Read this hilarious, honest, and insightful piece journalist Corinne Purtill wrote for Salon called “My Book Was A Bad Idea” in which she describes how she set out to write a book, twice, and failed both times.

It’s got gems like:

In the years since [taking time off to write a book] , many well-meaning people have asked me, “How’s the book?” This once-innocuous question falls upon my ears today like “How’s your chlamydia?” or “What happened to those lewd conduct charges against you?”

And:

My spirit animal has been kicked in the nuts.

Frankly, I think she should write a book. I’d read it.

I just spent the better part of the morning absorbing the crazy accomplished Anne-Marie Slaughter’s amazing article for The Atlantic called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”. Go! Go read it now!

One of her main points that she makes early on is something that really resonates with me (despite not even being a mother yet):

I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life.

So instead of blaming women and their supposed lack of personal ambition, we all need to look at the societal structures in place that make it impossible to successfully balance work and home life– from the obviously bad stuff like crazy long hours and no family leave, to the most subtle but equally detrimental stuff like having an office culture where women feel guilty about not being able to go in on Saturday because you have to and WANT TO go to parent teacher conference.

What I found perhaps most refreshing about the article is that she has some concrete suggestions. Very often I feel like I read an article like this and early on I’m going “Yeah! You’re right! Women have come so far and yet here we are still struggling with this basic need,” to “Well, it looks like we’re just fucked.”

Most of her suggestions come down to a need for flexibility–in hours, in where you work–which she acknowledges cannot be the reality for every career. And I completely agree with her assistant who wrote her and said, “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” I’ve been saying this for years too! Ever since I was in elementary school and hanging out in the After School care! Why are we still tied to an educational timeline of 8-3/September-June that allows for a fucking farming society?

The part of her article where I got most excited– the part that felt the most new and risky to me– was when she went out on a limb and said that while having a supportive life partner who will make sacrifices with you is important,

…the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case. 

Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. [Do you ever!] From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

Meowza! I love that she goes for it. MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT. Why is that so hard to say? Why do I even feel guilty writing that? Maybe because for years, feminism has seemed to mean that women can be and have what men are and have. This implies that the male experience is the normal experience, the one to strive for. I totally felt that growing up in the 90s, and throughout all of my schooling experience I felt like it was true: I could literally do everything the boys could do, and sometimes even better.

And then things changed.

Weirdly, a big part of when that all came crashing down for me was learning how to rock climb with my 6’2″ boyfriend at 24. I’d been an athlete for years, a captain of loads of teams, but I stopped playing sports in college when the time commitments for teams became ridiculous and interfered with my classes. So Steven never knew me as an athlete. I was determined to show him that I was.

(My high school bball team. I’m on the coach’s left with a mop of badly dyed hair.)

We climbed a lot because we lived and worked right by a rock gym and as the months wore on I got better and better but only to a certain point.

(By the way, yes I am fake climbing in the 1st photo but actually climbing in the 2nd.)

There were climbs that I would physically never be able to do because I am 5’4″, my hands are proportionately small, and I’ve got the muscle build of a 20-something woman. Sometimes my boobs would literally get in the way of holds. And OH MY GOD DID THAT PISS ME OFF. What had been a great form of physical and mental bonding between us eventually became something of a nightmare. I’d been told my whole life I could do anything, and here was my body showing me very clearly that I couldn’t and it made me really fucking mad. Often, irrationally at Steven.

It became important to me to have female climbing partners which I found in my dear friends Kate and Lauryn.

But still, it really bothered me that I even wanted that.

Of course I always intellectually understood that my body would not be capable of certain things, but what was most upsetting was that climbing triggered this whole waterfall of emotions and doubts: what else can I not do like Steven because I’m a woman? It made me feel like all of those “You can do it girls!” promises I’d grown up with were empty, short sighted, and setting me up to feel like a failure down the line. Exactly like Slaughter says.

Sadly, it didn’t occur to me to ask myself a much more productive question like, “What can I do because I’m a woman?”

By the way, I’m sure the fact that at that time I was babysitting a lot only compounded my feelings that pregnancy and children and all other womanly things would be the end of me and that I would have to be very vigilant about how and when kids appeared in my life if I was ever going to amount to something. AND EVEN THEN, like Slaughter is now asking, could I really have it all? Probably not. Definitely not in the sense that we’ve all meant it for years.

But to go back one paragraph, I want to end this by promising to to myself that I will no longer back away from my femininity as a way to supposedly achieve equality with men. I will allow myself to ask “What can I do because I’m a woman?” and more importantly, I will allow myself to answer.

I’ve been doing a little research on my neighborhood’s history and in doing so have become kind of addicted to The Brooklyn Historical Society’s blog and archives, which directed me to the work of local photographer Jackie Weisberg.

In 2009 she did a series of photographs of the Gowanus Canal, a previously bustling industrial area, now a somewhat empty Superfund site of epic toxicity. Her Gowanus Impressions collection is a series of “nonjudgemental” shots of a place that is sure to change in the coming years.

I remember we used to hold our noses when we passed it in the car. And now people are kayaking in it. Alright, kind of crazy people, but still. I absolutely believe Gowanus will be a happening place soon.

Poking around the rest of Weisberg’s website, I really enjoyed her Views From the Train series. I’m totally one of those people for whom trains are places of contemplation and imagination, places to think about Big Life Questions as the world streams by like a film strip.

