a little smattering of things we saw yesterday. sitting in the car while eli finishes up. took three baths in three days (clawfoot tub). can hear a rooster. feeling so sorry for myself about having to go back to work tomorrow. feeling so lucky that we can spend money on staying in such a beautiful place and we don’t have to account for babysitters etc. when people say “do you want it to just be you too forever?” yeah, maybe i do.
last night at a pizza parlor in ithaca. this one is still asleep. time to go outside with some banana bread and tea and see what i can see. apparently somewhere on this farm there’s chickens, and i am off to find the chickens.
you know it’s about to be a good weekend trip to the woods when this is what’s getting packed in your backpack :)
IF THE ROUTINE NO LONGER SERVES, YOU MUST ALTER THE PATTERN, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?? YOUR LIFE STARTS WITH YOU
one of the more surprising things about being in a long term relationship for me, i think, is communicating about sex. you have to, like, pencil it in sometimes. you have to give up control, then take control, then learn how to read what level of your control is needed (i heavily overthink this). you have to find kind ways to assert what you want, because this is who you’re getting what you want from for hopefully a long, long time. and you have to stay curious, and try not to take things personally, and lean into the beauty of intimately and wholly knowing someone else’s body. and you have to understand that sex can also be funny, and very playful, and doesn’t always have to be full of lust. and once your ego has softened, and once your performativity that you clung to in your 20’s melts away, once you moan only the way you moan naturally and nothing more or less, you come to realize you can’t suck it in forever with your forever person. you have to let the soft stomach of your body squish up against what it loves.
was teaching my 11th graders some plath today when i stumbled upon this and i just had to laugh. i am a manic depressive woman poet lmao. that’s all i can really say about that comparison, except that i need you all to know this about plath:
when she wrote the bell jar, she was pressured into a due date by the publishing company while she had fallen into a deep depression, so the book moreso than not came from a vulnerable self-examination of her own pain. after all, for a sick person, pain is sometimes the most (or only) accessible subject matter. when you’re sick, it feels better to further retreat into yourself—to attempt to examine your inner landscape rather than apply metaphor to an exterior one. this is, in part, why her writing is so raw and so brutal. it would be brave for any poet to publish words like hers in 2023. it was absolutely lionhearted of plath to do so in 1962. people simply weren’t talking about what she was talking about. she is unparalleled.
after bell jar came out, she wrote to her mother that she fully realized it was self-indulgent and that esther wasn’t a super likable character. she said bell jar was written from the perspective of a very sick person, and that her goal for her next book was to write from the perspective of a healed person. she felt determined to get better, and she had beautiful plans for her life. i don’t think we should concentrate so much on her suicide, but instead on her intentions to write the suffering out of her body and try to get better. it’s tragic that she never got there, but the prolific amount of stunning poetry and the many wonderful, curious, adventurous, and expansive years that preceded the end of her life should count for so much more than the few moments of her death.
hello I've just discovered Second Movement, which was an exhibition at the Barbican by Ragnar Kjartansso, and I'm obsessed
they did this for four hours every weekend during the exhibition
so insane to me that hunters take pictures next to the body of a dead animal that they’ve just killed, and they’re almost always smiling like they’re so happy, and we regard these people as normal and not as complete fucking murderous psychopaths.
i understand why people hunt deer, and i’m not against people feeding their families, but the killing aspect shouldn’t be so celebrated. it should be solemn and there definitely shouldn’t be any pictures. if i worked at PETA i would make a campaign of ppl dressed like hunters holding the antlers of their kills, but the kills are human. i think PETA is insane but that’s beside the point.
it’s always white people who do that shit, too. it’s like we don’t even understand all the ways in which we are the fucking worst. natives don’t pose next to their kills and they’ve been here in the US for 30,000 years. shouldn’t we take a hint?
