When I was in jr college, avettdeath, one of her friends and I went to see The Holiday at the theater. That was the winter that all the AMCs were running the Meet the Robinson’s Turn off Your Cellphone Ad and since we were literally the only people in the theater avettdeath and I were singing along. 

When it was over her friend was like “HOW DID YOU GUYS KNOW THE WORDS????” and we nearly died laughing.

When I was living in the dorms at SCAD, there was an evening when I was watching Def Poetry Jam DVDs and for some reason there was about 6 guys in the room at the time just hanging out.

Kendra Urdang’s “To Every Man Who Never Called Himself a Feminist” came on and I noticed that everyone in the room was silent, riveted to what she was saying. Every one of those college boys. And I sat there thinking “Oh my god this might be the first time these guys have heard something like this. Holy shit I’m so glad they are listening. Please let them remember this. Please let them take something from this.”

And as soon as the poem was over, my roommate, a woman, went on a 10 minute rant on how feminism is bullshit. How it was just a bunch of angry women who want to burn their bras and hate all men and she couldn’t STAND feminists. And I remember just being SO. ANGRY. that out of everyone in that room a woman came out with that. How damaging that was to the message of that poem, that those boys sat and listened to so intently, pissed that she could have possibly negated everything they had just heard. I hope that message stuck, because we need more men “to acknowledge that this problem is their problem too.”

My step-dad died the April before I went off to college in Savannah. Upon leaving, my mother finally gave in to my neurotic obsession with the book he’d left unfinished when he died and let me bring it with me so I could finish reading it for him.

It was Ernest Hemingway “A Farewell to Arms.” I’d never read Hemingway and as I read found I didn’t much care for him, or maybe just this book. It took me nearly my entire first quarter at school to get through it - maybe it was a subconscious thing, like if I finished it then he would really be dead, I don’t know - dragging it with me to all my classes and reading it slowly during breaks and in the hallways waiting for the previous class to vacate the premises.

It was during one of these moment, waiting for my Drawing II class that I was sitting in the hallway on the floor, as various other kids from my class started to line up or take seats to wait. A professor, one I’d never seen or met before, noticed the group of us waiting and asked if we needed him to unlock the door for us and someone let him know that no, the class before was still in there and we were just waiting. 

He started to chat with someone he knew for a moment before turning to leave and that’s when he saw me, struggling through Hemingway and made some blithe comment about people reading Hemingway in college. I don’t remember his exact words but I remember his condescension, this air that ‘Great here’s another pretentious art kid reading a classic novel thinking she’s hot shit.’

I’m not a confrontational person but at the time I was still trying to work through my feelings on the death of a man I didn’t really know all that well but who loved me unconditionally as if I were his own and was often times a better father to me than my biological one.

So really it wasn’t just a surprise to him or the students around us when I looked him straight in the face and said that I wasn’t reading this book because I thought it would make me look smart. I was reading it because it was the book that my stepfather was reading when he died and that when you actually ARE smart you don’t need to go out of your way to look it. Yeah, it surprised the hell out of me too.

I’m pretty sure we would have sat there in stunned silence for eternity had the class not FINALLY decided to give up the room and started shuffling out into the hallway. I think the guy tried to stammer an apology as I gathered my stuff to go inside.

I don’t really remember, being amped up on adrenaline and still being young enough to worry that I’d been so disrespectful to a professor but I feel like maybe that was a little bit of my stepdad looking out for me. Not letting some dickhead guy think that I was just pretending at being smart, that I actually WAS smart. He’d always hated when people doubted me, even my own mother. In many ways he believed in me a lot more than she did, I think, because he was able to see my potential a little more clearly, being an artist himself. 

For my senior prom my only goal was to have the biggest dress there. A real princess kind of dress. And since I had the princess style dress I thought why not go all the way with the princess gloves and princess crown. Photo evidence

Anyway after we’d finished dinner it was still to early to go to the dance so, being the white trash that we are, we wandering around Wal-Mart for about thirty or so minutes in our formal wear.

We were walking down the main aisle getting ready to leave when a woman was walking towards us, her five year old daughter sitting in the cart. As we passed each other I heard the little girl exclaim “MOMMY IT’S A PRINCESS” and the mom replied “Yeah honey aren’t you lucky? you got to see a real live princess.”

Still one of the greatest moments of my life not gonna lie.

My father is a misogynist. Not in the extremely overt, everyone knows it kind of way, but in the joking but really he’s serious kind of way. But after my mom left him when I was 13 it escalated to the point of raging and he went into numerous meaningless relationships with the sole goal of getting laid and fucking them over. (I think this is one of the reasons that I find relationships utterly terrifying but that’s for another post.)

Since I was a spoiled brat I expected him to get me candy and flowers for Valentine’s Day because I was his kid and that’s what dad’s did…or what I thought they were supposed to do so dammit he was going to do it. But since he was on this knuckle-dragging primate hee-man woman hater thing he REFUSED to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

So in order to get my damn candy we invented Effing C Day (Fucking Cunt Day… charming I know) which is the day AFTER Valentine’s day. We made each other inappropriate cards and bought each other clearance candy.

