This comment really captures something that has bothered me for a long time about 'time management' People always say "I just make time!" as if somehow all time is equal. As if a sleepy afternoon hour when you can barely string together two sentences is the same as a peak energy morning hour! I try to put the most energy using tasks at the best times, but on some days, I have no good hours of energy. I have a lot to spend my few hours of energy on, and when I am working, I tend to spend it on work rather than recreational writing.

Of course, the heart of this issue of who surmounts impossible odds to write and who doesn't, is that it doesn't really matter all that much. Sometimes people in fact are just talking. Everyone who says "Oh, I'd like to write a novel someday, when I have time" does not in fact need to be told about how if they just wrote a hundred words a day, they'd have a novel way before retirement or told about how they need to make time to write.

Maybe they just like to think of themselves as creative, a little more interesting than their lives have turned out to be. And that's OK.

We all have little fantasies of ourselves being the sort of person who likes doing things that we really don't like to do. We want to imagine ourselves as the sort of people who travel to exotic locations and have adventures or do volunteer work, but some part of us understands that bugs, heat and exhaustion do not figure into our fantasies.

And so it is with fantasies of being a writer. People don't imagine rereading their words over and over and over to edit it, or being up at 5 am writing that new chapter. And that's fine.

Advice for people who always complain that others don't heed their advice.

The thing is that the problem is not that people don't heed your advice. The problem is that you get twisted out of shape if people don't heed your advice. Advice is not a legally binding contract. If I tell someone not to buy brand name clothes, that they are all just made by the same sweatshops in China, and then they buy new name brand clothes, getting bent out of shape isn't going to help me at all. They probably heard my advice, and didn't think it worked for them. It's not a moral failing, they just like brand name clothing more than they like saving money.

And that's OK! This is not an epic battle for moral superiority! Giving advice is giving your opinion. Not everyone will agree with your opinion, and even if they do, everything is easier said than done.

This story creeps me out.

Now, I can't really excerpt it for you, but basically, a guy goes on a journey, tries to help some stranger who jumped off a bridge after this guy tied a rope around his waist, and then lets the stranger hurtle down into the water after some spiel about responsibility.

As a metaphor about not taking on too much, it doesn't work since the our audience is balancing our 'hero' losing momentum towards his goals and the horrible death of a stranger whose actions are irrational, but probably not death penalty worthy. Also, there's also the image of other people as mere baggage, mere obstacles on the way to your glorious goals. Just drop them off the bridge, and go on your merry way!

*shudder* I'm not saying drop all your goals and become codependent on a crack head. But balance is the key here. We're all interdependent on each other. We're both the man going towards his goal, and the man hanging off the bridge. Maybe we're the rope too. Seeing ourselves as all the characters gives us more compassion. Say, we're the man hanging off the bridge.

We see that our own actions have been foolish, irrational, or maybe we don't see. Anyway, we're hanging off the bridge, depending on someone else. We're scared. What if he leaves? What if we're all alone, speeding towards the water, the person we hoped that would save us, walking off smugly, after giving us a lesson in responsibility. Of course, we can't really learn this lesson, as our hearts stop when we hit the water.

Using math, people figure out that the rent is so high in many places that even with two minimum wage jobs, you're barely making it. It's so high that even if you wore sacks as pants, never watched cable on that cheap tv you got from extremely suspicious merchants, and only ate stone cut lentils, you'd be in the same position, but really miserable.

I've been trying to figure out why this 'culture of poverty' stuff bothers me. Some have written beautifully on environmental factors, and some have spoken on the effects of growing up poor.

I guess one thing that bothers me is that it's not just the language of Rohan and the language of Mordor, and those who can speak both are able to move fluidly- it's the idea that the language of Rohan is somehow the language everyone should speak, forever more, and that the language of Mordor has no grace or poetry to it. I don't agree with that- the ways people live are always both beautiful and terrible, because humans are like that. By focusing on what we think is 'terrible', even if we ourselves are doing the same 'terrible' things, we miss the whole rest of people's lives.


I was reading slackitivst and people were talking about the parable of the prodigal son. And I think some of the people talking about the culture of poverty are like the older brother. Instead of rejoicing that the poor can at least have something in their bellies, even if we don't like what they eat, or can enjoy some of the good of society, even if we think that their choices are wrongity wrong wrong, we sit in resentment. If only we could change their dysfunctional culture! If only they'd see the light! But..even if we think they should live like this or that, maybe we can let go of the feeling that because someone is poor, we should be able to control their lives.

