n. the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way—each of us trick-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a safe and predictable costume because we’re tired of answering the question, “What are you supposed to be?”
(Source: dictionaryofobscuresorrows)
It sucks when someone you have feelings for doesn’t share those feelings; it happens to women all the time, too. We hear “I just want to be friends” and “you’re like one of the guys” and “you’re like a sister to me” just as often. But you’ll never hear a woman complain that guys just don’t appreciate a Nice Girl because we’re taught it’s our own fucking fault when we’re rejected—we aren’t pretty enough or thin enough or sexy enough, we weren’t sexual enough or were too sexual, we put out too much or too little or too soon or not soon enough, we didn’t wear our hair the right way or our skirt the right length, we’re “too tomboyish” or “too butch” or “too feminine”, or we’re “not their type”, or we’re otherwise not good enough in various ways to entice the man to grace us with his affection.
But when we’re not interested in someone, we’re vilified. We’re the bitch that lead them on, the bitch who let them buy us dinner but didn’t want to date them, the bitch who doesn’t appreciate a nice guy, the bitch they were nice to and then got nothing in return from.
And, frankly, fuck those people. Showing interest in me, being friendly with me, getting close to me, or eating a meal with me (even if they paid for it) doesn’t obligate me to open my heart or my legs. And anyone who doesn’t appreciate my friendship sure as hell doesn’t deserve my love or my pussy.
"(Source: tainted-bliss, via internal-acceptance-movement)
— Lola Montez
After the photograph, the class wandered
off and I wondered why so often I found myself
the last man. Because I’d read Emerson
all summer long, I took my lack
of discomfort to be a sign of heroic standing.
So I determined to set for myself a new relation
to the universe, to write poems.
As if one could settle, once and for all, the question
whether or not vocation is all.
Solitude can become a rotten habit.
I remember how acute the contentment,
Friday nights especially, my reflection in the television.
What passes for turning inward, for study and for art,
can slip unnoticed into a well-practiced jeopardy,
a narrative fortress projecting the story
of separation into a post-quotidian SIGNIFICANT LIFE.
A myth is a lie breathed through silver.
Peace, not necessarily the doing of peaceful spirits,
can lead to believing that being a person is easy.
On my honeymoon, I thought to myself
You’ll never be alone again. Inside
the wigwam suite, clothes scattered
around the bearskin rug, an Indian-warrior
gelatin print—his feathers new, his face
deep-lined and droughted—as my eyewitness,
I wondered what might happen
if I surrendered, with a few conditions,
to this bright casualty.
Yesterday they were denticulate as dandelion greens, they
locked together in spokes and fell so weightlessly
I thought of best friends holding hands.
And then of mating hawks that soar into the air to link their claws
and somersault down, separating just before they touch the ground.
Sometimes the snowflakes glitter, it’s more like tinkling
than snow, it never strikes, and I want to be struck, that is
I want to know what to do. I begin enthusiastically,
I go in a hurry, I fall pell-mell down a hill, like a ball of yarn’s
unraveling trajectory—down and away but also surprising ricochets
that only after seem foretold. Yesterday I took a walk because
I wanted to be struck, and what happened was
an accident: a downy clump floated precisely in my eye.
The lashes clutched it close, melting it against the eye’s hot surface.
And like the woman talking to herself in an empty church
who eventually realizes she is praying, I walked home with eyes that melted snow.
— Kurt Vonnegut (via xo-skeleton)
Ok, I was a little nervous
in the airport, but I looked at her
right in her eyes, and sure
she had her hair up sometimes,
but why would that make any
difference? What I am saying
is that a thousand times I smiled
into her sweet face, at the restaurant
where the owner also took her hands,
in the sleepy park, at pizza—she
even drank some of my soda—in the bath
where I made love to her dirty hair, all that
and the moment of parting, waving
and waving at her, even when her head
disappeared up the escalator and then
her collarbone, hips, knees and perfect feet,
and my heart lost whatever small bits
of stone it ever could have had, and yes
time stopped and now everyone everywhere
looks like they are from out of Vigeland Park,
stone, sure, but smooth and naked and tangled.
— Chuck Palahniuk
If there is something to desire
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there is nothing to desire.
—Vera Pavlova, from If There Is Something to Desire: One Hundred Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, 2010).
Translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour
Painting: Harutyun Gulamir Khachatryan, Desire, n.d.
(Source: apoetreflects)
— Galway Kinnell, Middle of the Way (via word-digest)
