care to know, and I brought this up in a voice quiet and measured that I always use in situations where that's ten times harder than getting radish-faced and shouting and bludgeoning people across the head for being so unbelievably wrong and offending the sensibilities of anyone who's put in the menial time and energy to have half a fucking brain.

Anyway, this island off of Washington reminded me of Maine, because it was all tall grass and water, and it was quiet. Except one year when we had a vacation in Maine I listened to a lot of Bon Jovi (Slippery When Wet. Jesus fucking Christ, obviously) and we were on the South Beach Diet, and I thought that losing 15 pounds would be as valuable as any other vital accessory to the person I knew I needed to be, like a 1500 on the SATs or a boyfriend on the hockey team. But it was brutal, we ate peanut butter and ricotta cheese the entire time, and didn't lose a pound, and I remained a size four, my dreams of twos and zeros dashed along with those of a Little Ivy acceptance, and other things I'm really fucking thankful never reached my hands, and am now mortified and guilty and sad to admit ever held a place within my mind.

Those long dirt roads were beautiful though, bisecting this fluttering sea of bright green grass, and sometimes horses would come to the fence by the road, perfect: dumb and handsome, and the fields only stopped for a cliff at the endless gray-blue deep of the Atlantic that our porch sat right over.

And that's what Washington reminded me of, and we followed around the orca-watching tour vans in our car, and took a ferry back to the mainland, and of course the bright orange sun just melted into that water and absorbed everything except for the wind, and the trees got black against the pink and orange, and thinking about it now, it's almost too beautiful to believe it was real, sitting on the water and watching the day's end illuminate everything, even the wind, and just feeling like nothing in the face of it all, in a good way.

That's the last sunset I can really remember, almost a year ago, because ever since, when the sun goes down, it's been raining, or I've been at work, or drunk, and it doesn't matter anyway, because there's no water here (a river is not an ocean).

Service: In the Proper Adaptable Format

byMeredith Rivlin

My hands grazed the keyboard resting
making the distinct clicking and twitching
sound of idling fingers.

(Working hands, though.
These are my hands.
They are privileged hands.)

And I worked and clicked and spoke and
eased my own conscious back
into consciousness where productivity
also lies.
I practiced selflessness while clicking “send/
receive” in hopes of 20 new emails addressed
to me personally
with questions I could answer and people
I could convince.

Open minds and opportunities will
take the place of littered envelopes
(remnants of a culture of desire)
and broken sidewalk glass
(whose contents is used to forget selves and ease fears
as we lay awake
next to someone who might just
know the answers to
questions we lay
awake trying to forget,
like are we really special and where does that fit in?)

Working visions.
These are my visions.
They are out there and
unspecific and cliché.

And they feed off of devotion and passion,
though we think we have enough,
and get swallowed by cynicism and
another explanation
or excuse
of our generation.

What it feels like for (this) girl

I am eleven or twelve or thirteen in the fitting room at The Gap. I barely fit in to a women’s size 16. I ask my mother where I am going to buy jeans once I exceed the sizes at Gap. My mother is a good mother and she doesn’t know what to say. Really, there is no consoling a fat girl. I probably cried. I cried then and seemingly a million times before because I knew I wasn’t pretty. At eleven or twelve or thirteen, I hung a photo of a woman with a “hot body” that I cut from one of my teen magazines, manuals for how to be a good woman. This woman had flat abdominals and tanned skin. This woman attracted men because she was beautiful. This woman was a woman while I was merely a girl.
In my preteen journal I wrote, Loose 30 pounds, next to doodles of hearts and stars, I assume. I considered hanging this, my demand of myself, on my mirror, next to the magazine photo of the beautiful vacant woman. But I did not want my parents, or anyone, to see it. I tore out my declarative scribbles and placed it in my underwear drawer next to some lip gloss purchased at CVS.

Ding-Dong.

In a new series entitled 'Ding-Dong', I will post photos of good-lookin' men-folk. You might ask yourself, in what way is this constructive to the Revolution? Whelp, it's not. However, the revolution supports community, sharing, etc. and these bros are too sexay not to share.

To catapult this series, we start with Ryan Gosling. The brooding Mr. Gosling was in that movie The Spiral Composition Book and Half Nelson...talk about heroin chic! According to IMDB, the Gosling Goose is set to appear in All Good Things in 2009.

Love in the time of SWINE!