Because, at base, this is what our whole culture of poverty ideology is about. It's not about discussing people's experiences equally- it's about saying that if only poor folks had made the same choices as us, or choices we think everyone should make, they wouldn't be poor. That's why I don't like it. The idea that people who are richer are somehow better than the poor. That there's one right path to get through life, and if you deviate, you're wrong, even if you're adjusting to the circumstances of your life.

And I don't want to have that power. I don't want to be in people's bedrooms, questioning if they are having sex the 'right' way, with the 'right' person. I don't want to be at people's doctor's appointments, trying to make them not have children they want. I don't want to be in people's mailboxes, and bank accounts, trying to make them spend their money the right way.

To say that I know how you should live your life...that's arrogant. I know I'm arrogant, but to give yourself that much power, you're giving yourself an equal amount of responsibility. The world is not under our control. To say that you know the right way for millions of people! Feel the hubris of that!

To say you know when they should have kids, what they should eat, what they should spend their money on, what they should value... It makes me dizzy to think of it. Maybe we should try to be more humble. Instead of approaching people with "You should...", maybe we should try to listen to others sometimes.

White feminists realize that just because there's TEH SEX in porn doesn't mean that any and all standards for say...*safety* and *not getting a horribly fatal disease* are suspended. We can discuss how we can have some standards, but let's not pretend that porn stars aren't workers...

I'm thinking about the rat fable David Sedaris read on This American Life. BTW: Some time ago, I heard Sedaris read at the Canon Center, and he said that he had a lot of them and didn't know what to do with them. Now he does. Anyway, he's amazing, squee,etc. But yes, I really dislike people that Sedaris is satirizing with the rat character. On an irrational level, it feels like bad luck. I'm a grumpy guts, and I'm way less sick than many beautiful people who love life and help others. Thinking that they must have secretly done something wrong seems overly distrusting, especially if they are out saving the lives of babies instead of playing Civilization 5 for a zillion hours, and less logical than simply thinking that say...one can't help that they have breast cancer or lupus, etc.

The American belief that the individual has almost mystical powers bothers me on a deep level, that sadly for this blog, I can't quite articulate. All success is on an individual's shoulders, but also all failures, and that's too heavy for one person to bear.

What does his mom's marital status or lack thereof have to do with his success as an entrepreneur? Is this 1954? Let's get off of the whole UNWED MOTHER kick for good.

Now, I'm not a positive person. I don't tell others to smile or that their problems are unimportant because of the starving kids in Africa. But I think that some paths to problem solving are dead ends of despair. And one of those dead ends is thinking that getting people to make decisions you approve of is the path to societal change. It can be fun in small doses- I like getting riled up and complaining as much as anyone. However, if all we got is telling our cousin Mookie, random acquaintances in the grocery store, and strangers on the internet to close their legs, to not choose to parent when they want to parent, to stop drinking all that soda, well, we're doomed to failure.

People rarely change their behavior because someone says so. For example, I hear all about how fast food is horrible. There are websites and national campaigns against eating factory farmed meat products. But I still eat it. Why? Several factors- it's quick and I can go to a fast food place without being late for work tasks, it's avaliable, it tastes better than food I make myself, occasionally others buy it for me, it's familiar and comforting.

If you want me to stop eating McDonalds, a lecture won't work. You're going to have to identify my reasons. You can't do this by arm chair psychoanalysis. If you want to change the behavior of one person, you'll have to actually try to talk to them on their level. Figure out what drives their behavior and what help they want, instead of what you think they need. Then instead of focusing on their behavior- focus on your own. How can you promote the opening of restaurants with quick, healthy, and inexpensive food? It may take work- the good part of the finger wagging is that you don't have to do anything. All you have to do is complain, and complaining is fun.

But it's passive. You're waiting for others to come around and see your obvious rightness. You feel productive, but you're standing still. In terms of social change, you might as well have been writing Gakuen Alice fanfic. In which they are all furries.

