2/3rds of me is from people colonized for 33 years by the other 1/3rd of me, and then another 48 by the US after that, plus I really don't like turkey very much, so other than the time I was cast as a pilgrim in Mrs Nelson's kindergarten class for Saint Peter School's Thanksgiving pageant, I've never really cared much about Thanksgiving. This tweet I saw yesterday captures my sentiment perfectly:
Thanksgiving celebrates the worst qualities of white people: colonialism and the world's most bland cuisine.
When you write, it’s important to do it while you have the enthusiasm for the idea. Maybe the most important period of your writing is when you are convinced that your idea is the best idea any writer ever has had. So you have to use that energy, because the time will come when you wake up in the morning and you will doubt your idea. And then it’s good that you have already more than half–
I write better long form pieces if I've sat on them for a while to think the core ideas through, but for other projects this is completely spot on to me—I need to get better at making time to sit down and execute those kinds of projects (even if it's just in rudimentary ways) instead of just jotting my ideas down and promptly forgetting about them.
Here's a Twitter discussion from two weeks ago between some of my early adopter nerd friends, prompted by the horrifying news that the incompetents at Yahoo laid off Flickr's entire team of highest level customer support, a truly excellent group of people who have been essential at making Flickr awesome over the years:
Flickr turned eight years old last week. I'm friends with its founders and a lot of people that have worked there over the years, I've been using it since before it was Flickr, I built my grad school thesis on it back in 2005, and I love it just as much today as I did back then—I have two different accounts (lia & liabulaong) and happily pay for them both every year. I really truly hope it survives.
P.S. Thanks to Storify for making it so easy to collect and share tweets like this.
Seeing this in my Twitter stream just now was a very helpful kick in the butt as I've been avoiding finishing an email for months now to a friend who's asked me what I think about his first novel, for fear of being a dick.
I'm torn between being completely honest, as he's asked me to be—and as friends and employers know to expect whenever they ask for my opinion on something—and knowing there's nothing to be done about the things I disliked even if I convince him of my POV because it's already printed and comes out soon. I loved the book, so why be a dick? His argument is it'll be something to consider for the next novel, but my inner Admiral Ackbar says this is a trap. What to do?
"I want to belong in this city I didn’t grow up in; I want to call a bodega mine and have the guy behind the counter know what kind I smoke, even if he won’t talk to me. Even better! That’s so New York!"
I enjoyed reading Diane Kale's Dépanneurs vs. Bodegas: What Corner Stores Say About a City, though I disagree with her on the nature of belonging in New York—in many ways, the city belongs to those of us who've made our way here and have chosen to stay more than it does to those who were lucky enough to be born here and've never been anywhere else. In a city that's been built on the backs of immigrants from day one, there will always be a particular beauty to dreaming a dream and then choosing to make it real for yourself.
"People called her a train wreck, but that’s too simplistic. A train wrecks and is then cleaned up, something Smith rarely was. She wasn’t a train wreck; she was a fireworks display, and it was different every night."Anna Nicole Smith died five years ago today.
"I upload photos to Flickr almost daily, blethered on Twitter with some regularity and most recently have fallen in love with Path. But the place that used to be my heart and soul online? Nada. It used to be that our home pages were the one place we had to express ourselves. Now, we’re torn hither and yon across the internet." Heather completely nailed why I decided to start blogging again.
i'm lia bulaong and this is my blog, where i've been obsessing about pop culture, technology, art, literature, design, politics, and their various intersections on and off since 2000. you can read more about me and this site, or subscribe to the rss feed.
