The Oddest Thing She's Ever Said

What’s In A Name?

hipstersaremainstreamnow:

“You know my name. Not my story.”

—12 year-old girls on Facebook

This is the first time I have ever seen this, and yet my instantaneous gut-reflex was a solid “Yep” and I had to reblog.

You know, a lot of cultures believe that knowing someone’s true name is one of the most powerful influences you can have over a person. That if you know their name, you know who they really are. I wholeheartedly subscribe to this notion.

XOXO

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People Are Fascinating.

I would DEARLY like to know the story behind the ex and the girl he cheated on me with, because they cycle about every 3 months from being friends on Facebook and constant status commenters and then without warning, one un-friends the other, and it seems as if even their friends have picked sides and their profile pages are more buttoned-down to each other than the whole of J.Crew’s Fall collection, and then after an indeterminate length of deafening radio silence, they’re suddenly on my newsfeed again, friends, someone apparently having turned over a new leaf.

It is seriously one of the most compelling things to watch, and since I’m more over the ex by now than I’m over having bangs, and have stopped hating HER and begun regarding her more as brief benchmark in the history of my life, it seriously fascinates me on a human, societal level. What happened/keeps happening? How does she seem to pop so quickly back into the flow of his every-day life? Who keeps re-reaching out to whom? Has HE learned to admit error? Hell hath not frozen over thus. Is she so forgiving? If she is, in fact, is it desperation, or being a new reincarnation of Gandhi? What amazing, anthropologically interesting questions. I am endlessly intrigued and curious.

XOXO

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Will The Chairwoman Of The International Itty Bitty Titty Committee Please Stand Up?

I just saw the most distressing thing on Church Street— a woman who had no boobs. Like, none. Not even a hint of titty where there should have been. And before you go telling me about mastectomies, let me assure you, there are women in my family who have had them, and this was not one. This was a woman a few years older than myself who just never grew boobs. No boobs. NONE. But all the more power to her— she was out rocking a thin white tank top that I NEVER could, and she was wearing the DEATH out of it.

I suppose it’s all about using what you’ve got. But I never realized how thankful I was for mine until I gawked at this woman for a solid 10 seconds and than promptly found myself hugging my own chest.

XOXO

P.S— Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but we seem to be raising an entire sub-cultural generation of heavily inked, heavily made-up, dark-haired make-up artists who aspire to the nouveau pin-up style? I peeked into MAC, and there was just…a SEA of them. I thought it was the mirrors for a second before I realized it, in fact, wasn’t. Do we know MAC’s hiring protocol, because, like American Apparel’s, maybe that should be looked into.

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Cultural History Through The Ages With Secrets Hidden In Your Food.

No, I am not a conspiracy theorist.

Yes, this is going to completely mind-rape you again. 

My dad makes this totally bitchin’ foccacia— the best you can get this side of Italy and the Cinque Terra. So the other day while he was baking, I popped over to his recipe book to take a peek. It all seemed very Betty Crocker-ish to me as I read through, all the way down until the point when it said, “Fold the dough from the side of the bowl into the center a total of 8 times,” which means that you turn the bowl a total of 6 times. It’s really annoying. It’s really boring. It’s really overdone. Why, I wondered, would anyone go through all this oddly specific trouble to make sure you do it this exact way?

And then I remembered something from my high school math class that changed my life, and made me a terrible liar for all the years I said that I never needed to know what I learned in those classes for anything else in the rest of my life.

“Hmm, 6 times,” I thought, remembering that in numerology and folk belief, 6 is a number that represents production, completion, creation, and perfection. 6 was a perfect number— it can be divided by 3, 2, and 1 evenly,  and 1+2+3=6. Early religions (Christians included, because don’t forget, God supposedly created the Universe in 6 days and rested on the 7th,) were fascinated by this fact, making six a “lucky” number.

And wait! We were TURNING the bowl as we were creating this number effect. Was there a prefferance for the direction of turn as well? The certainly had to be! In life, we tend to turn things away from ourselves rather than in toward ourselves, which means we always turn things to the right, not to the left. Not surprising, either, is that there’s meaning in even this superstitious yet natural bodily response:

Doing anything to the left is still considered unlucky. “Widdershins” was the Pagan or early-Wiccan word for it, which I dredged up in my memory from the beginning of my practicing Wiccan, and, ultimately— Pagan— period of my life. It was opposite to the turning direction of the Sun, meaning it was considered unnatural, threatening, or negative.

Your ancestors who perfected this recipe— and you— probably don’t like the Forces of Evil gathering around your kitchen hearth, so they probably turned it deasil, and away from them in the motion that felt best.

Turning “deasil” means to turn to the right with the Sun, which means that turning to the right is the venerating direction, the one that represents moving with Nature and the flow of things and Time— just like the seasons that are ruled over by the Sun. The majority of Italians and Europeans being crop farmers who grew things like the wheat this bread was being made from, dependent on weather and the steady change of time, turning the bowl to the right it surely was.

Now, after all of this hocus pocus and baking, what did we add for a little bit of flavor?

Rosemary.

Otherwise known as the herb that symbolizes remembrance and good memory, longevity, and love. In ancient European culture, a young man would give a sprig of rosemary to the woman he loved so that she could wear it in her hair and think of him with love every time she smelled it. Hey, if cooks down South can still claim their “soul food” tastes better because it’s made with love, wouldn’t it make sense to add a great-smelling and -tasting herb to your recipe that also symbolized some really freakin’ great qualities?

So. We have a bread being folded for maximum perfection of the outcome, turned in a way that respects the Nature it came from, and seasoned with love and warm and fuzzy thoughts. Just things that, you know, just happen to be in a written, published recipe for the shits-n’-giggles. Or not. It is so fascinating to me to the realize the things we do every day that hold significance to what our fore-bearers believed in, even if we don’t even know it. 