This sweet photograph reminds me that love will conquer the piggy flu!:


Even if we have to wear protective suits and those masks (made popular in the days of SARS), we can still make-out with our partners and have a nice time before the fear-mongering kills or exhausts us all.
Enjoy your life...until you die a slow and excruciating death by the swine flu disease thing of 2k9.

Take Time

Check this video from the intelligent and sensitive experimental duo The Books for a mind/life altering experience similar to that of witnessing childbirth or climing a really really high mountain.

Happy Birthday Elissa Kathryn!

Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"
Robin Williams

R.I.P., Personal Computing

Today, I flushed a lot of monies down the toilet and mourned the loss of technologies. My computer just up and broke I am no longer an owner of a personal computer (I think they call it a “PC”) which puts me in a league of 3-year olds and the peoples of the developing world.

I took two trips and spend roughly100 hours at my university’s “computer depot.” It’s difficult to feel human when you realize how much we depend on machines that don’t love us back and that will just break. It’s hard to stay sane watching your beloved files being transferred to a sad, little, expensive external hard drive while a tech brah next to you listens to Widespread Panic on his moe. Pandora radio station.

As I walked home with a $1,000 hunk of metal and plastic in my bag, the world was still breathing and I still had all my appendages. The world keeps spinning: spring is coming alive around us and consumers continue to buy technology that will ultimately fail.

I’ll miss the convenience and making playlists. Alas, I was tiring of the mega blogs that I waste so much time on. The sun is shining and I desperately need a tan, not an extra special glimpse into the life of blog commenters.


I don’t know if a new computer is in my future which is to say, my blogging will take a hit. Dry your eyes; we’ll be okay.

And friends of the interwebs, don’t buy a Dell.

april showers.

A photographic ode to April, the greatest month in the Georgian calender.

[slate]

local celebrity

Study abroad with this (alt) broad (@ minute 3:40)

Fleetwood Tuesday

Another rainy day in the Green Mountains and the only cure is the Mac:



Rhiannon, 1976

Hotties of the Recession, Part Deux

Another Monday and the economy continues to spiral into oblivion and 50% off DVDs at Circuit City (Paul Blart: Mall Cop, anyone?). The silver lining of all this economic doomsday is Caleb Moore and Kyle Sevens, this week's Hotties of the Recession.

Caleb and Kyle live in Baltimore, the Philadelphia of Maryland, and are currently unemployed. Caleb was laid off from a position as a graphic designer (oooh!) and Kyle was laid off from his job as a woodwright's apprentice (huh?).

Pictured with their intricately placed owl lamp* and guitar, these dudes look sad. Sure, they have a very nice apartment, but poor Kyle admits to having taken walks to the ATM even when he didn't need cash. Caleb, with the decidedly cooler name and interesting glasses, has been taking his unemployment in stride; he is setting up a recording studio in their apartment because he's in a band, naturally. But don't cry for Kyle!: he's teaching himself to silkscreen.

Surely, Caleb and Kyle's interesting alternative hobbies will be enough to get these dudes laid for the remainder of the recession.

*This "hip" owl lamp was mostly likely purchased for $39.95 at Urban Outfitters. In these economic times, Caleb and Kyle will need to learn to be more thrifty. Also, boys, lamps go on tables, not the floor.


Faces of the Recession

Friends of the interwebs

This blogger might be my blogging soul mate and her blog, my internet Graceland:

Cute and Cuter

Puppies! Babies! Beards! (Lay off the cats. They are Stupid and Stupider)

The C-bomb

From Jezebel.com:

"Personally, I revel in vulgarity. I love the word "cunt" for its abruptness, its harsh syllable, its ability to shock nearly everyone. I don't say it to reclaim anything, really, either, because I appreciate its base nature, its harshness, its cruelty. I would rather be a cunt than a pussy (and certainly either than be a dick); I have a cunt, not a twat; I prefer being cunty to being bitchy because I feel like cuntiness is more deliberately mean. I like that "cunt" is worse than "fuck" on the scale of things you can't say in front of your mom. I feel I would rather my anatomy be the worst insult than a lesser insult, Because I'm competitive like that and because it's seemingly all based around the fear and mystery surrounding the female anatomy (and not just a little jealousy). But I also love the idea that it could be the greatest compliment, because having a cunt is pretty awesome."

Hotties of the Recession

In these economic times, The Revolution Will Be will be (ha!) presenting a new weekly installation called Hotties of the Recession. These men and women women are unemployed and sexy. You can most likely find them Mon-Sun. at your local bar, knocking back PBRs, quite unironically. They need comfort and a job too, probably.

