Whither Writing Workers? Ramble

Two competing (?) thoughts kept going through my head while reading this: “Not even a celeb like Emily Ratajkowski can find a decent man to date” and “A celeb like Emily Ratajkowski especially can’t find a decent man to date”.

I knew he was new to New York when he picked the bar. It was on a street that had felt cool and exciting to me in 2014, when I’d first moved to the city, and probably was, before the Australian café that does matcha art opened around the corner and women who could afford a uniform of Miu Miu bags and Alo sets moved into the fire-escape apartments. My date was older than me, and though I’d seen him on Instagram, he was more like a walking, talking Myspace page: bright hoodies, obnoxious gold jewelry, with a preference for passé hipster bars like the one he’d chosen.

“Washed” is what I would’ve called him to my friends if I’d been feeling honest and not just looking to get laid. Not get laid in the way men do, to quickly satisfy a physical urge — Lord knows I didn’t think there was any chance he was exceptional in bed or likely to make me come (besides, even if that were a possibility, I could do that at home in three minutes and experience the same mind-numbing seconds I would with him). What I wanted was his attention: I wanted to feel a man’s desire and to be reminded that I was a sexual being, not just a mother of a toddler. The lame bar would have to do.

I’d given birth two years earlier, a few months shy of my 30th birthday. “Pushing will be easy,” the nurse told me after I’d arrived at the hospital, nearly shitting myself on the linoleum floor, repeating “Oh fuck, oh fuck,” sounding like I was having the best orgasm of my life instead of experiencing the most agonizing pain I’d ever known. I was seven centimeters dilated, which impressed the staff. “For someone like you, you’ll be done in 30 minutes.” Instead, I pushed for four hours, ripping the muscle between my ass and my vagina in the process. My OB/GYN, in an effort to loosen me, had used her fingers to repeatedly spread my vagina, scratching both me and my son’s delicate, nearly translucent scalp. At home after being discharged from the hospital, I would find tiny scabs on the top of his head that matched the ones between my legs.

The Entire Human Species Has Been Turned Into A Profit-Generating Machine Caitlin Johnstone

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People 404 Media

John Thomson’s photos of China (1860s-70s). “Unlike many other early photographers he didn’t spend all his time photographing palaces and ruins. He also captured a lot of daily life including peasants, merchants, and criminals.”

Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise

The Pudding: An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.” I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives.

See also The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – The word sadness originally meant fullness,” to be filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It’s not about despair, or distraction, or controlling how you’re supposed to feel, it’s about awareness. Setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once; feeling the world as it is, the word as it could be. 

The unknown and the unknowable, closeness and distance and trust, and the passage of time. And all the others around you who are each going through the same thing. The Romans called it lacrimae rerum, the “tears of things.” We call them obscure sorrows.