So HAPPY EFFING C DAY TUMBLRITES!

I find them to be an incredible waste of time and I judge people who take them. In my mind it’s someones way of saying “well I can’t possibly entertain myself enough to stay awake.”

Wanna know how to send me into an irrational rage?

Respond to my text two hours after I sent it with the words “Sorry I was taking a nap.” I view it as a lack of creativity as well as a lack of will power. It’s the middle of the day!!! There a BILLIONS of things you could be doing!

Like right now I want a soda so bad I’d probably sacrifice someone’s child for one.

I was in 8th grade when the Red Hot Chili Peppers released their album, Californication. Being 13/14 years old everyone in my class was in that phase where we all viscerally connected with music and saw our musical likes as something sacred. Every single boy in our class had learned to play guitar or bass over the summer (there were only 28 of us, split almost even down the middle male/female) and ALL of them were into the Chili Peppers therefore all the girls were mildly interested in the Chili Peppers.

It was the week the album had come out, the boys had been waiting for it for weeks so it was all they talked about, learning how to play the songs and what not. Until our homeroom teacher banned us from saying the album name. She made the announcement one day and we all just blinked back at her in confusion.

“Why?” we asked and she flat out told us because it had the word “fornication” in it and surely we all knew what that meant. It was inappropriate to be talking about such things in the classroom.

And I, being sensitive to bad logic even at that age, didn’t even bother raising my hand when I said (with a little to much condescension I’ll admit) “It has nothing to do with sex. The album title refers to the way the California culture has bled into the rest of the country. So it like the "Californiacation” of our nation.“

She acted like I was just trying to be argumentative saying with extreme condescension, "I’m sure it is.”

And because at that age I didn’t know how to have a tactful argument I petulantly replied, “Well that’s what Anthony Kiedis (the frontman) said during promotions for it. That it was about the Californication of the country and really the world. Which is kind of true if you think about it-”

And then I got detention for saying “Californication” when she had told us not to.

Not all the time but there are times when literally any sound will just grate on my last ever-loving nerve. Like it’s actually physically painful. Saying it feels like I’m being electrocuted is kind of dramatic but it does feel like electric current running over my skin and down my spine. There are times when I have quite literally had to hold my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming “EVERYBODY SHUT THE GODDAMN HELL UP!!!!” And it doesn’t go away until I have a prolonged stretch of silence.

My first grade teacher had a quote taped up on our chalk board that I would stare at and read over and over when I was bored.

“Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, but today, today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present.”

I found out later it was said by Loretta LaRoche but at the time it was just a bunch of words strung together and it intrigued me because at age seven the idea of a double entendre was wholly new.

If I want to get really psychological with it I could probably say that this was where my love affair with words started. The way you can weave them to mean different things and how you can make people feel something so strongly if you use the right one. And quotes were wonderful because they packed such a strong punch in such a short, easily digestible group of words.

It wasn’t until I saw A Walk to Remember at 14 that I started keeping track of my favorites, getting the idea from Jamie’s mother’s quote book that had been passed down to her and then she left to Landon. I liked the idea of having something that was so personal but also shareable. In high school I would provide my favorite English teacher with her quote of the day every morning and made her cry when I graduated by giving her a binder of all the quotes I’d collected over the years (about two journals full at the time) so she could keep the tradition going.

Since I started I’ve filled 5 journals and am working on my 6th. Also because I’m anal I have them typed up in word documents for easy findablity and have just opened a secondary tumblr to be able to sort by author. Right now it’s all the super cliche and emo quotes that I started with when I was fourteen but it’s fun to go back to the beginning and see what lame ass shit moved me when I was a teenager. Also file under OCD is real kids.

The man ran 50 miles for charity. FIFTY. MILES. It took him ELEVEN HOURS. And here I am huffing and puffing and thinking I’m gonna die barely doing 2 miles a day. Granted I think he’s been running a lot longer than me (I just started a couple months ago) but it’s something to pass the time and the distance.

So whenever my legs are burning and I can’t fucking breathe I imagine him in his bright orange shorts and an AC/DC shirt just a little bit ahead of me and think “Dude you can’t puss out. The man ran 50 miles. Don’t hold him back. Just keep running.”

Whatever it takes to get you through folks, that’s what you gotta do.

No matter how high it is or how many levels it is I will always ALWAYS take the stairs over the escalators. I’ve been in Vegas for three days now, walking 8 bajillion miles a day between these casinos in search of food and entertainment and no matter how tired I am or how bad my blisters are, I take the mother fucking stairs…all 200 of them.

Not only do I dislike the taste and texture but due to an unfortunate graphic design assignment in community college the very idea of apples just pisses me the fuck off.

Keep reading

“Well this kind of sucks but…”

“I know it’s terrible but…”

“This isn’t really how I wanted it to turn out but…”

“This part is kind of fucked up but…”

Your audience is not an artistic priest. They do not need to hear your confession. If you don’t believe in your work why should anyone else?