“you have everything you need to survive in this world.”

Just now, I wrote a nerdy fan email to someone I knew a little bit in high school who runs this lovely blog. I have no idea if she’ll acknowledge the note, but having written it makes me feel like I’m taking risks. Plus, everyone likes to get fan mail.

I just read this snippet from the Awl: “Godrej and Boyce – the last company left in the world that was still manufacturing typewriters – has shut down its production plant in Mumbai, India with just a few hundred machines left in stock.”

This makes me super sad, because the typewriter was one of my first loves. My grandmother bought me an electronic AT&T when I was 12 and in spite of not knowing how to type, I felt immediately like a legitimate writer. I remember buying typewriter ribbons and eraser tape and big blocks of paper, and thinking about it now makes me miss the sound of assertive clacking. I had a word processor in high school, a big clunky thing with a pull up, rectangular screen where the text would appear, so you could write a draft before it printed out via the typewriter. At some point, my aunt and uncle gave me an actual computer (think giant monitor, hard disks, green print, because I am as old as the hills), on which I wrote a terrible, melodramatic novel. I left both in the house after my mom died, and like a lot of things there, I never went back for them. 

I’m in Western Massachusetts this week, which mean petting a cat, being driven around in a car, sitting in coffee shops, and wondering what it would be like to live here again. My plan is to write, take some pictures, watch documentaries that make me scared to go to sleep alone, record part of the podcast, cool down my brain, temper some stuff that’s gnawing away at my heart and try to look at the future without having a panic attack, even if it’s just for thirty seconds a day. Let’s hope it works.

to be added to your feminist reading list:

Riots Not Diets  and tumblinfeminist are two recent discoveries of mine. I love when they combine powers.

“Being a feminist doesn’t mean suddenly no longer liking problematic things. If you stopped liking everything that was sexist in media and entertainment there would be no media or entertainment left. Being a feminist, to me, is being aware of what it is you’re liking, and of its problematic aspects.”
- sabrina_il (via tumblinfeminist)

from Margitte, of Riots Not Diets: “I would also add to this that it’s not only being aware of what you like and how it’s problematic, but about TALKING to other people about the problematic aspects of the thing.”

from me:  It makes me crazy when people wonder how I can be a feminist and a consumer of pop culture and I’ve said before that I don’t see a contradiction here, I think feminists and everyone who works for justice has to be well versed in pop culture. I’m so freaking glad someone else is saying it. This is how you build a movement, after all.