25 Things To Do Before You Turn 25
1. Make peace with your parents. Whether you finally recognize that they actually have your best interests in mind or you forgive them for being flawed human beings, you can’t happily enter adulthood with that familial brand of resentment.
2. Kiss someone you think is out of your league; kiss models and med students and entrepreneurs with part-time lives in Dubai and don’t worry about if they’re going to call you afterward.
3. Minimize your passivity.
4. Work a service job to gain some understanding of how tipping works, how to keep your cool around assholes, how a few kind words can change someone’s day.
5. Recognize freedom as a 5:30 a.m. trip to the diner with a bunch of strangers you’ve just met.
6. Try not to beat yourself up over having obtained a ‘useless’ Bachelor’s Degree. Debt is hell, and things didn’t pan out quite like you expected, but you did get to go to college, and having a degree isn’t the worst thing in the world to have. We will figure this mess out, I think, probably; the point is you’re not worth less just because there hasn’t been an immediate pay off for going to school. Be patient, work with what you have, and remember that a lot of us are in this together.
7. If you’re employed in any capacity, open a savings account. You never know when you might be unemployed or in desperate need of getting away for a few days. Even $10 a week is $520 more a year than you would’ve had otherwise.
8. Make a habit of going outside, enjoying the light, relearning your friends, forgetting the internet.
9. Go on a 4-day, brunch-fueled bender.
10. Start a relationship with your crush by telling them that you want them. Directly. Like, look them in the face and say it to them. Say, I want you. I want to be with you.
11. Learn to say ‘no’ — to yourself. Don’t keep wearing high heels if you hate them; don’t keep smoking if you’re disgusted by the way you smell the morning after; stop wasting entire days on your couch if you’re going to complain about missing the sun.
12. Take time to revisit the places that made you who you are: the apartment you grew up in, your middle school, your hometown. These places may or may not be here forever; you definitely won’t be.
13. Find a hobby that makes being alone feel lovely and empowering and like something to look forward to.
14. Think you know yourself until you meet someone better than you.
15. Forget who you are, what your priorities are, and how a person should be.
16. Identify your fears and instead of letting them dictate your every move, find and talk to people who have overcome them. Don’t settle for experiencing .000002% of what the world has to offer because you’re afraid of getting on a plane.
17. Make a habit of cleaning up and letting go. Just because it fit at one point doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever — whether ‘it’ is your favorite pair of pants or your ex.
18. Stop hating yourself.
19. Go out and watch that movie, read that book, listen to that band you already lied about watching, reading, listening to.
20. Take advantage of health insurance while you have it.
21. Make a habit of telling people how you feel, whether it means writing a gushing fan-girl email to someone whose work you love or telling your boss why you deserve a raise.
22. Date someone who says, “I love you” first.
23. Leave the country under the premise of “finding yourself.” This will be unsuccessful. Places do not change people. Instead, do a lot of solo drinking, read a lot of books, have sex in dirty hostels, and come home when you start to miss it.
24. Suck it up and buy a Macbook Pro.
25. Quit that job that’s making you miserable, end the relationship that makes you act like a lunatic, lose the friend whose sole purpose in life is making you feel like you’re perpetually on the verge of vomiting. You’re young, you’re resilient, there are other jobs and relationships and friends if you’re patient and open.
—
(via inthisglasshouse (via leslieabsolutelynot)
5 years to go and i think i’ve achieved like two of these.
(via yesitsjohn)
The Nu Project | Nude Photography by Minneapolis Photographer Matt Blum
If the title doesn’t give you sufficient heads-up here: this doesn’t just “contain” nudity. Nudity is its whole deal. It’s a project that involves photographing naked people (almost entirely women; more on that momentarily) in everyday settings exactly as they are, which is to say, it’s not pictures of naked skinny idealized bodies being presented for the sexual stimulation of the viewer. It’s pictures of people in their own skin.
Some of us, raising and waving my hand here, have ~~issues~~ with feeling at home in our own skin. I’m leery of movements, once you put a movement name on something you basically give it an expiration date, but the ideas that roughly make up what’s being called “body positivity” are important and inspiring to me.
At the same time, I feel like making this project almost strictly about naked women inevitably privileges the straight male gaze, and that the reason Blum gives for this doesn’t entirely wash (“While I understand there is a lot of pressure on men to look a certain way, I believe that women are judged more harshly by appearance, and that’s why I’ve focused this project on women”). I agree: there’s a particular pressure, a specific way in which women are made to feel ashamed of their bodies. Seems sadly self-evident and worth fighting against. But by isolating women in a project like this, part of the cultural atmosphere in which that pressure gets created is continued, maybe? (I don’t know I am not an authority here I’m just thinking about stuff.) I think sexist body-shaming is a thing for sure, who could deny that. But there’s a more general mood of making people feel bad about how they look that — what’s the opposite of “transcends”? — runs deeper, I guess. Everybody needs to feel like what’s normal and awesome is looking how you look rather than conforming to some pathological ideal. Everybody everybody. Anybody at any point on the gender spectrum deserves to feel that way.
But reservations aside I do think this project is a movement toward a nicer world and it passed the “does it make you cry because there is a sweetness in the world” test so I’m sharing it here.
emphasis mine, not because I agree or disagree with it, but because I am chewing on it and interested in what my followers have to say.
initial reactions: the ways that women’s bodies are policed are different from the way men’s bodies are, and they are more deeply embedded in a system of gendered power relations and oppression. This is important. But I think Mr. Darnielle here understands that. And the quote from Matt Blum- that women are judged “more harshly” sets up a definite false gradient. Are the ways that male bodies are policed comparable to the ways female bodies are policed? Is it worth making that comparison? To oversimplify, men’s bodies are policed into positions of power and privilege and punished for not fitting that standard, whereas women’s bodies are punished for the audacity of existing. (Among many other complex factors which are further complicated by race, class, ability, sexuality, size, etc etc etc etc of course.)
So here is what I am now thinking about:
1. If this project is made by a male-identified person, does it “inevitably further the straight male gaze”?
2. Would including cis male bodies, trans men and women (disclaimer before the list, I haven’t looked at the full project and I’m on my work computer rn so I’m not gonna), disabled, poc, etc etc etc etc etc bodies de-problematize it?
3. Is this just a matter of single-issue work? This project seems, to me, about demystifying the female body, creating images to replace the photoshopped models we’re inundated with.
4. how do i feel about work that targets one group and one group only? how broad does body positive work need to be to continue to be body-positive?
…hmmmm
really really great thoughts here - 70s/80s feminism used to talk a lot about “women’s space,” and it always felt like a valuable idea - and as the female body does have, as I said, particular pressures, gender-specific societal expectations/mystifications/other-izations: doesn’t the project gain focus by restricting itself? ….hmmmm indeed
William Caxton Fan Club: wilwheaton: I really hope Yahoo doesn’t fuck up Tumblr like it’s...
I really hope Yahoo doesn’t fuck up Tumblr like it’s fucked up … well, every single thing it’s ever touched in the history of the universe.
See here’s the thing though. The only way to prevent something like this would have been to make Tumblr an unwelcoming space, and that’s…
JOHN DARNIELLE KNOWS WHAT’S UP.
