Go after her.
Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.
Life lessons from a tree
Fear not.
The importance of not being beautiful
Fabulous thoughts from my eternally fabulous former boss.
Always worth watching. Especially relevant for all you women out there, but really just lots of great insights on life in general.
Julia Roberts is a terrible love model.
Look, I know she’s America’s platypus-mouthed sweetheart and everyone loves her, and I’m not un-immune to her charms. I will fight anyone who says bad things about Steel Magnolias, and I can even forgive the fact that Julia Roberts was SOMEHOW THE ONE THAT GOT NOMINATED FOR AN OSCAR FOR IT AND NOT DOLLY PARTON. I also love Erin Brockovich. It’s ham-fisted, but Steven Soderbergh cooked that ham. I like his ham.
But when it comes to relationships, you should generally do the opposite of what Julia Roberts would do. This is the woman who almost broke up her best friend’s impending marriage because she suddenly decided she was in love with him (information that would have been helpful much earlier) and kept dumping a frumpy-haired Hugh Grant just to show up on his doorstep and expect he could just forgive everything, just like that. She also inspired young women by telling them they could grow up to be a prostitute AND a princess and be saved by a rich guy on a horse. I’m sure Sasha Obama and Dora will be thrilled at their options.
As My Best Friend’s Wedding and Runaway Bride proved, the woman needs a Sassy Gay Friend assigned to her at all times or she could go rogue and runaway with Richard Gere just because the script said so, when she could have married love-of-my-life Chris Meloni. She’s worse than Carrie in Homeland.
[From 10 Things The 90s Taught Us About Love by Nico Lang]
“Some Boys” by Death Cab For Cutie
Some boys are sleeping, some boys are sleeping alone
Cause there’s no one that’s keeping them warm through evening
They know that they’re on their own
Some boys don’t know how to love
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live. It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay is born.
A highlight reel from Charlie Kaufman’s Screenwriters Lecture.
Full video and transcript here.
“…Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.”
Filled with