Two or Three Things I Know About Texas

This'll put color in your cheeks.

To be so narcotised by the mere fact of someone saying pleasant things about you that you become absolutely indifferent to their content is the behavior of an egotist, a praise addict, like someone eating brownie mixture out of the packet because they want a sugar rush and they don’t care how they get it.

—This is an interesting essay, but mostly I’m posting the quote above because I really identify with the second half of that simile. 

emilygould:

“I had written to express skepticism about the voice cultivated by women’s websites. Now I was experiencing the real problem with the community defined by that voice: the way it manages criticism. When intimacy is your model of success, it becomes easy to assume that everyone is either a friend or a traitor. I had tried to approach the ladyblogs as an observer rather than a participant, but my writing about them in an apparently impersonal public voice, as a woman—which became a woman holding myself apart from their community of women—registered as unacceptable aggression. So, was I a spinster feminist, or just out to impress boys? This was the exact corner of the internet that seemed like it ought to know better.”

—

On Ladyblogs by Molly Fischer is online!

Women continue to feel like their shared online spaces are so tenuous that any critique of them must be treated as a mortal threat. It’s easy to understand why they feel that way when you think of how recently these outlets have emerged and when you look at the blog-world outside them. But we need to spend less time defending our fortresses and more time expanding the borders of our empire.

Since I am never more eloquent than at 9:15 AM on gchat, a partial transcript of a conversation I had with a friend this morning. 

i think we’re short-changing ourselves
as women
if we don’t allow ourselves to ask more / different things of the
websites that are “for us”
she’s not saying “down with the hairpin!”
or “your feminism is not for me!”
which is i feel how her original article was read
she’s saying
“i want a place where ladies can disagree with each other and also not tear each other down”
…
and i think we should be comfortable asking for that also
not instead of the hairpin
but in addition to it
In other words, co-sign Emily’s much more eloquent reaction, above. (Full disclosure: I used to live with Molly / am friends with her, which is not to say that I am unable to disagree with things she writes. But if I did disagree, I would probably tell her in person, not on the Internet.)
adrianeq: I thought the gallery misspelled “Miranda” While my last name is easy to make a nickname out of, my first name presents a challenge. My crush in the fifth grade used to call me “Miranda Panda” (not, I think, affectionately); a high school friend went with “Randy” (objectionable on many levels). My uncle used “Rwanda” when I was very small (pre-1994), before settling on “Veranda,” as a result of which I’ve always had a soft spot for the Decemberists’ song “We Both Go Down Together.” 

adrianeq:

I thought the gallery misspelled “Miranda”

While my last name is easy to make a nickname out of, my first name presents a challenge. My crush in the fifth grade used to call me “Miranda Panda” (not, I think, affectionately); a high school friend went with “Randy” (objectionable on many levels). My uncle used “Rwanda” when I was very small (pre-1994), before settling on “Veranda,” as a result of which I’ve always had a soft spot for the Decemberists’ song “We Both Go Down Together.” 

His courtship of Miranda (Selma Blair), a mopey young woman who also lives at home in a state of arrested, medicated quasi-adolescence, is frequently excruciating to watch because it exposes just how misplaced and bizarre his self-confidence is.

—This is from a New York Times review of Todd Solondz’s new movie, Dark Horse. But when you’re a self-obsessed single woman with an unusual first name, it’s hard not to take these kinds of things personally. 

One benefit of being at work on a weekend: you get dibs on all the weird spam faxes! (Taken with instagram)

One benefit of being at work on a weekend: you get dibs on all the weird spam faxes! (Taken with instagram)

My junior year of college I moved into an apartment whose bedroom came furnished with a large, gorgeous wooden desk—which surface I immediately proceeded to cover with piles and piles of books. The piles eventually got so high, Z became convinced they were going to topple over and kill me. This obviously did not happen, but stacks of paper may yet be the end of me! That’s a picture of the situation above my desk. One of coworkers pulled me aside yesterday to offer to help me move some of the manuscripts. “I don’t like blood,” he said, by way of explanation. 

My junior year of college I moved into an apartment whose bedroom came furnished with a large, gorgeous wooden desk—which surface I immediately proceeded to cover with piles and piles of books. The piles eventually got so high, Z became convinced they were going to topple over and kill me. This obviously did not happen, but stacks of paper may yet be the end of me! That’s a picture of the situation above my desk. One of coworkers pulled me aside yesterday to offer to help me move some of the manuscripts. “I don’t like blood,” he said, by way of explanation. 

The Playing Field

The chances that you would come by this post via my blog as opposed to via Emily Books are slim, but just in case: friends, I wrote a thing about my feelings (of course) about feminism, and teaching, and feeling inadequate in the company of men. 

emilybooks:

by Miranda Popkey

For one year, immediately after graduating from college, I taught English to high school sophomores in South Texas. My inexperience with classroom management often resulted in—among many other disasters, large and small—discussions that veered wildly off topic. The school, and the larger community, was majority Hispanic; in fact, reviewing my students’ standardized test results from the previous year, I realized that only two had identified themselves as solely “Caucasian.” And so perhaps it was not surprising that one of those two students eventually brought up the topic of “reverse-racism.”

I don’t remember what my lesson plan that day was to have been; in any case, it was immediately discarded in favor of a discussion about structural inequality.

Read More

What she said.

zanopticon:

This is probably the first and last time you will see my name on a Contributors list alongside Jennifer Egan’s. I could not be one bit more excited about it, or Girlcrush in general.