So much good stuff on the interwebs this week. Put a show on for the kids and pretend that laundry isn’t there – I’ve got links for you. Lots and lots of links.
So a baby walked into a bar… | Mom 101
We’ve spent a lot of time this week deciding why it’s so different in Spain. Why here, children are so integrated into the cafe culture while the opposite is true back home. I would imagine some of it has to do with our puritanical roots and desire to separate the kids from the booze. (Oh noes! A child might see a bottle of wine!) Nate thinks it has to do with an American culture that encourages drinking to get drunk, and positions bars as a place to separate from the family unit. Either way, I like the Spanish take much better.
Thirty Three Short Thoughts About Being Conspicuous | My Fascinating Life
I have come to realise that there is no relationship – none at all – between how much people adore my children’s ‘beautiful brown skin’ and how willing they are to really grapple with issues of race in society. This shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. Some of the people who are most enamoured of my children’s beautiful skin – and they aren’t faking it, I’m certain – are the least willing to examine what it will mean for these kids to go through life wearing it).
antique eyes | Amy Turn Sharp
And I am older now. I am old enough that I can notice youth. I saw it all around me in the bars of my old university town. I felt myself reverting to type. I am the most popular girl in the room. I started using my humor and red lipstick. I was relieved to find myself not yet invisible. I could hold a gaze. I was interesting and charm fell out of my body and filled the bar. You could almost drown in it. I called my husband and he laughed at me when I told him that my friends and I got hit on by old men and ex convicts.
Let’s talk about race | …and they called me freak
One thing I learned from that experience was that these people are people, they’re not monsters. Making them monsters makes it too easy to distance our selves and society from their beliefs and their actions. When we recognize that they are people we have to also examine how they came to be that way, because they sure as hell didn’t just spring from the head of Ernst Zundel like Athena from Zeus.
Peanut Butter and Shelley | The Apparent Project Blog
Those of us who live in Haiti and frequent one of the hundreds of local markets or the scores of grocery stores here know that food scarcity in Haiti is simply not the issue. There is plenty of food in Haiti… if you have money. The food is not cheap and the produce is not always as cosmetically enhanced as what you may see in your American super market, but it’s here. All around. And it’s for sale. If you have an income. Oh… and 70-90% of the food is American. That’s a big part of why there are no jobs in Haiti.
On Average | Lemmonex
I am an average woman with average concerns and anxieties and insecurities and problems. Those clanging thoughts are no louder than that of any other and those fears are not more profound. My road blocks match those of a thousand others. My heart is not more broken, nor my sorrows more complex. My mistakes, which I clung to so fiercely for so long, are mere blips. My pains are real, yes, but nothing I can’t survive.
Things I shouldn’t know exist. | Stuff Christians Like
There’s the person you really are and then the person you pretend to be around other Christians. Nothing good ever comes from dividing yourself into two different people. Finding Louis CK secretly brilliant and then not wanting to tweet about him is a classic example of creating an “offline me” and an “online me.” That is some nonsense right there.
Internet Addiction | MomCrunch
With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.
With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.
in the midst of this | The Extraordinary Ordinary
It is at the end of myself, I see the beginning, where faith starts. Where humility exists. I am all poured out and I lay my body down so carefully so as not to wake her and I look around and over the ugly ugly ways that I’ve been dealing with this sacrifice and I have no choice but surrender; to take a good look at the humanity in me that needs Grace and, oh please have mercy. I am a stubborn one and so motherhood is one of the only ways I’ll allow a holy kind of soul cleansing thing to happen in me. I am otherwise so occupied with myself that I pay that kind of change no mind at all.
Oh How I Need You | Jet Set
The trouble with being a true extrovert is that you really need other people to keep your sanity and perspective. If I start to sink into the morass, J knows to send me out to be with people. Just as an introvert needs to be alone to recharge, I need company and conversation to ease my spirit. I need you, in other words.
The Solace Of Preparing Fried Foods And Other Quaint Remembrances From 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts On The Help | The Rumpus
Watching historical movies about the black experience (or white interpretations of the black experience) have become nearly impossible for the same reason I hope I never read another slave narrative. It’s too much. It’s too painful. It’s too frustrating and infuriating. The history is too recent and too close. I watch movies like Rosewood or The Help and realize that if I had been born to different parents, at a different time, I too could have been picking cotton or raising a white woman’s babies for less than minimum wage or enduring any number of intolerable circumstances far beyond my control. More than that, though, I am troubled by how little has changed. I am troubled by how complacently we are willing to consume these often revisionist stories of this country’s complex, and painful racial history. History is important but sometimes the past renders me hopeless and helpless.
