Summer is at last in full swing, and so are we. We begin July with our feet planted more firmly. Our schedule is coming together, and we are picking up new writers. We’re still tinkering with the site, enabling ratings on posts and comments and a front page that highlights content in a more organized fashion.
June saw a great outpouring of deeply emotive entries. We were pleased and outraged, victorious and shaken, in love and alone. The political sphere mirrored our ups and downs, with a nail-biting lead-up to New York state passing legislation to permit same-sex marriages, followed by a similar passage in Rhode Island.
We’re looking forward to more break-throughs and more soul sharing this summer. Join us!
My home is in your arms. My home, is in your arms. I am at home when I am in your arms, and when you are away I can’t help but be homesick.
How can a person be a home? How can a person be a home, when a home is walls, and doors, and windows and portraits, and furniture, and so much baggage? You are my home; you are my furniture, my windows, my doors, and my portraits. You are the baggage I carry around, waiting to be found, by you.
The heart of it is that I’ve been lonely, a long time now. Maybe I’m hungry, or horny; I could say I’m tired. And, sure enough, all those things would be true. I’m listening to a song that breaks my heart, because feeling my heart break is the best I can do. It’s the most I can manage. It’s hard to simulate solace when there’s no one around.
I watch my reflection in the windows of the bank as the bus drives away; I see a girl in a blue shirt, dark hair tied up. We hit the second street corner and an announcement for tickets to this summer’s big event comes on the speaker, as usual.
“You go all the way around the state before you get to the point,” I remember my friend telling me. She was laughing but, still, it hurt a little.
[Long pause in journaling]
“How do you know I’m ready?”
“Your body’s ready.”
“I’m almost twenty-three, my body better be ready.”
My first encounters with female beauty in books was, as @joyabella noted when I asked this question on Twitter, the Wakefield twins. So many women found their gateway to romance in Sweet Valley High, and that gateway came with the constantly repeated and thus unfortunately inculcated reference to the “perfect size six figure.”
First, let me say on behalf of every woman with breasts and a backside: Fuck you and your six.
(Have I mentioned that I ADORE the Smart Bitches? Because I do, oh so much.)
This one is loaded with controversy. A Pakistani comedian has put together a music video spoofing the classic “Oh, Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison.
Personally, I think the concept is awesome. I’m always up for satire, and I think it’s most needed where people don’t want it.
Some people say it’s derogatory toward these women, that it mocks Islam, that it will sour relations with the West, that it will “only create further divisions and friction within Pakistan.” All of that is true, and none of it is true. I get the sense that this video was done with great affection, as well as criticism for, the customs of Pakistan and Islam in general.
What are your thoughts? Hilarious send-up, or blight on social discourse?
(I understand it’s an emotional argument to make. I also understand that I can’t make blanket statements. I am going to violate every cardinal rule of argument or political correctness — you know, that convention that prevents us social anthropologists from saying that one tradition is inherently better than the other.)
The writer has chosen not to reveal her name. This is smart. She is clearly confused and her thoughts are badly organized. If she gave her real name, she would have been pilloried across the internet.
This story was a mishmash of disjointed orientalist stereotypes, and it should not have been run. I love the Frisky’s GirlTalk segments as a rule, but this is awful. I hope against hope that this doesn’t turn into a farce of Gilbert-style proportions.
After it gets around to Princess that I am fucking her brother, she starts to tell me things in confidence.
I wish she wouldn’t (it’s pretty clear what I feel about her, and that feeling can be summed up in a few unprintable names) but it is a late night at the old Indian homestead. The lizards hump the fluorescent lightbulbs in the damp evening as we begin to talk. Our parents are already either sleeping or watching television so it’s just the two of us after dinner, disinterested in bombastic serials.
Princess is beautiful. I’ve mentioned it before, but I have to keep mentioning it. I say this as someone who is not a very visual person; her beauty is so profound that I get struck dumb by it. I understand what it means when otherwise strong men declare beauty as their point of weakness. For me it is an anchor that allows me to look past the voice and the affected mannerisms, that makes me eager to hear what she has to say. She is like Ernie’s enigmatic Lola from Hey Arnold, standing on the street corner in her pristine dress, looking into the horizon with liquid eyes.
Lovers Project at the Yohohama Landmark Tower SkyGarden. A huge heart made of love tickets put together by lovers. lovers-project.com/
How are you doing? How is your health? Are you meeting the goals you set for yourself or has life got you mired down, too?
I am well, for the most part.
This week has me thinking. My parents will have been married for 34 years come the weekend. That’s a helluva long time. They got married when they were younger than I am now, which is how they’ve achieved this amazing feat. I have no doubt they will make it to 50, which will be in the year 2026.
In the year 2026, I will be forty. In the next sixteen years, I want to find you, Mr. Right, settle ourselves somewhere we love, and have babies. (Not a lot of them, Just Enough. And maybe we’ll adopt, but I want one of my very own–one of you.) In 2016, our kids could be anywhere from preschool-ish (pleasegawdno) to preteens. It’ll be a great party, with all of us and my parents together.
You will love them, I promise. (My parents, not the babies. You’re obligated by biology to love the babies.) And they will love you. I couldn’t love a man who wouldn’t fit into our existing unit. So don’t worry, you’re going to love them and they will love you.
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After it gets around to Princess that I am fucking her brother, she starts to tell me things in confidence.