Postbougie helps me learn that just because we're both black that doesn't give me the right to start complaining that some other lady's sex life isn't the same as mine. Trying to force all black women into this one model isn't working! Marriage is consistently held up as an ideal, but women who don't fit into the ideal don't go "AHAHAHA! I'M GOING TO HAVE A BABY OUT OF WEDLOCK* TO BRING DOWN THE BLACK COMMUNITY!!!" It's not like that, and no amount of finger wagging is going change the reasons people do things that we don't like. I can say "You gotta LUUUURVE everyone you have sex with" and folks will still have casual sex, because sex is fun. I can say "You need to do a credit check, background check, and check his 401k contributions before he can even see your ankle" and folks would pretend to do a 401k check, much like religious folks pretend they never have sex outside of marriage, and then go with what actually fits their lives instead of my ideals. Yea, I said it, people will go with what fits what is actually going on in their lives rather than the ideals of people on the internet that live in totally different states!


*That sounds so judgey and old fashioned, btw?

More about how No Wedding No Womb is a horrible fucking idea.*


*Not so much about weddings- there's nothing wrong with a good marriage,but the idea that if everyone conformed to this marriage ideal, everything would be dory hunky.

Apparently scolding black women to get married hasn't been working, so we need a different approach. It's not two parent, white wedding or total chaos as our choices. There's a rainbow of opportunities out there.

The black snob discusses parenthood and I have an opinion. My first opinion is that not every child can be so easily dissuaded from sneaking out at night as the black snob. Some children are easier to parent than others, so a child who is easy to parent can be guided easily with a parent with just basic parenting skills. It's like getting a baby to sleep through the night. Some will sleep through the night no matter what a parent does almost[They won't sleep through the night if they have a rap concert every night at 3 am, but other than that, they'll sleep through anything] and some will have parents up every night, contemplating leaving their child at the fire house. People who have the easy babies can think they are better parents than those with more difficult babies, but that may not in fact be the case.

Of course, many others may have issues with the narrative about the goals and dreams of teen moms- I get the vibe that some think that if teen girls had higher self esteem or more goals or something they wouldn't get pregnant, and while it's important for girls to have goals and dreams, a broken condom doesn't go "Well, she wanted to be an ob gyn,so I'll magically fix myself!",and contrary to stereotype, 'good girls' who have goals and study hard still have sexual relationships- some with well meaning boyfriends and some with 'men' who ought to be ashamed of themselves, and some will, even if they have access to birth control,will get pregnant, and some of them either won't have access to or do not desire to have an abortion or go through the trauma of adoption.

I also have to note that the nuclear family model is not the only model- a cousin, a brother, an aunt,a friend, a teacher, a church member- all of them can raise a child. I have to admit that sometimes I think we act like women have a crystal ball and can see the future of a relationship,so we blame women for not knowing that a relationship would go south- it's not just casual encounters that lead to single parenthood, but committed cohabitation or even marriage.

Children aren't a problem to be solved, but a solution to be envisioned.

The idea that everyone should fit into a narrow box of 'adulthood' does great harm. People go without help and support they need. And the places where we need support aren't visible to others. For example, if one can only live on their own by working two jobs, and they have issues with fatigue or a need for more sleep than others consider necessary- even if the peanut gallery has a lot to say about that, it's better for that person to center their health. If a person is able to go to a few social events for maybe 4 hours a week, but can't work a 40 hour a week job, well, the peanut gallery needs to put a sock in it. You know what? Maybe learning to put a sock in it is an important ability to learn. You never know what someone is doing only at great cost that you take for granted. Maybe more STFUing is what we need.

"Sometimes I think that the world's so small, that we can never get away from the sprawl"-Arcade Fire

George Will is an idiot. This much is true. This week I was reading both Collaspe and The Place You Love Is Gone which are both about the same thing in different ways- humans overtaking the resources that are avaliable to them.

People like George Will don't get it. We're not so much concerned about whether in a million years the carbon levels will go down. We're worried about the human population crashing due to hunger, lack of resources like water, animals, and farmland, natural disasters due to climate change, and wars over resources. Yes, people like Pierson do talk about aesthetics, which is important to humans psychologically. Yes, maybe places where the sea comes in and destroys human settlements will come back, but the people displaced have been dealt a strong blow to their psyche, and their livelihoods in the small blink of time which is their lives.