This week we have Blake Sims from Austin, Texas. Blake was recently laid off from his job as an offset printing technician. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it looks like the that sticky bar stool next to him is empty.

[Great Shots from Tough Times]
http://facesoftherecession.blogspot.com/

The Future of Journalism

Birmingham City University is offering a year-long course in "social media": $5,700 for instruction on how to start a blog, record a podcast, and use Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo.

[Gawker]

Spring.

Happy Spring Equinox.





Burlington, Vermont, April 2008



More delightful Spring photos found at slate.com

Chick Lit

Susan Sontag, 1972

Portraits of authors, who happen to be women

simple pleasures.

Sometimes it's nice to take a step back...

Morning Watch
The percolator is a gurgling alembic
brewing the morning's sputtering slick.
I bask in the coffee's simple balm.
For once I'll be wise and forgo
turning to the company of the radio,
the world's hourly news and see
if the goldfinch and the chickadee
will come to our feeder,
to our coffee-brown sunflower seed.
I'll accept the responsibility of being calm.
I'll pay attention to the small creatures,
to their broadcast and morning need.
This morning I will pay special heed.
-Greg Delante

dark room.

Oh no oh no! Financial crisis and trillions of dollar$$ of debt is forcing true artists to sell out and sell all--even art that has yet to be created! I'm melting!!!

Happy Birthday Sara

It's a new year,
I'm glad to be here
It's a fresh spring,
so let's sing
(yeasayer, 2080)

What to Expect When You're Expected (Part 1)

By M.R.R

I reached down below my desk to turn on the computer and as I looked around me, changing from my winter boots to office-appropriate footwear, it all seeed strangely familiar. Not familiar in the sense that it was Wednesday and I had been at this job Monday through Friday for the past six months; it was familiar in the sense that I had done all this only several hours ago. It was as if I slept in the office or worked through the night, as thoughts of mentoring and public awareness (or, to use a detestable phrase, "branding") encroached upon my inexplicable, albeit incredibly important, R.E.M. cycle.

Yes, i had dreamt about work again. But what was worse was that i had solved a problem, figured out a task that had stumped me, and, as soon as 9am rolled around, i could execute my solution.

So it worked; i found a missing file that had been misfiled and it took me all of half an hour to fix it. Then I looked up from my desk in the basement-level office out the large window where I cannot see the sun itself, but I can see the color of the sky and I can see glares and reflections. I sat and thought about other people. Other people were sleeping in right now; other people were walking their dogs, meeting other people walking their dogs; other people were starting and then subsequently finishing something that they wanted to start and then subsequently finish. And I was refiling existing information.

Barbie: Every girl?

By Anna Mae Green, Guest writer

Barbie claims to be “every girl.” Rather, the toy company Mattel claims Barbie is every girl; “from urban teen to fantasy queen, she’s every girl!” Realistically, is Barbie any girl? In America and worldwide, Barbie is a phenomenon, representing American culture and catering to millions of children. Barbie represents an impossible attainability and subliminally preaches perfection to the world’s youth. Mattel created Barbie in a perfect light, with a perfect life, becoming a catalyst for the demoralization of the worlds girls in their strive for the impossible. Barbie’s dimensions are physically impossible to attain; “she has excessively long legs… her feet are eternally on point, she also has large breasts, long hair” (Gamber). However, now more than ever, girls and women of all ages are regularly getting plastic surgery, dying their hair a certain shade of blonde, and even becoming anorexic and bulimic, knowingly or not becoming more and more like Barbie. Barbie is not every girl, but a representation of the perfect girl, the girl we are supposed to strive to be like.

