b-luish
because everything else in your life will fail you, including yourself
113 posts
Latest Posts by b-luish
Joy Sullivan, “Tomatoes”, Instructions for Traveling West
Louise Glück, “Unpainted Door” Poems 1962-2012 / Ingmar Bergman, Bergman On Bergman interviews with Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima / Moonlight 2016 dir. Barry Jenkins / Fiona Apple, Second Bite interview by Craig McLean, The Guardian / Eighth Grade 2018 dir. Bo Burnham / Norman Rockwell, Little Girl Looking Downstairs at Christmas Party / Anne Carson, “The Anthropology of Water” in Plainwater
reflections about summer
A Separate Peace, John Knowles / Stand by Me dir. Rob Reiner / Why are you haunted?, filmnoirsbian
Comic about my weird old dog
“I knew I did from the first moment we met. It was not love at first sight exactly, but familiarity. Like: oh, hello, its you. Its going to be you.”
— Mhairi McFarlane
cant stop thinking about this this was sooo crazyyyyy
the tradwife movement is the same as it has always been - back in the kitchen, back to breeding - it just has better branding.
when i was younger, i hated pink. i was not like other girls. this is now something i'm embarrassed of - this was not me being a "girl's girl."
but it was expressing something many of us felt at the time: i literally wasn't what girlhood was supposed to be. this is a hard thing to explain, but you know when you're not performing girlhood correctly. it isn't as easy as "i liked x when girls liked y" - because there were other girls that liked x, too - but i never figured out exactly the correct way to like x, or to be interested in y.
now there is the divine feminine. this is the same rhetoric it has always been: women are biologically driven to like pink and ribbons and submitting to our husbands.
the problem is that the patriarchy found a better PR team. because yes, actually, i want every woman to have the choice to be a homemaker. i also want her taken seriously for her legitimate home-making labor. i want her to be recognized as also having a job, just unpaid. i want men to have this opportunity, too.
but it is no longer "i made this choice and I love it." instead it is a sixteen-paragraph rant about how selfish it is that my generation isn't having kids. instead it's long videos about how if you feed your children processed foods, you're going to kill them. instead it is "this is what womanhood is supposed to be. i feel bad for any other choices you're making."
the shame spiral is just prettier. it is large houses devoid of personality. it is the implication: if you don't have this, you aren't happy. the solid, everlasting assurance: women are actually supposed to be submitting. this is the default. this is the natural state of things. all other attempts inflict suffering.
but you can no longer say i'm not like other girls. you can no longer reject this image completely. you cannot find it revolting, even if you know that the underbelly is toxic and festering. sure, it is the same repackaged patriarchy. but the internet does not have shades of grey. you should support and reward other women! your disgust is actually internalized misogyny. not because you are seeing a vision of yourself the way they're trying to train you to be. not because you feel her ghost pass within an inch of your earlobe. not because your father will eventually ask you - why can't you be like her?
because they figured out how to make it beautiful: women will sell other women on this idea, and we will find the singular loophole in feminism. sure, she's shaming you in most of her videos. sure, she implies that a different life is obscene. but she just wants you to be happy! you'd be happier if you were listening!
and the whole time you're sitting there thinking: i'd actually just be happier if i had that kind of money.
New York Times, The One Who Got Away
Meditations in an Emergency, Cameron Awkward-Rich
the relationship i have w a little life is so complex i hate it i love it i would never recommend it to anyone i think the last 100 pages will never leave me in a way that is terrible and beautiful and endless i have sm beef w hanya yanagihara but this is the single most beautiful paragraph i have ever read in my life and i think about it often
My Species by Jane Hirshfield
“I didn’t yearn for anything but privacy, because it is an embarrassment to be a wound in public.”
— Billy-Ray Belcourt, from A History of My Brief Body
“I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you’ve been doing. It’s a hundred years since we’ve met- it may be another hundred years before we meet again.”
— Edith Wharton
MISS YOU. WANT TO GET NOODLES WITH YOU. DISREGARD THIS, After Gabrielle Calvocoressi, by Lev St. Valentine
An Ode to 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' by David Gate
the years by alex dimitrov
Missed Time, Ha Jin
“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”
— David Foster Wallace / Infinite Jest
everything u need to know about me can actually be explained by the fact that i read that poem about the serving girl wearing the pearls so they're warm for her mistress when i was like 11 and it rewrote my brain chemistry forever
like this Changed Me
dudes, we did not go through the hassle of getting these fake IDs for this jukebox to not have any Springsteen by Hanif Abdurraqib
Alex Dimitrov
the silence of the lambs/hannibal: naka-choko
and now it's october by Barbara Crooker
Mary Oliver, "The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac." Blue Horses