It seems I wrote up my manifesto as a small child. My mom saved this document and recently returned it to me. I’m struck by how prescient this was, when for most of my formative years I thought I’d be an artist. But I didn’t stick with that, and I’ve always been writing.
“I’m a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality — dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers.”
— Dorothy Parker on “the women problem” of literature. (via explore-blog)
The inimitable Grant Snider strikes again, with the day jobs of famous poets – including Jack Kerouac (railroad worker), Charles Bukowski (mailman), Emily Dickinson (cat-keeper), and T. S. Eliot (bank clerk.)
My laptop started dying, the workhorse Lenovo that I brought with me across Southeast Asia. It would crash when I watched a video, then it crashed if I touched it wrong. I backed it up on a terabyte drive, brought it in to my favorite computer store, and heard the bad news. This, I’ll note, is the second laptop I’ve burned out after about two years of use: things are not made to last anymore.
Pictured: me, repairing my old tower computer, also backed up for security. I have a history of wanting to get hands-on with building and repairing computers, but I don’t have a mind for that information. As interested as I am in it, my brain is profoundly uninterested in it and I retain nothing I learn.
And actually I have a stack of old hard drives, in which photos, videos, and my writing from decades is stored and preserved, as accessible as though in amber. Those old drives belong to extinct technology, and only a real boffin or geek might have the equipment to sneak in and rescue all that imprisoned data.
But here we go again: I’ve rebuilt a new computer, stocked with a 2TB drive, and I’m trying to salvage info off my laptop before it goes down for the count, and I’m exhuming the backup of the previous workstation from two years ago. All this information, floating around, funneling through wires, only rarely getting corrupted and lost…
I hadn’t even heard of this trend until I read a well-composed decrying of it. It seems that hipsters, always grabbing and appropriating things without context or understanding, are starting to explore racism. But when asked to perhaps not be so racist, they instead defend their right to be uneducated assholes. Hipster girls have taken to coöpting the headdress, the sacred, male-only cultural artifact of many Native American tribes, because they think it’s “pretty.” So, hail the conquering tribe: white girls don’t see any problem with pillaging a minority culture for the sake of shallow fashion trends and getting drunk with friends. And they wonder why they’re so unlikable…
Bored in Minneapolis?
There are things to do in our fine city. We were recently polled as #2 best music city in the nation, and we host far too many excellent ethnic cuisine restaurants. Stroll around the lakes (take your pick), try some local microbrews, or wander around Downtown West and take your chances against mobs of two dozen young men attacking people for absolutely no reason. The cops are helpless! Hilarity ensues.
If that’s not enough:
- Get engaged with emergency preparedness: CERT training runs April 27-29. Learn how to protect yourself in a disaster—don’t be a liability.
- MN Streetcar Museum is ready to train volunteers to drive their century-old trolleys! Few things are as exquisite as operating your own trolley as the sun goes down on Lake Harriet, with live music drifting over from the bandshell.
If you live in Minneapolis, want to know more about who lived here and how it was built (and have five bucks), you should make your way down to the Hennepin History Museum. Meander not through a gallery but someone’s large house, getting up-close and personal with the artifacts of our history: sometimes alarming, sometimes gross, and sometimes too sweet to bear, but always damned interesting.