Like most companies today, Mattel has created a virtual world that Barbie lives in. Girls can interactively play with Barbie and model their Barbie world after the one online. The Barbie website has a link for parents that leads to webeliveingirls.com, a website more about the strength and power of girls than the strength and power of Barbie. Obviously fashioned for the over-protective mother who may see through Barbie, the website is geniusly designed to focus on the children who may be purchasing a Barbie doll rather than Barbie herself. In this important move, Mattel is able to show that Barbie can and will lead to strong, independent girls and young women. As life has confirmed, however, Barbie leads us down a treacherous path of trying to prove ourselves to the world and to each other through beauty and all things pink, not, on the contrary to a life of happiness and strength. The website features girls of all ages and nationalities, unlike the doll itself who is either white or white with black skin (i.e. all white features but clearly simply dyed differently). Some children, at least one child, altered her African American Barbie to become more versed in African American heritage; “the doll’s hair has had treatments applied to it, treatments that would be found in the African American community” (Gamber).
Barbie, fashioned as a white middle class teenager, was deemed to be a role model for young girls growing up in America; she was “an icon of what it means to be an American” (Gamber). As time progressed, Barbie spanned her arms worldwide to become a more versed and cultured Barbie. Incidentally, Barbie sent a negative message to countries worldwide, adding to the American influence across the globe. Later, Barbie adapted to the diversity of the world and altered Barbie for different national identities; “they are not using the same copyrighted face…they have marked her features differently” (Gamber). Barbie now has a different persona for every country she is sold in; however “at the core, Barbie is still this white, western ideal” (Gamber).
My mother and Barbie are the same age; both were born in 1959. My mother remembers growing up with Barbie; she received one in a red bathing suit as a gift from a neighbor when she was about 6 or 7. She recalls however, that Barbie was a representation of the 1950s idealism and representation of women, but as the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s took over Barbie’s popularity waned. With women’s liberation, Mattel combated the movement by modernizing Barbie by marketing her in a police or doctor uniform instead of the typical bathing suit or dress originally included with the doll. Despite this attempt at modernization, Barbie remained a sexual and provocative figure. The new packaging and outfits included with Barbie was a farce; Barbie’s eyes were still bating with perverse motion, surrounded by intense eye makeup. Her breasts were still the center-point of an outfit and her feet were even now modeled forever on point, only able to wear high heels. As if placing Barbie as a police officer or as a presidential candidate undid the negative stereotyping associated with the doll, the marketing scheme worked. Barbie’s popularity was growing more now than ever before. However, there has been a recent resurgence of the original stipulates of the doll, almost reversing the women’s movement all together. Barbie remains an icon of the 1950s; her modernization plot was a clear ruse.
In the last few weeks and months, a court case has developed between Mattel and MGA, maker of Bratz dolls. Bratz dolls, slightly shorter than Barbie dolls, portray urban teenagers with slightly more attitude than girly-girl Barbie. Bratz’s popularity since their creation in 2001 has exponentially risen, outselling Barbie in the United Kingdom as well as in other parts of the world. Bratz dolls don’t pretend to be sophisticated and friendly like Barbie, but instead illustrate a rude demeanor with obvious sexual intentions. Mattel, feeling that the idea of Bratz was stolen from Barbie, is suing MGA, proving that the true intentions of Barbie are blatantly sexual ones.
Barbie preaches independence and intelligence but is the opposite. Mattel has given specific press conferences as to the marital or dating status of Barbie: at one minute she’s with Ken, at the next she’s not, then they’re together again. The relationship between Ken and Barbie presents a purely heterogeneous one. They live their perfect lives together, sending the message to young girls, the average consumer that to be happy is to be blonde, disproportionately slim, beautiful, and in a relationship with an equally beautiful man. Although put back on the dating market by Mattel, Barbie couldn’t be alone; what message would that send to young girls!?! Can one be happy without being romantically involved? The answer, made clear by Mattel is no; therefore resulting in Barbie reentering her relationship with Ken. Although intimating and insinuating sexual intentions, sex amongst Barbie and Barbie’s friends is unheard of; her permanently tattooed underwear would prevent this from happening anyway. Therefore, Mattel advocates a message of abstinence but has deep sexual intentions for Barbie and her lovers.
We live in a world today of conflicting ideas and interests, raging wars, a weak dollar and a deteriorating environment. Barbie lives in a different world. Her world is perfect, just like she is, emphasizing consumer culture and lavish lifestyles. If most of the world’s girls cannot even afford a Barbie doll themselves, how could they relate to a girl, albeit Barbie, who drives several cars at once, has hundreds of different outfits, and infinite accessories for every activity? Barbie is not every girl; she is not even one girl.
As time progresses, perhaps Barbie will become a thing of the past, she’ll be stuffed in boxes in basements and garages beside beanie babies and yo-yos, a passing fad that was popular once. Barbie’s fall may be due to competing products or ideas, or may be because her idealism is simply old fashioned and will finally become obsolete. Instead of representing what girls should be, Barbie might become an image of what girls should not be. Until mothers and daughters decide to make that change themselves, however, Mattel will continue to be successful. Barbie would not be successful were it not for the average consumer buying her at a rate of once every three seconds (Gamber). To be beautiful and rich is something to be treasured in this country so young girls will continue to gravitate towards such a role model until change by mothers and daughters is brought about.

