Badluck,
kitten
I love this. Someday, when I have a used bookshop/cafe of my own, I will totally steal this idea.

I love this. Someday, when I have a used bookshop/cafe of my own, I will totally steal this idea.

(Source: notclairvoyant)

“There’s not a single person out there whose life hasn’t been touched by the issue of consent.”

-  The Rumpus Interview with Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (via therumpus)

literaryreference:

You know how it is, right, ladies? You know a guy for a while. You hang out with him. You do fun things with him—play video games, watch movies, go hiking, go to concerts. You invite him to your parties. You listen to his problems. You do all this because you think he…

THIS.

“I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.”

- Uwem Akpan (via writersrelief)

So, I’m totally vegging out today after the fourteen hour shift that I pulled on the cupcake truck yesterday. My leg muscles, in particular, need to recuperate. Lifting, walking, running, standing, crouching, controlled stepping 2-3 feet on and off the truck since the back step is broken…It may not have been cardio, but it was more of an endurance workout than I’ve had in ages. On the plus side, it’s prep for load-in this summer. On the negative? Walking hurts. So does sitting.

Really, everything just hurts.

My schedule yesterday consisted of two events: The Massasoit Community College Arts Festival in Canton, MA, and the Hometown Comfort charity event in Dorchester. Both events were pretty chill (unlike the Regatta, which still haunts my dreams. 14 hours of that would have been the death of me. P.S. I don’t know why photos aren’t working in old posts, but the post is still there…).

Anyway, something odd happened at both events. The food truck community in Boston has changed in the year that I’ve been away. While the front-runners when the community was being built were multi-truck companies that hired barely-not-minimum-wage workers to operate the truck, the majority of big players now are single-truck (occasionally with a single brick and mortar establishment) manned by the owner (with a handful of staff as extra hands). Sara, and Kickass Cupcakes, should fit seamlessly into that new demographic. Single truck, single storefront, hands-on owner, right? Wrong. Sara appears to have backed away from the hands-on charity approach that I remember, leaving it to her (not-so-informed) operators to represent her on the truck and at events.

Conversations with the ex-techie owner of the Captain Marden’s truck, the hands-on owner of the Chubby Chickpea truck (and store), and the very Aussie owner of K.O. Catering and Pies (not a truck, but a similar philosophy, to be sure) really solidified the feel of that change. They also made me want to jump back in – not as a lackey, but as one of them. They had a sense of ownership and involvement that has always inspired me, leaving that idea of entrepreneurship floating at the edge of my brain as a “someday”.

It’s something to think about, certainly. There are so many things that I want to do with my life, from writing to create a lifestyle to having the freedom to plot my own business. I’m already doing some of it, though it often feels like, since I don’t have success that is visible to others (or something that others would categorize as success), that I’m not doing enough. Yea, I do stuff part time. I wouldn’t be running tech for the type of Shakespeare company that makes peoples’ eyes go wide at a mention if I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be learning everything I can about running a small, hands-on business in the food service industry if I wasn’t putting myself out there amongst the truck owners in the Boston Food Truck Alliance. I wouldn’t be learning about the publishing industry without Perry and KidPub, and I wouldn’t be able to do any of it without the steady (and FUN) paycheck I get from that work.

And, while my own insecurities might make me feel low about those choices right now, I really think that the people who get so pissy about it are just jealous. Guess what, guys! I have more of it figured out than you do. I know what I want from my life. And sure, living in Boston, Jeff carries more of our finances, but living somewhere less pricey, I could do this – ALL of it – on my own. I wouldn’t even need a roommate in order to do it in Troy. I don’t struggle with these life choices. I struggle with the perception of them that society has built up, and the people in my life who are so caught up in that perception that they feel like they need to pity me for doing what they wish they could do.

