Tag: words

What I didn’t know at the time was that this is what time is like for most women: fragmented, interrupted by child care and housework. Whatever leisure time they have is often devoted to what others want to do – particularly the kids – and making sure everyone else is happy doing it. Often women are so preoccupied by all the other stuff that needs doing – worrying about the carpool, whether there’s anything in the fridge to cook for dinner – that the time itself is what sociologists call “contaminated.”

I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow.

Women aren’t expected to flow.

Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue (via sniffing)

toska [tohs-kah]

(noun) An untranslatable, Russian word – Vladimir Nabokov describes it best: “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” (via ofpaintedflowers)

Poem Not Written in Catalan

motherground:

Of all the things that are not eternal
I deny the patience of water, the divinity of salt, and the
persistence of the spider

I would like to write a suicide note in three and a half languages
and travel south on a Thursday towards
some form of life outside of earth

And although people will think I’m no longer there
I will live in geodesic domes
and count only in numbers below zero

Sometimes when I walk past trees in the city I hear them denying me
Normally this doesn’t bother me but today
I’m not going to take any conspiracies

I deny bodies of water smaller than the Great Lakes
I deny any planet larger than America

I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me
I am air, light, sound, all of which I deny
I deny the Buddha, I do not deny the Buddha

An exact copy of my life is being lived three million light years
away
If there’s a way to prove it
If mathematics were the only religion

We are passing an era of turbulence
make sure your seats are in the uptight position

“When we come close to another a certain light ignites”

Love like an arsonist
steals into my life and burns down all my tenements

(In a court of law, love will deny me
and I can’t prove a thing)

– eric gamalinda

lifeinpoetry:

I tend towards excess,
thirteen was a ripe year,
the unbuttoning of flesh,

first blood biting
between unready thighs,
knees aching with the weight of God,

his dank breath,
the thread between my teeth
catching, romantic and dark with it.

My heart calling from
another room without window,
Delilah with Samson like smoke between her teeth.

— Crystal Vega-Huerta, “Heart”