Hi. I’m a recovering scholar who digs the occult.

XOXO

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Here’s The Thing…Get Out Of The Lobster Pot.

Male lobsters have to be boiled alone, because if one male finds his way out of the pot, he’ll stay and help the others escape as well. That’s a total dinner loss. Female lobsters, however, can be boiled to death en masse because if a female starts to find her way out, the rest of them will all gang up to pull her back down so that they all perish together, rather than let the clever one escape and help the rest. Human women seem to do the same thing.

As Mika Brzezinski said, “We know better than anyone else what buttons to push to keep someone down. We know that other women, and young women, are afraid of not being liked, and we know how to keep them down.” I know that women are always the cruelest to other women. I know that it’s a bitch-eat-bitch world out there, and that human women would rather fall trap to the lobster method than rising above and being decent, because that’s just harder, and we all are, after all, inherently lazy, selfish individuals at heart. But that’s just not ok. What is it about demeaning and putting other people down that makes us feel good? Why do we need to do it to prove to ourselves something, anything? Why can’t we just make the informed decision to let other people do their own thing, without passing judgement or being purposefully hurtful and snarky?

Look, what I do on my own time is my own fucking business. I expect other people to stay out of it. I could be a female lobster, too— I could poke fun at your weight; I could post things like http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lry87qGLvx1r3368eo1_400.jpg; I could tell you hurtful things that I KNOW you’d never want to hear about relationships; I could press all your little insecurity buttons and call you stupid, meaningless names culled from a stunted vocabulary, BUT I DON’T. I have played this game a hundred times before; I know all the moves; I’m tired of them. I’ve crawled out of the pot. I know when people do something to purposefully piss me off. I know WHY they do it. I could do the same. But I choose not to. So I really don’t understand what makes some people choose the other approach.

I guess while we may all be fundamentally different people with different tolerance levels and ideas of how judgmental we should be about other people’s lives or decisions, the only thing I can say is that I do what I am comfortable with. That’s MY confidence levels, MY securities, MY actions, MY decisions. YOUR confidence (or lack thereof), insecurities, actions, and decisions have no place in defining what it is I do. So I could do without the peanut gallery comments on the way I choose to live my life. You’re not going to change anything about me. Your anon comments and tirades may piss me off, but that emotion only lasts a minute or two until I realize that you’re just a sad, jealous individual who shares the lobster need to drag other people down to your level.

And that is not ok. That is not mature. That is not good behavior. That is a crustacean’s decision, not another human being’s. If I want to take PG-13 photos of my own body because I am proud of it and I don’t see any harm or loss of anything in sharing it with the people who willingly follow me, that’s my prerogative, regardless of the fact that you may be the sort of person who would never feel comfortable doing something like that or has issues with it; it’s whatever because I’m not asking YOU to strip down, too. YOURS is to be a bigger person than you’re currently being and suffer through it without any snide comments like we all do every day when we’re not pleased about something. But I see that’s not happening.

If other people won’t call you out on your bad behavior, I’m going to do it, right now. STOP IT. It’s not flattering to you; it’s not a flattering reflection OF YOU to ANYONE you even associate with, here, or in real life. Grow up. Learn tolerance and to love yourself. And get your nose THE FUCK out of my life. I didn’t invite you into it. You’re not welcome. Consider this your engraved invitation to get less interested in whatever it is that I do, and more interested in whatever it is that you do. THAT is where your time and energy should go to— not to thinking about or reacting to ME or whatever I do, however “flattering” that may be to me.

For anyone else who is disgusted by humanity’s all-time bullying lows, here’s what you can do to help— yourself, and others:

- Hold other people accountable for their actions. A good friend— or a good person— should know when you’re letting your emotions rule your actions and should be able to warn you accordingly. If you see or hear something you don’t like, speak up. If you hear someone putting someone else down, don’t stay silent. If you stay silent, you’re just as culpable as the perpetrator.

- Think about it from the opposing side. It’s called “empathy.” What would YOU feel or re-act like if someone called you ugly, fat, disgusting, shallow, or slutty? If YOU’RE using words like those to describe other people, you should know to expect some backlash for them. We all know what words are triggers. So just stop using them. Cut them out of your vocabulary.

- The easiest way to learn to tolerate or ignore something is to not go looking for it in the first place. If you’re going out of your way to find things that piss you off, do yourself and others a favor, and just stop looking for them. You will be such a happier human being. Seriously, why do you do something that you know is going to put you in a foul mood in the first place? I know we all have some masochistic tendencies in life, but really— if YOU have an issue with something, than it’s up to YOU to avoid going anywhere where you might run into it. I happen to hate parsley. So whenever I go out to eat, I ask the waiter to make sure that none ends up on my plate, or, I just don’t order anything that could be garnished with it. Like my herb issue, whatever you have the issue with will either resolve itself, or you’ll learn to live with it. It’s as simple as that. Making your life a happier place starts with making your own decisions to live it that way. Rise above it all. Get out of the lobster pot and onto the right level.

Thank you.

XOXO

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I genuinely prefer men as human beings to women.

XOXO

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There are all these cute 20- and 30-something business and entrepreneur guys following me on the company’s Twitter account— you know the type; Twitter is inundated with them: Gym-membership-bicep-baring, motivational speaker type, Jr. Wall Street bros— and I don’t know how to flirt in 140 characters or less.

Oh, wait— Jersey Shore taught us that, too:

“You DTF?”

Ew.

XOXO

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Oh Jesus, the Oscars are on. Prepare for all things Angelina Jolie and Robert Patt-whatever to flood your dashboard. Hold on tight. Try not to scream in frustration. People, they’re celebrities. Not the Dalai Lama.

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