Tell us about the last time you were really, truly jealous of someone. Did you act on it? Did it hurt your relationship?
I am either very out of touch with my feelings/emotions or is is too early for me to think of the last time I was really jealous or I am just happy when my friends become successful? Since I came up with nothing, here is what you get: A classic example of jealousy, set to a beat that will stick in your head all day.
Jessie is a friend, yeah
I know he’s been a good friend of mine
But lately something’s changed that ain’t hard to define
Jessie’s got himself a girl and I want to make her mine
And she’s watching him with those eyes
And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it
Yeah ‘n’ he’s holding her in his arms
Late, late at night
You know, I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
Where can I find a woman like that
I play along with the charade
There doesn’t seem to be a reason to change
You know, I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
I wanna tell her that I love her but the point is probably mute
‘Cause she’s watching him with those eyes
And she’s lovin’ him with that body, I just know it
And he’s holding her in his arms
Late, late at night
You know, I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
Where can I find a woman like that
Like Jessie’s girl
I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
Where can I find a woman
Where can I find a woman like that
And I’m lookin’ in the mirror all the time
Wondering what she don’t see in me, I’ve been funny
I’ve been cool with the lines
Ain’t that the way love supposed to be
Tell me, where can I find a woman like that
You know, I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
I want Jessie’s girl
Where can I find a woman like that
Like Jessie’s girl
I wish that I had Jessie’s girl
I want, I want Jessie’s girl
Humans are very sensitive to change: When we get a raise or commission, we really enjoy it — but we adapt at incredible speeds to our new wealth. Some studies have shown that in North America additional income beyond $75,000 a year ceases to impact day-to-day happiness.
Dancing always makes me happy, and it’s free! That said, it’s Friday, so please form a Soul Train line from the back and enjoy some new Daft Punk:
I gave waldina.com a new look last night. Some people, after a particularly trying day at work, hit a happy hour somewhere and forget about how top down, almost every single solitary person employed at their company is a lazy fucking idiot. Some people leave work and play video games all night long just to dull the memories of the antics of morons at their work place. I think that it has been well-established that my sanity lies in my cardio workouts at the gym. Thirty minutes of the elliptical or bike, throw in some Piers Morgan and I will have totally forgotten where I was the previous eight-ish hours.
I do recognize signs of particularly bad days, however. If I leave the gym and still want beers (yes, plural), I know it was a doozy. Still, for whatever reason, I refuse to drink because of a bad day. It happens, every day can’t be a peach, otherwise it would be called something other than ‘work.’
Instead, I came home and reworked the layout of Waldina.com to more match my other blog Wasp & Pear. Wasp & Pear is like my life’s super-feed (since I don’t like the facebook over-share syndrome); waldina, instagram, articles I like, photos that inspire me, my own form of tweets, all that get pushed to Wasp & Pear for archiving (and the enjoyment of 24 followers). It’s a Tumblr, so if you do that, you know what to do.
I dug through the archives and found a poem about early mornings in the city and a Haiku about kissing a littler person.
It Is Only Our Morning
The sun lights the sky and the glass on the tall buildings before it lights the air where we walk. We walked to under a canopy of warm refractory light in the darkness this morning.
We claim a bit more ownership of the city at this hour. Sharing it only with delivery trucks, school kids, and the barristas that make our coffee. The empty sidewalks and streets, the dark shop windows, the last of the summer blooms are all ours. We share them with each other and witness the city waking up together.
I didn’t have a photo of anything that seemed to fit.
The question is:
Do you feel uncomfortable when you see someone else being embarrassed? What’s most likely to make you squirm?
1. Devout Anything. You name it, if you use a reason of why you do or do not do or believe anything because “I’m a [whatever].” I cringe. That goes for Christians, Catholics, Jew, Democrat, Republican, vegan, vegetarian, or whatever other title people seem to need to ascribe to themselves as an easy way of claiming identity. I cringe, I absolutely cringe. I want to hear the reason you do not eat any animal products because you do not believe that they are healthy or ethical or whatever. THAT is a reason, saying it is because you are a vegan is a cop out. In my mind, people that are devout anything are hypocrites, liars, elitists, extremists and unthinking robots.
2. Public Expressions of Love. We have all seen that fairly-new celebrity couple on a talk show exclaiming that their new mats is the love of their life. I cringe. Next week, it’s the cover of People Magazine about their break up. Thanks to facebook, you no longer have to be a celebrity to make such exclamations to the world. You can be in madly in love with a new person every week, be constantly changing your relationship status, and all done by the click of a mouse. Embarrassing.
3. Loud, Emotional Drunks. Drinking unties the knots that bind the feelings that you keep hidden. If you are sad, angry, or just ‘going through it’, drinking will most likely amplify, exaggerate, and magnify it. When I see a very drunk person crying/screaming, I cringe. I absolutely physically cringe. Drinking isn’t going to make you feel better and definitely will not make you forget (thanks camera phones and social media!). There have been times when I have not drank because I was afraid I would start crying and never stop.
