Hello, I'm Rachel.

Margaret Atwood.

“On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her ‘little lady,’ or saying they weren’t expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do anymore. If she weren’t so tiny, though, she’d never get away with it, if she were six feet tall and built like a blockhouse; if she had hips. Then she’d be threatening, then she’d be an Amazon. It’s the incongruity that grants her permission. A breath would blow you away, they beam down at her silently. You wish, she thinks, smiling up. Many have blown.”

-The Robber Bride

She’s the best.

I would not exactly dub this "succeeding in business."

Or at least you know, not without really trying.

Not great.

Decisions

kettering:

I’m having one of those days where I don’t like myself that much. One of my favorite, most favorite, Kurt Vonnegut quotes (which I have quoted like three times just on my blog(s) in the last year or so, due to its awesomeness and his death), goes:

“Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.”

What’s been getting to me lately is the amount of time spent on utterly unimportant things, when there are so very many important things out there. Or, perhaps more correctly, the amount of time spent on ugly things and ugly feelings. It’s in this spirit that I just unsubscribed from Gawker, among other items, which I realized I spend hours on in a month while my music blogs go unread into the vast content mess of the internet. I know this sounds silly — I just said that I don’t like myself and my response, my correcting instinct, is to unsubscribe from a blog. But it’s all part of the same universe. I spend tons of time thinking about how I want to be surrounded by beautiful things, and reading blogs written by women in sleepy places like Vermont and Portland (on either coast), and then I waste my time on utter bullshit and gossip about people I don’t even know. Here, then, I announce my renewed devotion to things and places that matter.

The sad part is, I find myself irresistably drawn to blogging about, for example, Robert Downey, Jr., who, although beautiful in his own way, isn’t really the kind of important, beautiful thing I should be striving to write about. Oh well. I guess I should go easy on myself and let some of my guilty pleasures make their way on to my little corner of the Internet, but I want to keep myself honest. Sigh. Feeling very melanchony today and the frustration with the potential fruitlessness and hypocrisy of this post is already rising up in my chest.

One of the several reasons Ems is one of my favorite people on earth.