I once took a 36 hour train ride from Beijing to Chengdu and it was absolutely a highlight of my entire trip. There was a while there when I was considering doing the famous Trans-Siberian Railway ride. And then I watched the movie Transsiberian.

That said, I’m now really looking forward to my train trip down to Maryland next weekend. Maybe I’ll even take some pictures.

Last year, Chronicle Books published this hilarious book by French author/illustrator Hervé Tullet called Press Here. It’s basically an elegant and amusing picture book meditation on smart devices.

Press Here

I love the simplicity of it, the humor– and most importantly the lack of snark. It’s not anti-devices, rather it works with your knowledge of devices (something that a lot of small kids have from being pacified in long lines etc with their parents’ iPhones and such) to make something original.

Then, this morning, I came across Press Here: The App and had to giggle aloud at the absurdity. Really? The book that gives you the faux-device experience can now be experienced on a real device? A whole lotta meta for me.

I read on Publisher’s Weekly that one of the fifteen games is table hockey with the dots. That seems a little… lazy? For a book that’s so original, I would have hoped the games would be just as original too. Maybe the other fourteen are, but I must say– most digital books/apps for kids seem to rely on the same tricks: touch something and watch it animate briefly, record yourself reading the story, play some drag and drop game… I feel like we’re all still waiting for the e-book revolution in books, and by revolution I mean real change in how a story is experienced. Will it ever happen? Or will e-books remain, for the most part, just digital photocopies of books with a few bells and whistles that don’t actually move the story along?

Update 6/19: A new (albeit small) study reports that kids who read enhanced digital versions of stories vs. printed stories remember significantly fewer narrative details than their physical book reading counterparts–mostly because the “enhancing” features didn’t move the story along but rather, took both the kid and the parent reader out of the story experience. It concludes that digital books can be great to give reluctant readers a little push, but that if you’re trying to get any literacy learning done they’re not exactly ideal.

Today Steven and I did some lettering/signage for a new bar that’s opening just blocks from our apartment called Owl Farm. The owners, Mike and Ben, are also partners of our other favorite haunts, Mission Dolores and Bar Great Harry, so we were psyched and honored to be asked to paint all over their walls.

We started with some print outs of our handwritten signs that Mike and Ben had chosen out of a slew of options. This way we could make sure the sizing and placement was right.

Then we traced the backs of them with charcoal–

Which we then rubbed onto the walls so that Steven would have a faint but pretty exact copy to paint over with ink.

Then we poured a beer and surveyed out work.

We’re returning on Monday to do their outdoor sign, and then returning pretty often after that to enjoy their rotation of 28 beers on tap.

They don’t have an exact opening day date yet, but they’re aiming for next week. So come by soon and check out our handwork while enjoying a crazy delicious brew!

By the way fellow Park Slopers– this is the space that was formerly Harry Boland’s, that crazy old drunk/underage Irish dive that you like to pretend you never went into. Not to out myself on the Internet, but I believe I went there for the first time at 14 when I may or may not have looked like this:

I’m a more than a little afraid I’m going to go into autopilot there and start ordering things like Fuzzy Navels and hard ciders and embarrass myself in front of all the hardcore beer loving bar tenders. I must be vigilant.

Holly Hilgenberg of Bitch Magazine– one of my favorite feminist publications– recently posted this thoughtful article about “lifestyle blogging.” 

She gets into why these soft focused, Instagram’ed up the wazoo, DIY-ish blogs that portray a polished version of a supposedly simple life are so damn popular. Mostly it’s their combination of authenticity and aspiration.

Authenticity in that, these blogs are, as she says:

…unlike more traditional forms of media like magazines, television, and movies, blogs are supposed to be real. In theory, they exist outside the economic strictures of parent companies and advertising contracts; they are, at the most basic level, online records born from a desire to share with others, rather than satisfy a bottom line.

And aspiration in the sense that readers look at these sites and hope to have a life as equally filled with cupcakes, smiling children, and good hair days.

Hilgenberg points out just how white, straight, and wealthy most popular lifestyle bloggers are– which isn’t the bloggers’ fault, but it is amazing how traditionally feminine the documented pursuits are as well.

The copious images of female-focused domesticity can’t help but underscore that, while we’re all free to choose our choices, a clear and privileged path to happiness and achievement runs through the kitchen, the garden, and the nursery.

I think her most interesting (and Bitch-esque) point about these blogs though, is that “so few of them elicit the challenge to societal expectations of femininity one would reasonably expect in a medium so dominated by women.” And:

So while lifestyle bloggers can rightly claim that their “choice” (that is, their privilege) to not work outside the home, their choice to be primary parents to their children, and their excitement about rewallpapering their downstairs bathroom is just that—an individual choice. But an accumulation of such choices promotes a homogenous narrative indistinguishable from those that have come before. 

God I just LOVE the world homogenous. Total side track story: back in college, my friend Syd and I got into a ridiculous email account competition that saddled us with gmail accounts like hegemonicpatriarchaldiscourse@gmail.com and iamablessing@gmail.com. Yes they still work. Yes we would like you to email us things.

But back to the blog issue at hand: I think Hilgenberg makes a really important point, and that is: if we can write whatever we want about on the free-for-all that is the Internet, why do so many of us so often self-censor and abide by existing, acceptable norms?