4. Mutton dressed and acting as Lamb. It could be my age and recognizing that there is an age-appropriate way to dress and act and when ignoring those basic rules, everyone sees you as desperately grasping and scratching at any small crumb of youth that you may still possess. My personal age-appropriate rules of dress are much more strict and when I see them broken by others, I do not cringe. I wear well-fitting clothes in a limited color palate, I do not follow trends and I stay away from brand logos or elaborate embellishments. That is basically it. When guys a few years older than me have fauxhawks, wear Abercrombie & Fitch tshirts and are cranking dance music out of their new Fiat 500. I double-plus cringe and think ‘there, but for the grace of Diana Vreeland, go I.” I cringe because I know that it could have easily been me, if not for the wise guidance of a few pioneers I have observed. It is knowing youthfulness comes from within, a curiosity, a light. We have all known 80 year-olds with sharp tongues and sparkles in their eyes. That is youth.
I have to save the rest of my cringing for my trip to Target later today.
The Library of Congress created an exhibit, “Books that Shaped America,” that explores books that “have had a profound effect on American life.” Many of the books in the exhibit have been banned/challenged. Give yourself the gift of a beautiful story and read one and them imagine what your life would be like if you were never given that gift.
Fight censorship.
I have not read this book, and like with all the other books on the banned book list, it has been added to my must-read list.
Parents of students in Advanced English classes in a Virginia high school objected to language and sexual content in this book, which made TIME magazine’s list of top 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, to John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher. Hurston was the fifth of eight children, and while she was still a toddler, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black incorporated town in the United States, where John Hurston served several terms as mayor. In 1917, Hurston enrolled in Morgan Academy in Baltimore, where she completed her high school education.
Three years later, she enrolled at Howard University and began her writing career. She took classes there intermittently for several years and eventually earned an associate degree. The university’s literary magazine published her first story in 1921. In 1925, she moved to New York and became a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance. A year later, she, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman organized the journal Fire!, considered one of the defining publications of the era. Meanwhile, she enrolled in Barnard College and studied anthropology with arguably the greatest anthropologist of the twentieth century, Franz Boas. Hurston’s life in Eatonville and her extensive anthropological research on rural black folklore greatly influenced her writing.
Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937, long after the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. The literature of the 1920s, a period of postwar prosperity, was marked by a sense of freedom and experimentation, but the 1930s brought the Depression and an end to the cultural openness that had allowed the Harlem Renaissance to flourish. As the Depression worsened, political tension increased within the United States; cultural production came to be dominated by “social realism,” a gritty, political style associated with left-wing radicalism. The movement’s proponents felt that art should be primarily political and expose social injustice in the world. This new crop of writers and artists dismissed much of the Harlem Renaissance as bourgeois, devoid of important political content and thus devoid of any artistic merit. The influential and highly political black novelist Richard Wright, then an ardent Communist, wrote a scathing review of Their Eyes Were Watching God upon its publication, claiming that it was not “serious fiction” and that it “carries no theme, no message, no thought.”
Hurston was also criticized for her comportment: she refused to bow to gender conventions, and her behavior often seemed shocking if not outrageous. Although she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and had published prolifically (both works of fiction and anthropological works), Hurston fell into obscurity for a number of years. By the late 1940s, she began to have increasing difficulty getting her work published. By the early 1950s, she was forced to work as a maid. In the 1960s, the counterculture revolution continued to show disdain for any literature that was not overtly political, and Zora Neale Hurston’s writing was further ignored.
A stroke in the late 1950s forced Hurston to enter a welfare home in Florida. After she died penniless on January 28, 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker, another prominent African-American writer, rediscovered her work in the late 1960s. In 1973, Walker traveled to Florida to place a marker on Hurston’s grave containing the phrase, “A Genius of the South.” Walker’s 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine, propelled Hurston’s work back into vogue. Since then, Hurston’s opus has been published and republished many times; it has even been adapted for the cinema: Spike Lee’s first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It, parallels Their Eyes Were Watching God and can be viewed as an interesting modern adaptation of the novel.
One of the strengths of Hurston’s work is that it can be studied in the context of a number of different American literary traditions. Most often, Their Eyes Were Watching God is associated with Harlem Renaissance literature, even though it was published in a later era, because of Hurston’s connection to that scene. Certain aspects of the book, though, make it possible to discuss it in other literary contexts. For example, some critics argue that the novel should be read in the context of American Southern literature: with its rural Southern setting and its focus on the relationship between man and nature, the dynamics of human relationships, and a hero’s quest for independence, Their Eyes Were Watching God fits well into the tradition that includes such works as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The novel is also important in the continuum of American feminist literature, comparing well to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. More specifically, and due in large part to Alice Walker’s essay, Zora Neale Hurston is often viewed as the first in a succession of great American black women writers that includes Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor. But Their Eyes Were Watching God resists reduction to a single movement, either literary or political. Wright’s criticism from 1937 is, to a certain extent, true: the book is not a political treatise—it carries no single, overwhelming message or moral. Far from being a weakness, however, this resistance is the secret of the novel’s strength: it is a profoundly rich, multifaceted work that can be read in a number of ways.
You’ve inherited $5 million, with instructions that you must give it all away — but you can choose any organizations you like to be the beneficiaries. Where does the money go?
