everything is connected

stellamemoria:

By Francesca Lia Block

i always believed if i had blond hair, pixie face
big breasts
everything would be all right
not realizing that culturally idolized beauty
is not only foolproof
but potentially dangerous

if you believe in your own unconventional beauty
when you are young
you will accomplish twice as much and suffer half so

turn off lightbulbs and light a candle

walk don’t drive

plant a tree

wear sunscreen

dancing is an antidepressant

kindness is the new status symbol

every day please try to eat something green
and something orange
that grow out of the ground

tell me how mad you are
that your father and i parted
i will always listen
though i can’t ever take away the pain

expectations are for what you yourself create

they rarely work when applied to others

turn off the television

tv is a depressant

yoga is an antidepressant

don’t feel guilty about wanting pretty things

they would not be so alluring
if you weren’t supposed to want them
just don’t value them over compassion

use your words even when you are a grown-up
and people no longer think it is entirely acceptable
when you say, that hurt my feelings

if you can digest chocolate eat it sometimes

same goes for ice cream
(i don’t really need to tell you those things do i?)

do your homework because it is part of the game but

don’t spend too much time worrying about grades

fall in love with someone kind who loves your body
and your mind

if you have a dream that won’t let you go, that
tickles your solar plexus, heed it

turn dark feelings into paintings or poetry
or dancing

music is a kind of food

if you are sad talk to a happy woman who loves you
it will always help

move your body when you are sad or angry

avoid the following:
genetically modified ingredients
parabens
sodium lauryl sulfate
mercury in certain fish
neurotic thoughts about food
(is that a contradiction?)

love your curls though they tangle
your pale skin though it can burn in the sun
your nose though it is broader than some
your sturdy legs and feet

forget barbie she does not possess imagination

remember you are a botticelli angel

the planet we live on is perfection

love her like a goddess

love yourself as her daughter

there is a planet full of different kinds of beauty

the idea that only one type of woman is beautiful
is blasphemy

of everything i brought to the world in these
forty-five years
you and your brother are by far the most astounding

because of this i will always love your father

matter never vanishes, only changes

remember that when someone you love dies

your round head on my breast when you were born
is the memory
i will keep with me when i leave this body

when i am gone i will still be near you

this is how i know: when you were born
it was not a meeting
but a reunion

It has always had my heart in a box. In the clip-joint souvenir shops in the gaudiest blocks of the Quarter, with canned Cajun music drilling rock-concert-loud into my ears, I could never resist opening the toy wooden coffins to see what was inside. I knew it would be just a cut-rate voodoo doll — a wad of rags, cheap plastic beads and blind, button eyes. But every time, it made me smile. What a place, what a city, that can make you laugh at coffins and believe in magic — all the way to the cash register. What a place, where old women sit beside you on outbound planes complaining about their diabetes while eating caramel-covered popcorn a fistful at a time. “It’s hard, so hard, sweet baby,” they will say of their disease, then go home and slick an iron skillet with bacon grease, because what good is there in a life without hot cornbread? What a place, where in the poorest cemeteries the poorest men and women build tin-foil monuments to lost children in a potter’s field, while just a few blocks over, the better-off lay out oyster po’ boys and cold root beer and dine in the shade of the family crypt, doing lunch with their ancestors and the cement angels in cities of the dead. What a place, so at ease here at the elbow of death, where I once marched and was almost compelled to dance in a jazz funeral for a street-corner conjurer named Chicken Man, who was carried to his resting place by a hot-stepping brass band and a procession of mourners who drank long-neck beers and laughed out loud as his hearse rolled past doorways filled with men and women who clapped in time. Now, for those of us who borrowed that spirit and used that love and then moved away, these past few awful days have seemed like a hospital death watch — and, in fact, for so many people it has been. And we stare deep into the television screen, at the water that had always seemed like just one more witch, one more story to scare ourselves into a warmer, deeper sleep, and we wonder if there is just too much water and too much death this time. Ever since I was barely in my twenties, I have loved the way some men love women, if that means unreasonably. I fell in love with the city and a Louisiana State University sophomore on the same night, eating shrimp cooked seven ways in the Quarter, riding the ferry across the black, black river where fireworks burned the air at Algiers Point. I drank so much rum I could sleep standing up against a wall. The sophomore left me, smiling, but the city never did. There is no way to explain to someone who has never lived here why every day seemed like parole. Every time I would swing my legs from under the quilt and ease my toes onto the pine floors of my shotgun double, I would think, I am getting away with something here. How long now before the streetcar rattles down St. Charles Avenue and beads swing into the 200-year-old trees? How long before Dunbar’s puts the chicken and stewed cabbage on the stove, or the overworked ladies at Domilisie’s dress a po’ boy on Annunciation Street, or the midday drinkers find their way back to Frankie and Johnny’s on Arabella Street? Does my old house still stand on Joseph? It was high, high ground, on the lip of the bowl, and you could hit the Mississippi River with a silver dollar if you threw it twice. I cannot stand the idea that it is broken, unfixable. I look at the men using axes to hack their way into 100-year-old houses to save people trapped there by the suffocating water. I know there is life and death to be fought out for a long, long time. But I can’t help but wonder what will come, later. My wife, as wives do, voiced what most of us are afraid to say. “I’m glad you took me there,” she said. “Before.” We went there on our honeymoon. Just a few weeks ago, I spent a week there, walking along Magazine, walking the Quarter, not minding the heat because that is what the devil sends, heat and water, to make you appreciate the smell of crushed cherries and whiskey on the balcony at the Columns Hotel, to make you savor the barbecued shrimp, to make you hear, really hear, the sound of a 12-year-old boy blowing his own heart out into a battered trumpet by a ragged cardboard box full of pocket change. How long, before that city reforms. Some people say it never will. But I have seen these people dance, laughing, to the edge of a grave. I believe that, now, they will dance back from it. 

dearcoketalk:

I’d love to get rapped up in some great revolutionary movement. Believe completely, take to the streets, kill nay-sayers, with the knowledge that it’s all for the best. But nothing has caught my fancy yet. Any suggestions?

Move to Iran.