What Art Isn't

Never has the American art world functioned so efficiently as a full-service marketing industry on the corporate model. Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

--NYT, Feb. 15, 2009

ICELAND—By the Urridafoss waterfall, anti-industrialization protesters hold a banner demonstrating against the proposed damming of the Thjórsá River, which is under threat of housing a new power station. The waterfall has the highest volume of water passing through it in all of Iceland, 2007.

Barbie: Baller

On her 50th birthday, Barbie is a controversial role model. Some say she represents an unrealistic image of women. She is the standard of American beauty: blond hair, blue eyes, a tiny waste and tits to topple her over. Others contend Barbie, who has been a doctor and a pilot, is an entrepreneur and a role model. While no little girl should aspire to have her plastic breasts, I say that Barbie is a baller.
Barbara “Barbie” Millicent Roberts was modeled after a German doll in 1959 by a woman named Ruth Handler. Her daughter, Barbara (a.k.a. Barbie) was tired of her baby dolls and Handler was attracted to the German model which was an adult woman doll. Handler brought the idea to her husband, a co-founder of Mattel. The company was unenthusiastic with Handler’s idea and I need not say how rare a businesswoman was in the 1950s. Yet Barbie debuted in her great zebra bathing suit and the rest, as they say, is history.
I’m a feminist and I’ve never had a problem with Barbie. In fact, I love Barbie. I played with Barbie from the time my thumbs were opposable to the time when boys were more important than Barbies (fifth grade, ok?). I kept my Barbies in a big white bag filled with fabulous clothes and an array of little plastic multicolored shoes. I had over 20 Barbies, all different in appearance and personality. There was Theresa, a no-nonsense brunette with killer legs, obviously. There was Barbie’s teenage sister, Skipper, whose hair my sister shored to a buzz-cut before we got any male Kens. …A total lesbian now that I think of it. And then there was Keira. Keira was my favorite, Asian and awesome, with a streak of light brown in her beautiful jet black hair.
Like any famous woman, Barbie is surrounded with controversy. The most common criticism of the doll is that she is an inaccurate and unrealistic of women. If Barbie was a real woman, her body could not hold her internal organs and she would be unable to stand due to the weight of her breasts. Yet, Barbie is not a real woman; she is a doll. Margaux Lange, who creates jewelry from Barbie’s appendages, said “I think people have a hard time separating Barbie from a real woman.”
Barbie was a staple in my life for nearly a decade and not once did I think, “I want to look just like Barbie.” She was skinning and I was not, but I had parents telling me I could do and be whoever I wanted and a sister teaching me about self-confidence.
Girls are inundated with negative images of women daily, but Barbie is not just big boobs. Teen magazines that tell girls what “real” guys want from “real” girls but Barbie asks girls what they want from themselves. Barbie herself has had numerous careers, a lot of friends, and never married.
I do not regret one day I spent with Barbie. My sister and I played Barbies endlessly and can remember us going to bed one night, so excited to play Barbies the next morning. But my best times with Barbie were when I played with all my Barbies alone in my room. Through Barbie I developed a limitless imagination and a keen interest in people.
Barbie’s popularity is waning and her stocks are dropping but I hope Barbie is around for another 50 years so my daughters can imagine who they want to be. And the alternative is pretty frightening.

Love is not proud, you know.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
I don't know if I want to get married. I think weddings are pretty awful (the electric slide, drunk relatives, reading awesome poems like "Love is not proud, love is not boastful..." Ick.). I think that the normative family structure isn't so much traditional as it is unrealistic. Also unrealistic? Monogamy. But mostly, I'm just incredibly skeptical that I will meet a nice boy, fall in love and stay in love until that nice boy becomes a nice old man.
Yet, aren't I lucky. As a heterosexual woman in the 21st century, I have the luxury and the privilege to question marriage. Or if I meet a nice boy who, resembles a lumberjack, looks good in a suit, cooks, adheres to no preconceived gender constructs, and will hyphenate our babies' last names, I can marry him whenever I want.
I wish that every bigot who believes that same sex marriage is about more than simply two people committing to each other for life would watch this video. It made this marriage skeptic cry.

Ballllrr

A Reminder

that it's not all evil.

This Moment

'Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake...'

--Francis Bacon

Yes We Can Change! I Hope!

We are now well aware that "going green" is not portrayed in the media as a salvation of our planet, but as a means to be hip and acquire more stuff. Politics dictate trends--consumer, fashion, disposal of past trends--so that while grassroots organizations have existed since the beat generation to protect our vulnerable earth, Al Gore gets rich by showing us, with large charts and an automatic ladder lift, what we've chosen to ignore and have found inconvenient for years.

