ladyparts

Awkward convos

This morn­ing on my way to work I was stopped at a light (Santa Mon­ica and West­wood) with another cyclist and the fol­low­ing exchange ensued:

- Nice that it’s warm­ing up again.

Not hear­ing the first part of this sen­tence cor­rectly, I gravely replied:

- Yeah.

Then it hit me… He was beaming.

- Wait, you’re happy about it?

- Yes,  I’m happy.

And then the light turned green.

It was weird.

When the Santa Ana winds come the smog hangs in the air and every breath burns and tastes like hell. There are no cool spills of clean(er) air pour­ing forth on the stretch near the golf course. There is only thick exhaust. HOW CAN HE BE SMILING?! WE ARE SUFFOCATING.

I keep think­ing about recy­cling clay and the process of pour­ing the dry clay and sand into the soopy mass inside the mixer. My insides hard­en­ing, lungs heavy with mat­ter… Also, the heavy cakes of black that cover all of the sur­faces in our apart­ment min­utes after we clean them. Not cool.

How much can our frag­ile skin really pro­tect us from? I shud­der to think of it.

Which brings me to my next point! My new favorite phrase: “refried ass­hat.” (As in: “I watched a clip of myself read­ing copy for an ad this morn­ing and I looked like a refried asshat.”)

How’s your Friday?

Blame it on those Ad Men

There is some­thing that we need to talk about. Let’s start by read­ing this excerpt from Riana:

Through­out human his­tory, chil­dren have spent the major­ity of their lives with both par­ents every sin­gle day. This con­tin­ued up through the tran­si­tion to agri­cul­ture and really ended only in the mod­ern era. Though it is an eco­log­i­cally and envi­ron­men­tally sound form of fam­ily life and that it, ulti­mately, leads to greater psy­cho­log­i­cal happiness.

And actu­ally wash­ing dishes is fun. We don’t have to be pros­per­ous and find excite­ment from each task that we do, but it’s not hard labor and I enjoy my full days at home. I’m very lucky that i can be at home all day to play with amaya and let her learn from me: cook­ing, sewing, wash­ing, clean­ing, read­ing, gar­den­ing, fix­ing, writ­ing, draw­ing, craft­ing. woman’s work? per­haps. but i think its bet­ter than lin­ing the pock­ets of some­one else, work­ing for basi­cally noth­ing (for what end or pur­pose), prob­a­bly harm­ing the earth more (we have 30 less envi­ron­ment impact by me not work­ing). this work i do at home ben­e­fits us, not some unknown corp exec and doesnt pol­lute the earth.

We have made the choice to live off of one salary (and my hus­band works only four days a week) and that means that we will always be poor. one car, less “stuff”, noth­ing new for years, but much more hap­pier. that means we get to see and be part of her mile­stones, hear each new word uttered and each new task mastered.

She learns how to live, truly live: for­age and hunt for food and pre­pare it from scratch, reuse and reclaim and col­lect water, build a shel­ter and this means hap­pi­ness and avoid­ing mis­ery. Learn­ing to be clean is part of being human. Chores, scrub­bing the toi­lets, wash­ing clothes is not drudgery, but some­thing to be enjoyed, part of clean­ing up after our­selves. it leads to sat­is­fac­tion and being good stew­ards of our earth.

It seems that many of us kids in our 20’s and 30’s are des­per­ately try­ing to hone in on the per­fect expres­sion of grat­i­tude to the many lives that have been sac­ri­ficed for our right to self, a face–occupation. Let’s all take a minute to remem­ber that what we do is a vehi­cle for who we are. We are fight­ing for honor and respect and oppor­tu­nity. Is there a more hon­or­able, respectable, and free per­son than the arti­san? In my heart I do not believe so.

The day I found out that my job would be com­ing to an end after our project closes out I was walk­ing home in the rain. I con­tem­plated how to deal with these next few months–do I dis­en­gage myself from all of my work or do I con­tinue to throw myself into it? Then it came to me: WHERE ALL YOUR STARS OUT? WHERE YOU BUSY WRITING YOUR HEART OUT? Dear god, let us see that we are our own child. We are teach­ing our­self to live. Be an arti­san of what­ever you want. Peo­ple have died for you to do so. They didn’t die for you to fill some­one else’s pock­ets. Be a peas­ant. Use your parts to heal the world.

An equiv­a­lent of the D.A. is form­ing. Young peo­ple are leav­ing (or being asked to leave ) their cor­po­rate jobs and demand­ing bet­ter ways to live. Pretty awesome.

More on this later. Tater. ox.

WHY?!=EMx+b

You know when you’re hav­ing one of those days when the inter­net is serv­ing you up deli­cious con­tent by the post­ful? I mean, you are really in the thick of it–reading all your feeds, gig­gling or maybe cry­ing. And then it hap­pens… Your inter­net goes out.

NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

You panic.
You keep hit­ting refresh.
You ask your roommate/co-worker/neighbor/pet/self if they are “get­ting the inter­net.“
You try and stay calm.
(It’s not work­ing.)
You are start­ing to sweat.

And it’s not like this has never hap­pened before, in fact, it hap­pens more often that you’d care to admit. BUT STILL! … and then you feel like a jerk for car­ing so much about a thing like hav­ing or not hav­ing an inter­net con­nec­tion right now.

At this point you have a few choices. You can do one or all of the fol­low­ing: a) sit there and wait for it to come back b) go unplug the modem to see if you can get it to restart c) get on the phone with your provider and get them to fix it or d) do some­thing else for a while.

The most impor­tant thing is to remem­ber is that it’s not the inter­net itself that is cre­at­ing the absence. It is what you were reading/viewing on the inter­net that is caus­ing that ter­ri­ble ache. You haven’t really lost anything.

YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.

You could go for a walk. You could read a really great book. You could go to the library.  You could have an adven­ture. You could draw a map. You could bake a cake. You could teach your­self how to do some­thing cool. Or you could even do a cartwheel.

The inter­net was one of the many tools you use to achieve the same goal: hap­pi­ness. Maybe you could pick up a new tool for a lit­tle while.

And the best part is, even if you do some­thing else for a while it doesn’t mean that you can’t come back to the inter­net later. In fact, you might even have more fun and be bet­ter at using the inter­net then you were before the whole “los­ing the Inter­net (again)” fiasco.

Well… get­ting laid off is kindof like that.