heh heh

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Rg @ellisjrosen

A post shared by Gemma Burgess (@gemmakburgess) on May 24, 2019 at 6:15pm PDT

wiiiiiickkkkk

for some reason i just love this

round-up

latest things:

• “night shift” by lucy dacus
• hanif abdurraqib’s essay about “night shift” and more
• fleabag, oh my whoa, what everyone says is true, so compelling, first season crushed me, second season so romantic, i can’t stop thinking about either one or phoebe waller-bridge or boo or THAT PRIEST, i mean that priest
• super bad day at work, v. cool, immediately worrying about being fired, bankrupting the company, etc. etc.
• still thinking about the yellow and orange wildflowers on the way to austin two weeks ago
• also thinking about coloring my hair, enh, but the gray is kind of taking over and making me look even more like an olden crone (a cool olden crone)
• ross and i ate part of a weed gummie the other night, i took a mere quarter, but immediately we were both so dumb, like keanu reeves and william hurt in i love you to death (the worst movie) (kevin kline ughhhhhhh)

nostalgia/agony

me, 1988, 14 years old, braces, vest, fluffy hair, mad style

john dug up some old home videos of us from college and high school and oh it was intense viewing. good memories, but also kind of traumatizing. i’d kind of built up my own mythology about those days — “i was square but happy,” “nerdy but actually cool” — which is…eh…true, but also doesn’t account for all the searching, awkwardness, trying to figure out who to be, HOW to be, during the ages of 12-23. i had the most amazing friends, but i was such a late bloomer, and basically you could see all that melodramatic seeking in the videos. was painful to witness; i was so relieved to be past it. to have figured it out (relatively) (still struggle with a different kind of seeking) (though i’m trying to frame my searching as curiosity) (life is not about flatlining, right?). the moral of the story is that some kids get out of adolescence easy; some DO NOT. (or does anyone really get out easy? maybe it’s all a question of hard or harder or hardest.)

recommended

Artemisia Gentileschi, 1614-1618

good chuckles in Lyta Gold & Brianna Rennix’s “RANKED: 10 Paintings of Judith Beheading Holofernes”

smoke and lovers

Frank Stewart, “Smoke and Lovers,” Memphis, Tenn. 1992. Featured in “Kamoinge’s Half-Century of African-American Photography.” Via The New York Times.

sitting alone together

Courtesy of the Arnold Lobel estate, via The New Yorker.

bought arnold lobel’s days with frog and toad for my nephew’s birthday — i’d forgotten most of it, but what a heartbreaker. from the new yorker’s “‘Frog and Toad’: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love”:

When reading children’s books as children, we get to experience an author’s fictional world removed from the very real one he or she inhabits. But knowing the strains of sadness in Lobel’s life story gives his simple and elegant stories new poignancies. On the final page of “Alone,” Frog and Toad, having cleared up their misunderstanding, sit contently on the island looking into the distance, each with his arm around the other. Beneath the drawing, Lobel writes, “They were two close friends, sitting alone together.”

part 2 of becoming an old crone

today i described a bar as “jumping”

becoming an old crone

A TALE

by nicole ittner

does this feel aggressive to you

IT JUST CAN’T BE TIME FOR AARP ADS YET