Alone with brownies and good books on a snow day...both a good thing and a bad, but mostly good. I am so happy I found these two books when I did the little cleaning I did today. There are both amazing and I thought I had lost them! Re-discovery is fun and perfect for this kind of day indoors.

The Music Of Your Life opens with a description that makes me think of my childhood and watching "The Lawrence Welk Show" with my grandparents, plus it's just a super collection of stories.

Giant's Bread I bought and read (and read and read) in the tenth grade. I'll never forgot how I felt the first time I read it. I couldn't believe Agatha Christie had written it nor how beautiful it could be in some parts. I read it so much the binding is barely holding together.

 

The entire piece is not online, but the current issue of Wired has a great article about using music instead of sexting to enrich a relationship. I love it...it's from the March issue.

just a snippet..from "Seduction by Spotify" by.Jenna Wortham

 

I've written about this before, but to see the topic discussed in Wired magazine takes me by pleasant surprise:

 

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/demisexuality/

It's probably not a good idea to spend time with Sylvia Plath on a snow day (all that quiet time for too much introspection), yet I found this (until now, mostly unread) on my shelf and pulled it off to read while I sip tea.

I find her journals much more intriguing and well-written than The Bell Jar, yet I imagine I will re-shelf this before the afternoon is over. It's just all a bit too much.

I can only begin to imagine what it would be like to live day in, day out with all these thoughts in one's head...it makes me so sad to think that such despair comes with such talent.


http://thoughtcatalog.com/jeffrey-ellinger/2014/06/80-memorable-passages-from-the-unabridged-journals-of-sylvia-plath/

12. “Face it, kid, you’ve had a hell of lot of good breaks. No Elizabeth Taylor, maybe. No child Hemingway, but God, you are growing up. In other words, you’ve come a long way from the ugly introvert you were only five years ago. Pats on the back in order? OK. Tan, tall, blondish, not half bad.” - Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

16. “Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.”

17. “God, I want to get to know him. If I could build an idea and creative life with him, or someone like him, I would feel I lived a testimony of constructive faith in a hell of a world. And our reality would be our heaven. Please, I dream of talking to him again, under apple trees at night in the hills of orchards; talking, quoting poetry, and making a good life. Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen.”

"Anesthetizing myself again, and pretending nothing is there...My inability to lose myself in a character, a situation."

Except for the "except me" part, I totally get this and love the response from "Ask Polly" columnist:


http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/03/ask-polly-how-do-i-act-normal.html?om_rid=AAAigm&om_mid=_BU922iB8-swbT7


with emphasis on:

Even though I have never been in a relationship, I know it is a massive mistake to try to find your own happiness in someone else. The thing is, I already know what makes me happy in life — another academic field that is considered even more rigorous than the one I am about to graduate from. With this field, I eagerly wake up, reading self-purchased textbooks and studying online, and I feel like it gives me purpose. I count the days until I can graduate from my current college, and enroll in another master's program with the degree I want to study for.

But that means I really have nothing to offer in terms of a relationship for the next few years. I won't have any sort of respectable job. I will just look like that weirdo who stayed in college too long. It is very possible that I won't even go on a date until I am 30. On the days when I am stagnating, my mind quickly returns to thinking about my lack of friends/relationships. Should I be looking for a relationship at this point?

Of course...at age 25, the person who wrote "Ask Polly" is not that abnormal to not have had a relationship yet. I relate to this way more than I wish I did.

I tried to copy and paste this article directly here since some of the pictures at the bottom of the link are a bit "sensitive," but the pasting wouldn't work. This article is way too good, though, to not re-post just because of some delicate links at the bottom of the webpage.

The below article struck such a nerve with me so much that I had to get up and walk around so I wouldn't get upset...the author is so on point about how we never tell men they need to put down their hamburgers and worry about their figures.

So much of our self-worth as women is tied into how we look (or don't look) and I suppose it depends on our own individual life experiences whether this resonates with us or not...but there's a very good chance it will.

Whether we heard it from our mothers ("you don't want to get fat, do you?" said in the same way if you took out "fat" and replaced it with "evil" or some other four letter word), boys in school or even other girls, it's familiar and men just don't get the kind of treatment the author describes. I'm still shaking at what she experienced. Being judged for how you look or don't look and "should" is one of the things that's wrong with our society.

Here's the article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-lifshitz/a-memo-to-the-men-who-told-me-not-to-eat_b_6771956.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592


...and then this morning I go online to read today's New York Times and I see this, also heart-breaking. I long for an era or a society where body image is not so critical to who we see ourselves:

At least, I wish that I felt about extra pounds the way I feel when my hair gets too long — no big deal, really, and maybe the excess even looks nice. I wish that I lived in a society devoid of clavicle-fetishizing, industrialized food, Calvin Klein billboards, that mysterious berry called acai. I wish that I was too smart for this. I wish that I’d aged out of this. I wish that my feminism protected me from this. But I’ll likely wind up dieting again, doing calorie math in my head, because few things make me feel as hopeful or invigorated.

It’s embarrassing to admit that.

 

As a child, I heard a story about a man sentenced to life in prison who refused all of his meals, but always saved the butter packets. When he was finally thin enough, he buttered the bars and slid out. When the guards came to his cell in the morning, they found his clothes discarded on his cot. Before I understood that this story wasn’t true, I always wondered how he pulled it off, how he crept naked past the guards, out of the building, out of town, how he shuffled himself into the world unnoticed. I often think of him — a man in despair, trapped in a cage, whose only way out was to shrink.

 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/may-or-may-not-cause-weight-gain/?ref=opinion&_r=0