With a new administration come new trends. President (i was getting sick of that required "elect" distinction) Obama's focus on service and civic engagement, while no less legit than environmentalism, is becoming yet another American trend. Starbucks has announced their new inspired ad campaign-slash-initiative to comply with Obama's urge for community service. By pledging 5 hours of (national) community service, a customer is rewarded with a large (venti??) coffee that we can only hope is fair trade. [Please note that no where does Starbucks encourage bringing a reuseable mug on your way to clean up a park or read to a child.] Starbucks makes sure the customer realizes that 5 hours isn't really that much time; it won't interfere too much with his busy, self-serving Americn life. Much like "going green"catered to the stubbornness of citizens by pushing hybrid Lexus SUVs, name brand peace signs, and energy efficient dish washers, Starbucks assures that the customer doesn't have to go too much out of her way to feel like a good American again.
This, once again, brings up the question of motives. Did that yuppie suburban woman start bringing a canvass bag to Trader Joe's because she can't bear to imagine where her plastic bags end up or because Oprah said so? Did the busy businessman start using earth-friendly cleaning products because he doesn't want chemicals ending up in his water or because of his brand loyalty to Clorox? Are we supposed to help better our community because we're passionate about changing things on a domestic level or because Obama and our Favorite Coffee Shop (TM) told us to?
And does it matter? If 100 million caffeiene addicts actually accomplish 500 million hours of community service for the wrong reason, is there such thing as a wrong reason? Or should they get praise for being dutiful capitalist citizens? The coffee is free after all.

The 44th President or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love America

On January 20, 2009, Inauguration day, former Vice President was wheeled onto the Mall in an sadly hilarious metaphor; he and his buddy George Bush are lame ducks, now irrelevant that their reign of power is through. (Mr. Cheney pulled a muscle while packing up his things. No one was willing to help the old curmudgeon. Ha! And my boy Anderson Cooper called him Dr. Strangelove. Ha! Ha!)

It’s the day that everyone* has been waiting for: today, the United States becomes Obamanation. Or, as one clever sign stated, we are “One Nation Under a Groove.” While we are deep in a dark winter, today is the beginning of a brighter day, a better era.

I'll admit that I caught the Obama bug: I have hope. The inauguration is just expensive fluff and brouhaha but I sincerely believe that not only will President Obama bring about real change and will change the way Americans view race and gender.

President Obama stepped onto the Mall to address those who voted for him and those who didn't. With the world watching, the President spoke of personal responsibility and non-partisanship. As Robert F. Kennedy once said, "this [is] difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in" and there was a distinct feeling on the Mall today that our new president knows what direction we need to take.

I’m a critic (although not paid, so I suppose I’m just critical) but in my opinion, the inauguration was not without flaw. Our nation has seem to forget that there is a separation between church and state (it's in the Consitution, guys). The God shout outs were many and redundant; for all of Obama's chatter about being a diverse country, at the inauguration it was assumed we are a country exclusively of Christians. Furthermore, the Reverend Rick Warren, mega pastor! and vocal supporter of Proposition 8, was not appropriate. I get it, Mr. President: you want to include all Americans, even Red Staters. But to have a man who does not support equal rights and so hypocritically spoke of God's "loving everyone" is not instep with Obama's message of change.

Still, the Obama Administration will create change and encourage progression. This country needs a makeover: America is that popular high school girl with a bad reputation. Everyone fears her, resents her and doesn't like her. We have two failing wars, a dismal economy, health care and education issues, and a gross rollback of personal rights. We need change, and a lot of it.

While this is the beginning of an era, the Obama era, it is also the end of another. George Bush, don't let the door hit you on the way out. President Obama, we have confidence in you. Please, don't let us down.

*everyone is 54 percent of Americans that voted for Obama and let’s be honest, the rest of the world. And c’mon, red states, just admit it—you like the guy too.

Thanks Yahoo News

Clarkson's glossy new look:
"American Idol" Kelly Clarkson trades in her smoky rocker look for bright red lipstick. 

» A return to pop sweetness
Kelly Clarkson videos, photos, songs

and, thanks google:

Related searches: kelly clarkson fat

Face-value

Branded like a cow.

Thanks, everyone, for putting those expensive Psychology Degrees to degrading, belittling, corporate use.
(Chewing gum makes a person very attractive and witty)