I ask people like George Will to consider the value of what they are willing to destroy things like our forests, our water, our air for. Is it another pharmacy on a road with five? Is it short term gain in the stock market, followed by a crash? We can't keep growing forever, and maybe instead of forever growing outwards, and hoping that somehow things will be alright, we need to plan for growth, and use things we already have, such as buildings empty from the last time we were convinced that that new Wal Mart was the answer to all woes- Pierson speaks of the retail economy as neighbors finding jobs taking each other's washing in- a sterile circle.

Maybe we could live in houses that do not have home theater rooms[yes, these exist. I've been in two homes that have them], and work with the huge housing stock that we already have. Of course, that's crazy talk, like building a grocery store in an area of the city that lacks one!

And anyway George Will needs to fill column inches- better invest that Newsweek salary in some oil stock. Drill in our last wild places! Spill and pollute the water and the land! The earth doesn't care, so we shouldn't.

White feminists discuss fat [replying to this post where some lady says something stupid] Personally, I think that people are too quick to believe that large percentages of the population just randomly become less 'moral'.We think that black men suddenly just wake up and decide 'hey, let's drop out of high school- because we're lazy gits!" and that between 2007 and now, millions of people have suddenly become too lazy to work, and that people have all just suddenly decided that they want to be really fat.

It's because we're so trained to focus in on people's individual moral character that we end up being ridiculous. We also see everything in the light of moral character. If a child pees the bed, he's 'lazy'[I hear this a lot], if a person is fat, they don't have enough 'willpower', and etc, etc, and we structure our society this way- worrying about the moral hazard of unemployment benefits, etc, instead of structuring it so that people can succeed in their goals.

Problem Chlyde has a beautiful post on the view that poor people shouldn't have nice things. I connect it to the idea that you should have a horrible life unless you were perfectly moral and never did anything wrong in your life. "Wrong" is pretty loose here- it can be anything from owning a television to only working eight hours a day instead of 18. It's the sort of attitude that ends with people lecturing small children on the virtues of hard work because they asked for some chips.

I think really we should stop hewing to the whole idea that basic rights like food, shelter, health care, etc, should be doled out based on how moral we think people are. That's why they are called rights. People inherently deserve food, water, shelter, health care. We don't starve the very worst, the dregs of society- the psychopaths who have killed and raped and maimed. We don't force them to freeze in the cold.

We understand that to have a civilized society, we need to guarantee certain things even to the worst people. So why the hysteria if we see a poor person with a cell phone slightly nicer than we think they should have? Why the OMG, HOW DARE SHE HAVE SHELTER GIVEN TO HER IF SHE REPRODUCED IN A WAY I DON'T AGREE WITH? We have more moral outrage over seeing a woman put 2 for $5 bacon wrapped steak fillets in her cart than we do over the war in Afghanistan and the flooding in Pakistan.

When we have a society, people have rights. That means that poor people can have entertainment and beauty in their lives, people can work hours that allow them to have lives not just a living, and yes, families can be started, and children cherished even if the conditions aren't perfect. We just need to stop being assholes.

On the #browntwitterbird issue:

DR Goddess reflects on how on twitter, we're a community. When I use twitter, I want a far flung wide reaching conversation not just a one way watching Kayne tweet.

Shani-O unraveals the 'mystery' of black folks using twitter- it's adapted to mobile internet.

Yep, black folks with similar interests cluster. People don't wonder why etsy folks use twitter or why manga obsessives use twitter. I mean as this lady says, there's no just one black twitter. Activists group, rap folks group, people who spend all their time on twitter obsessing about Arcade Fire and Scott Pilgrim group.

We all have our baseline 'blackness'- American blackness, British blackness, Carribean blackness, African blackness- all different. But within that blackness, there's multitudes. Multitudes who want you to know that #itsallfunandgamesuntil

I wish we could bring up stuff without it being about white folk's feelings and shit.

Eh, welcome to the world of us plain women, lady. Many folks didn't have looks to trade off when they were young. That said, age discrimination is real. The sad part is that people are living longer nowadays, and soon we'll have more people over 60 than kids under 5.

People aren't like machines. We can't toss them out because they are old. Of course people of my generation are also screwed with huge amounts of debt, and of course, merely being young doesn't make us able to work 18 hour days without cracking, despite the myth.

Man, folks who say ghetto for bad drive me nuts.

A collection on radical mothering? Awesome.

MS tells men to step up and be accountable for sex trafficking.