"Skinny-Dipping After Work at the Drive-In"
Debra Nystrom

No moon; the pickup's headlights stare
across the river from the bluff above, where
fields of sunflower heads turn away,
waiting for dawn. It's cold, yelps Amy,
and Brian calls where are you
but she screams no, get away, so
he and Tommy laugh, dive under for
her legs again. In March I skated over
this same place, past Farm Island, leaving
my track lines in the snow hard to imagine
now, and even then the water must
have moved like this beneath me, erasing
bodies' outlines, as if everything touched
everything all the time.

hello!

i was looking in the memories for a book list for pre-teens/tweens (zines would be fine as well). the only one i found was from a suspended user/journal so i wasn't able to see the entry. if you all could recommend some books/zines, i would really appreciate it. (looking for a friend of mine's 13yr old sister)

c... c... c...

CRAMPS

[curls up on couch with hot tea and painkillers and laptop and video games]






I like how my icon implies that Hakkai suffers from menstrual pain now and then.

"Rift"
Adrienne Rich

I have in my head some images of you:
your face turned awkwardly from the kiss of greeting
the sparkle of your eyes in the dark car, driving
your beautiful fingers reaching for
a glass of water.
                          Also your lip curling
at what displeases you, the sign of closure,
the fending-off, the clouding-over.
                              

THIS IS A like a month late BIRTHDAY FIC FOR nekokoban, who wanted Izanami/Adachi.

Attendant
Persona 4
Izanami/Adachi
Spooooilers. Also rather unpleasant POV narration, fair warning.

( Attendant )

at the drop of a hat
-This phrase hearkens back to the days of the Wild West, where a gun was as much a part of a man as his right hand and where brawling was a right of passage. In fact, it was this propensity for fighting that led to the creation of at the drop of a hat 'quickly and without much prompting.' During the 19th century, the start of a duel was often signaled by a third party dropping his hat or holding it in his hand and sweeping it down across himself. The dueler with the quickest reaction time and keenest aim would be the winner, and from this speedy response came the definition of today's expression. The act of dropping a hat to signal the start of a duel or race spread to other items of clothing, particularly the scarf or handkerchief of a woman attached to one of the competitors.




Side note:
Helloooooo to everyone! Wow, that was one hell of a flu; it took five days for my fever to break. Hope everyone else had a better week and weekend. Also, no more takers for Halloween photos?

Excerpt by Slavoj Zizek in the New York Times:

Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”

It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...

What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.

One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

source

Ever eat something at a restaurant and have that dish linger long in your memories? That's how it was when my sister took me to The Helmand in Cambridge, MA, for my birthday. I don't know what food from Afghanistan is supposed to taste like but I loved everything. In particular, I loved the appetizer, Kaddo Bourani, that my sister got. It didn't sound like the sort of thing I would like since it involved a yogurt sauce and pumpkin and I don't care all that much about either of those things. But when I tasted it, I was a convert. The sweet hot pumpkin mixed with the tang of the cold yogurt sauce and then melded with the hot savory ground beef sauce. (They also offered this as a vegetarian option by leaving out the meat sauce.) The blend of flavors, textures, and temperatures made me sigh happily. When I got home, I looked on the restaurant's website to see if they shared the recipe and they didn't. Alas. If you're in San Francisco or Boston, I heartily recommend making reservations to eat at The Helmand.

When I was looking for pumpkin recipes last month, I stumbled upon The Recipe! I read it eagerly and was surprised to see that it required baking the pumpkin for over 3 hours. Not something to make on a whim. Well I finally tried it and it was worth every moment of waiting. The hardest part was preparing the pumpkin. The rest of the recipe is fairly simple and straight-forward. But it did take a long time. I kept going over to check on things. By the time I was done cooking, eating, and cleaning everything up, I lay down and noticed, "Wow...my FEET are sore from all that cooking and cleaning." But you know what? I loved it. I couldn't believe that something that tasted so good had come out of my kitchen. I only regret that the stores around here seem to sell fresh pumpkins only for Halloween. So I guess I'll have to wait until next year to make this again.

(If anyone in Boston or Seacoast New Hampshire knows where I could buy some sugar pumpkins, please let me know!)

Recipe here:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/apple-crisp-ii/Detail.aspx

"Unhappy Hour"
Richard Siken

Going to a party where I knew you'd be,
dudes bobbing for boyfriends, eyes shining
like candy apples. I want to be a lamppost,
or the history of plumbing. I am tired of being
mysterious. You are drinking rum next to
the laughing skullheads and I am unhappy
because I am dead and I miss you. Once
a year, day of the dead, you think you'd think
of me more often. These people shoulda
dressed up as their best selves to mix and
mingle in the courtyard garden. If everything
is green then why do I feel so blue? I would like
to be a plain-faced man, living with you quietly.
Leave the party but you can't hear me you can
no longer hear me. The dead are boring.
Enlightenment is boring. We can read the minds
of dogs. We make the black cats scatter across
the grass. There is a better party where I am not
a ghost and you are not Aquaman. I am like
a pornstar, we are all of us pornstars aching
to get back into our terrycloth robes. Gives me
a headache, all this intellectual stimulation.
It's cold out tonight. I am here by the back wall,
in the museum of the afterlife. I would like to
be a flickering cowboy. I like the live music--
we only get the recorded stuff here. I would like
to be alive again. I would like to say something
about grace.

---

Unrelated: Why do people feel that other people strangers' business is their business and that they have the right to ask any deeply personal question that they want and then get frustrated when the stranger doesn't answer? And how are you supposed to respond to one of those bothersome people asks such a question?

yuletide is a small fandom fic exchange run at the end of the year, with the goal of giving all 1000odd participants a prompted fic for Christmas. The Authority is an eligible fandom and there's currently seven prompts and ten people offering to write for it... but we could have more! :D

So if you're a writer please consider signing up! Fics are due 21st of December with a minimum of 1000 words, so there's plenty of time. Signups for Yuletide close on the 12th of November. More info can be found at the Yuletide website, FAQ, yuletide and yuletide_admin