I would gladly donate every last cent of that five million to the It Gets Better Project and feel lucky to be able to help. Even without the $5M, you can see me at the gym in a “It Gets Better” tshirt and the South Kitsap High School Library has received a “It Gets Better” book from me. I hope they kept it.
Growing up isn’t easy. Many young people face daily tormenting and bullying, leading them to feel like they have nowhere to turn. This is especially true for LGBT kids and teens, who often hide their sexuality for fear of bullying. Without other openly gay adults and mentors in their lives, they can’t imagine what their future may hold. In many instances, gay and lesbian adolescents are taunted — even tortured — simply for being themselves.
While many of these teens couldn’t see a positive future for themselves, we can. The It Gets Better Project was created to show young LGBT people the levels of happiness, potential, and positivity their lives will reach – if they can just get through their teen years. The It Gets Better Project wants to remind teenagers in the LGBT community that they are not alone — and it WILL get better.
I have written about my school bullies and my own It Gets Better story, you can read it HERE.
You can get involved with the project HERE. Donate. Share. Anything. The internet has connected everyone, no one needs to feel alone anymore. Kids do not have the perspective of time and distance. We need to tell them that what they are feeling right now will be just a blip on the timeline of their lives, their wonderful amazing lives.
8:00 am. My morning commute on the train where everyone avoids eye contact and reads their Kindles.
10:00 am. Opened the store and snapped a quick pic with the nicest coworker I have.
12:00 pm. Shoes. Taking a photo of the spreadsheet I was actually working on would have bored you.
2:00 pm. Boxes I need to unpack.
4:00 pm. The store room next door is empty. I went over and snapped this pic because I was actually auditing last weeks sales receipts and it would have been really boring.
6:00 pm. This photo is of the Smith Tower, taken from the outside elevator on the 14th floor, on the way to the gym.
8:00 pm. This is Bear. She thinks she is going to get some of my food if she tries really really hard to look cute.
**I added as many of the posts that participated in the challenge that I could. Hope you like them!**
There are no gods and goddesses in the sky watching over us. Karma is not a good deed savings account. Nothing EVER happens for a reason. Horoscopes. Fortune cookies. Dreams. Superstitions. All devices created by people that need answers for the unanswerable. I do not believe in impossible things because it is hard enough believing in possible things. I do not believe that people are fundamentally good and that they can change, I believe that water flows downhill and people are about as lazy when left to their own choices.
So this is how it is: the innocent suffer, the guilty go free, and truth and fiction are pretty much interchangeable. There is neither a Santa Claus nor an Easter Bunny, and there are no angels watching over us. Things just happen for no reason. And nothing makes any sense.
I noticed a picture on facebook of my first grade class a while ago, I was not tagged as I was not facebook friends with the person who had posed the picture. I remember the girl and remember her name, I actually remember a bunch of the people tagged in that photograph. I thought about friend-requesting them, but I just do not know what I would say or talk to them about. How do you nutshell 25 years? One girl I remember best because she and I were always seated next to each other when classrooms were organized alphabetically. We went kindergarten through senior year together and even went to each other’s birthday parties in grade school.
I know, you are waiting for it, so here is where the story turns. Since we were alphabetically connected, at least at the beginning of the year, we sat next to each other most of the time for twelve years. I mean, whenever we had a class together. In junior high social studies class, she called me by my whole name, first and last, then turned to another girl and said “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?” It hurt, I won’t lie. We had been friends all through grade school, our mothers knew each other, we had history.
In her defense, I was a nerd, a short, skinny, awkward nerd. At the same time, the cruelty of children is absolutely bottomless. She didn’t need to call me a nerd, I knew I was a nerd, I heard it from every single guy in my P.E. class, well, actually I heard much worse.
We, along with most of the kids from grade school, got into this familiarity-thing where they sort of acknowledged my existence, but didn’t acknowledge our history. So, they would see that I was standing there, taking up air space, but would not do anything more than that. This started in junior high and continued through high school. It was fine, I made new friends with the other outcasts and misfits, we wrote alternative newspapers, dyed our hair, had dog weddings, and befriended the foreign exchange students. Yes, that was my crowd.
To this day, my mother will say she saw so-and-so-from-grade-school’s mother at the grocery store and I just don’t have the heart to tell her they basically ignored me for the last six years of school.
Basically, at my school, groups of kids were friends almost solely based on the radio station they listened to. I am not sure if those were simpler times and the dynamics are much more complex now with the internet and such, but ours was a gentile time where you either listened to butt rock, top 40, or new wave. I, as well as my clan, all listened to New Wave, C89.5 to be exact. This is when C89.5 went off at 11:00 PM. There was a subset of us that listened to KCMU, also. The radio station influenced everything: the clothes you wore, your haircut, the car you drove, and the friends you made.
I guess in some ways, even though we had our own insulated group, we still felt like outcasts and maybe looked up to the popular kids that listened to top 40. I did not look up to the butt rock kids, they were frightening to me. But the popular kids still had the impression of charmed lives. John Hughes was spot on and we knew it.
It is curious how even today, when someone says my first and last name, I instantly think of “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?”
