Paper Dolls

You know what I hoppaperdollse the next wave of feminism is about? I hope it’s about how we women are human. I don’t want to be a superwoman or an archetype. I just want the right to be seen and treated as a human being who is good at some things, clueless about other things and who sometimes needs a little help and other times knows just the right thing to make things better. A human being who sometimes has a bad day and doesn’t feel like smiling all the time like a Barbie doll when, say, she just had to meet last minute deadlines at work, and has just gotten scary news from the doctor. A human being who sometimes doesn’t know what the hell she is doing, who makes mistakes, who tries her best and often falls short, but sometimes is unexpectedly brave and strong. Just a person, not an object of desire, not a heroine, not a goddess, not an Earth Mother.

When do we get to be that? When will people accept us as just people who happen to have female reproductive organs? Is that really too much to ask?

The Diabolically Solicitous Friend

There’s a certain type of person who thrives on making even the simplest request into a huge complicated mess. For instance, if I ask for something, instead of giving me a Yes or No answer, they’ll provide additional options that, in their view, are so much better than whatever I originally wanted. Like, say I ask for a glass of water. They’ll tell me: “Are you sure you’d like water? Because orange juice quenches your thirst AND supplies your daily requirement of vitamin C.”

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5 Great Movies About Life Through A Child’s Eyes

Childhood has a lot in common with great cinema in that when you’re small, everything is new, lending everything intensity, fantasy, and vividness. A truly great movie is not just a story, it’s an experience. You get to grab Cary Grant’s hand as he saves you from going over the cliff and then you kiss him. You jump into Dick Van Dyke’s watercolors and cavort with Mary Poppins and a couple of penguins. And yet onscreen kids are often phony, unbearably grown-up and off-putting, and few movies truly capture what it’s like to be a kid. Below are some exceptions.

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Happy birthday, Simón Díaz!

Yesterday was Simón Diaz’s birthday, the author of many of the tunes I grew up listening to as a child. Although he is little known in the U.S., this Venezuelan singer-songwriter’s tunes have been translated and adapted worldwide. In fact, if you’ve ever heard the Gypsy King’s Bamboleo, then you heard a sliver of Diaz’s most famous song, Caballo Viejo.

Diaz’s work is lyrically, intrinsically Venezuelan. Inspired by life on the llanos, or the plainlands, Diaz revitalized the traditional work song, tunes that plain men and women sung while engaged in the monotony of farm labor. The result  is both poetic and down-to-earth, and reaches deep into the human soul through the use of nature and animal metaphors. Below is the birthday mixtape. Hope you enjoy it.

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