Wow. I’m sorry that this post got so rant-y. A lot of things have been said recently that have really gotten under my skin, but I guess I didn’t realize how much. It’s rather difficult to work on self-esteem when I feel as if I’m under siege.

incidentalcomics:

Performance-Enhancing Drugs for Writers

veschwab:

“Treat all your secondary characters like they think the book’s about them.”

(Source: amandaonwriting)

Laurie Penny’s Saudade

There are more of us than you think, kicking off our high-heeled shoes to run and being told not so fast

The best minds of my generation consumed by craving, furious half naked starving-

Who ripped tights and dripping make up smoked alone in bedsits bare mattresses waiting for transfiguration.

Who ran half dressed out of department stores yelling that we didn’t want to be good and beautiful

Who glowing high and hopeful were the last to leave the gig our skin crackling with lust and sweat and pure music

Who wrote poetry on each other’s arms and cared more about fucking than being fuckable

Who worked until our backs stiffened and our limbs sang with the memory of misbehaviour that was what it was to be a woman

Who dared to dance until dawn and were drugged and raped by men in clean T-shirts and woke up scared and sore to be told it was our fault

Who swallowed bosses’ patronizing side-eyes stole away from violent broken boys in the middle of the night and vowed never again to try to fix the world one man at a time

Who slammed down the tray of drinks and tore off our aprons and aching smiles and went scowling out into the streets looking for change

Who stripped in dark rooms for strangers’ anodyne dollars because we wanted education and were told we were traitors

Who sat faces upturned to the glow of the network searching searching for strangers who would call us pretty

Who bared our breasts to hidden cameras and fought and fought and fought to be human

Who waited in grim hallways with synth-pop crackling over the speaker system for the doctor to call us clutching fistfuls of pamphlets calling us sluts whores murderers

Who crossed continents alone with knapsacks full of books bare limbs clear-eyed vision running running from the homes that held our mothers down

Who filled notebooks with gibberish philosophy and scraps of stories and cameras to prove we were there keeping our novels and the name of out children close to our hearts

Who were told all our lives that we were too loud too tisky too fat too ugly too scruffy too selfish too much too and refused to take up less space refused to be still refused refused refused to be tame

Who would never be still. Who would never shut up. Who were punished for it and spat and snarled and they shook the bars of our cages until they snapped and they called us wild and crazy and we laughed with mouths open hearts open hands open and would never not ever be tame.

Sara, I’m with you in hospital, in the narroe rooms where you have put off your veil to count your ribs through your T-shirt, short hair and secrets and quiet defiance crying together that we don’t know how to be perfect-

Lara, I’m with you in mandatory art therapy, where we draw pictures of weeping cocks and are told we are not making progress-

Lila, I’m with you in a north London bathdroom, watchhing unreal maggots crawl in the cuts in your arms and listening to your girlfriend drunk and raging through the wall-

Andy, I’m with you in Bethnal Green where you love ambitious angry women with heart brain pen fingers tongue and you have a line from Nietzche tattooed over your cunt-

Adele, I’m with you in the student occupation, with your lipstick and cloche hat and teenage lisp drawling that there’s not enough fucking in this revolution and we must take action-

Kay, I’m with you on the night bus, half drunk and high dragging bright-eyed boys home to our bed, where we watch them worn out sleeping and whisper that we will never be married-

Katie, I’m with you in Zuccotti Park, where a broken heart is less important than a broken laptop is less important than a broken future and we watch the cops beating kids bloody on the pavement for daring to ask for more-

Tara, I’m with you in Islington where you have thrown all your pretty dresses out of the window and flushed your medication so you can write and write-

Alex, I’m with you and a bottle of Scotch at two in the morning when you tell me that no man will make us live for ever and we must seduce the city the country the world-

We are always hungry.

There are more of us than you think.

Laurie Penny’s Saudade, from Fifty Shades of Feminism (via mollycrabapple)

So good.

(via neil-gaiman)

Person:  In my experience people are nicest to people who they think can get them published or paid.
Other person:  And here I've been wasting my time being nice to people I'd like to have sex with.
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