Shake Girl is an impressive collaboration–so much input to mediate and organize in just six weeks!–and is worth a look-over. Also, from the Shake Girl website, here’s a short listing of human rights organizations/charities in Cambodia working on behalf of acid attack victims, if you’re interested in donating or learning a little more about the issue.
Via Craft, check out these wonderful miniatures by Thomas Doyle. I’m particularly fond of this first piece pictured in the Reclamations Series, but they’re all great.
Note! This post contains graphic depictions of sex, beyond the “Read the rest” link. Click on at your discretion.
For this to make the best kind of sense, please refer to back to SOPP and the guidelines therein.
This is Via the Hookah smoking and infinitely creative ways of Tayzer Carrotsauce, Staceysaurus, and Kelsa.
There are a few Antioch-specific references, but I hope that won’t throw anyone off to far.
Here goes:
Emerson and Libby shared a glance across the smoky dorm room, the sweet scent of melon shish curling delicately through the air. It was nearing the end of the second term, and with Antioch College closing for good within a few short weeks, Libby felt the pressure of her secret desires closing in. It was tonight, or never.
Libby and Emerson had become close within the first few weeks of school, but strictly within a friendly sense. Libby had entertained numerous open relationships with the boys on campus, and presented herself as strictly identifying as straight. Libby had shared details of all of her sexual encounters with Emerson, but had kept one big secret from him. She wanted him. Bad.
As friends slowly filed out as the hookah ran out, Libby worked up the courage to make the move she had been dreaming of. She took a deep breath as she struggled to finally ask him, “do you want to take a walk in the glen?” Emerson, used to these late night walks, where they talked about everything, from future plans to crushes, did not realize that tonight was a night unlike any other.
“Of course,” he said, smiling his usual roguish grin. They set off, and soon found themselves along amongst the trees. It was a pleasantly warm night in mid April, the full moon showing full and bright, illuminating the rocky steps they walked on.
“Emerson,” Libby finally broke the silence they had been walking in, “I have something to tell you.” She sat down on one of the large boulders close to them. “I’ve always wanted you. From the first day I met you, at propsp. weekend.” Emerson looked stunned.
“I’m flattered, Libby,” he replied, pressing a hand to his tightly bound chest, “but I thought you were only interested in male bodied people.”
“Well, Emerson,” Libby began, “After taking queer theory with Isabella Winkler last term, I realized that I should stop limiting my desires into the box the society creates. I realized that want you and what I want to do with you, and that is that.”
Apologies, once again, for the silence around here. As I’ve mentioned, we are all suffocating under the enormous weight of our finals. In one week, we will be free.
For now, I recommend you explore my mother’s new website. My mom, Mickey* Bond, is a painter, who works primarily on clayboards with water-soluble pastels. She paints expressive landscapes. The photos are lovely, but in person the paintings glow like bioluminescence.
A beautiful day today. It’s been seventy degrees and the first summer storm is tumbling in. The sky is a dozen shades of gray, cobalt, lavender. I am looking forward to pounding, surging rain, rain falling down in heavy sheets like water thrown out of a bucket. I am hoping for thunder, and for the kind of lightning that can wake a person from sleep with nothing but its brightness.
The city is full of trees and the trees are full of white blossoms. On our balcony we have a clay pot overflowing with pansies, and my mother has promised to bring us another, this one planted with rosemary.
Someday soon all these tests and projects and papers and forms and obligations will have washed themselves away, and we will all be together again, if only for a little while. We will be lost in the heat of these summer weeks, wandering from one house to another. I’m expecting sunburns, droplets collecting on cold drinks, hours lost to television, and books devoured whole at breakneck speeds. I’m expecting buckets of cold paint, and sleeping through the morning, and the soft and careful clicks of cameras.
I am expecting such relief. I have missed so many hearts. The weather is wonderful, and I am as full of love as the trees are of flowers.
I’ve been working pretty constantly for the last two days on my big final paper for a class of mine. It’s a research paper on sex differences in humans, specifically differences in problem solving and on the performances of various mental tasks. What a huge, exhausting topic! Ugh.
I’m posting it here in order to make the big amount of work feel vaguely more satisfying (it’s an assignment and a post!), and because, as you may have observed, I tend to post my longer, more interesting papers. This paper will be edited by my peers and my professor this week, so I may post the revision if I feel it has improved substantially. Also to look forward to next week: my final essay for another class, Writing for Arts and Culture, about sexual imagery in the work of Jeff Mangum, in which I will try to tease out the commonalities in the sexual references in the lyrics of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, On Avery Island, and some live recordings including Live at Jittery Joe’s, a show at Aquarius Records, and a show in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2001, hopefully developing an idea of some kind of over-arching meaning, attitude, intention, something. That one should be fun.
Anyway, this paper. Almost entirely below the fold, of course, ’cause it’s ten damn pages long. As a taste-test to help you figure out if you have any interest in reading it, here are some things I learned that I wasn’t expecting to (in addition to a whole bunch of stuff I was expecting to learn): little girls are about 2% more likely to engage in “cross-gender behavior” than little boys (van Beijsterveld 650), but despite this, boys are something like six times more likely to get referred to doctors to be treated for GID (van Beijsterveld 655), which shows just how huge the imbalance is between the social acceptance of female masculinity (in kids) and male femininity. Also, it’s fairly apparent, I think, that a combination of classism, racism, weird sexist ideas, and macho culture are undermining a lot of boys’ academic success. These two things have convinced me even more that we desperately need a men’s equivalent of feminism, not to shuck off the oppressive regime of women or to overturn feminist achievements or anything like that, obviously — die-hard feminist here — but to do for boys and men what feminism is doing for girls and women: to expand opportunities and remake gender roles. We’ve begun the work of making it socially acceptable for girls to excel in math and science; as we continue that work, we need to begin the process of encouraging boys in the humanities. As we continue the work of expanding our conceptions of femininity and femaleness, we need to do the parallel work of expanding our ideas of masculinity and maleness. The gender system will not die until we until we begin to attack it from every side. And for fuck’s sake, that thing must die.
On that note, here is my paper.
Sex Differences In Cognition:
Disparities, Similarities, and Explanations
There are documented differences in the average intellectual strengths and weaknesses of women and men. Some postulate that these dissimilarities are innate, the product of an evolutionary history that placed different pressures on the sexes. Others account for the variation with the strong forces of culture and socialization, asserting that the divergences are the product of the different treatment of young boys and girls.
At this time, it is not clear whether the demonstrable differences in the behavior of women and men are caused primarily by biological or environmental forces — there is support for both claims. What is clear, however, is that the sex of an individual is not an indicator of his or her particular abilities. There is a tremendous amount of overlap between the sexes, a the tremendous amount of variation within each sex, and a tremendous number of forces that influence behavior. Though there are observable trends along gender lines, they are just that: trends, which cannot reveal information about any given individual. Furthermore, “variation between men and women tends to be smaller than deviations within each sex” (Kimura 34) — regardless of certain tendencies, women and men are far more alike than they are different, and sex is just one of many axes on which persistent differences can be observed. Read the rest of this entry »
The Walking Bike (via) is a bicycle with a shoe on the end of every spoke, instead of a traditional wheel. Finally, a way to avoid the impossible decision of whether to walk or bike to work.
