27 Oct 2012

links i love

The Anxious Idiot

I am someone who suffers from a lot of free-floating anxiety. Maybe I’m diagnosable, maybe I’m not, but in order not to curl up into a ball and die, I sometimes have to focus really intently on separating feelings of anxiety from my intellectual knowledge of what those feelings are and how they act on my body. Daniel Smith writes this piece for a NY Times blog that hits the nail on the head – anxious people are fundamentally idiots, with the term defined as “an impractical and unreasonable person, a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid.” Word.

 

Straight White Male is the Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

This is an article about race! Well-known genius, author Jon Scalzi, presents a shockingly straightforward metaphor for American race relations targeted at those who are most likely to misunderstand American race relations and the concept of privilege. You probably need a basic understanding of video games to get the full effect, but this is what I wish all cultural analysis was written like.

 

Boston From the Red Line

There is a part of the Boston subway that crosses from Boston to Cambridge via a bridge over the Charles River. It is perhaps my favorite part of Boston; when I was interning and taking class and working and exhausted, I woke myself up every morning from my red line snooze to take in the view. The creator of this site seems to agree – and he/she has an iPhone. 

 

Eight Hours of Sleep and Two Cups of Coffee

My favorite Ashley from Writing to Reach You talks about something that – as you might have noticed – has really consumed my thoughts for the past few years – exactly HOW do you remain a functional, productive, healthy human being? Ashley’s post is a bit more personal/nuanced, but Eight Hours of Sleep and Two Cups of Coffee is about as close to a life’s mantra as I have. Since my life has settled down and I’ve been eating nothing but meat and veggies and olive oil, I’ve been getting more sleep and sometimes not needing Cup #2, which is a great development, I think, but yes, this post hit home as I, too, am readjusting to a certain level of self-awareness that Crazy-Schedule-Jessica was not allowed.

Celebrate Nothing and Everything

I am a fan of non-holiday-related celebrations. Sometimes I neglect to inform those that should be celebrating with me, say, the last day of school, and then those that should be celebrating with me go out for drinks with coworkers and come home after 9 p.m., leaving me alone all evening in a decided state of non-celebration, but that is certainly a communication failing on my part, not a reason to skip random celebrations. The 20-Nothings blog has a great list of random celebrations to add to your life.

 

 

Scholastic’s Great Idea: The Legacy of the Babysitter’s Club

The Atlantic writes a little ode to a children’s literature bastion that was The Babysitter’s Club. Starting with the awkward tales of Karen Brewer in the Babysitter’s Little Sister junior series and moving on as I aged up a few years, the BSC was most definitely my multivolume, uber-packaged children’s series of choice. This article is sensitive and comprehensive; I especially liked the bit about how  young Scholastic intern David Levithan (see: Every Day) was charged with keeping The Babysitter’s Club Bible. I wonder how many pages of this tome was dedicated to keeping track of Claudia Kishi’s many outrageous outfits.

Kid Lit Election 2012

I am completely over Presidential election coverage. However, if Charlotte A. Cavatica was running against Jamie Kincaid, I would be glued to the screen. The clever folks at Horn Book have crafted this entertaining series that is distracting me from actual politics. Scroll back through the tag archives for the Democratic and Republican primaries.

10 Things I Never Learned in Library School

There are probably a billion of posts with this title on the interwebs – Library School is a strange beast of a professional program with questionable correlation to the actual profession.

However, this post is not about professional critique. This is about crazy things that happen in libraries. I’m sure many other jobs have laundry lists of strange happenings, but I am not sure that any happenings could be stranger than library happenings.

What To Read? 20 Book Club Recommendations

Holy treasure-trove of books! Janssen of Everyday Reading posted this mega-list of discussion-friendly, fairly-easy-to-obtain, relatively-contemporary titles to suggest to your book club. I went to a work-people book club last month (we read this ridiculous book), and while I am more excited about this month’s selection, this still does not feel book-clubby enough for me… maybe not enough baked goods, wine, and wearing my pajamas? I don’t know why I envision myself wearing pajamas at a book club… nonetheless I may be inclined to enact some sort of ChL Survivors Drunk Book Club/Pajama Party soon, and maybe I will yank a suggestion from this excellent list.

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