Jezebel 
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New York, 7:12 PM
Wed Nov 25
61 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/06/09
I can't believe Elizabeth Lambert wasn't thrown off the field and out of the game sooner. Not necessarily for What she did, but for the officiating that must have turned huge blind eyes to the game at hand to miss such blatant fouls.
Players talk, ESPECIALLY women. And as a referee, you can tell the exaggerations from the truth. So what happened here?!?
Alright, I admit, at first I was scared the world was headed on a terror against girls who play hard. But that girl did Not head out on to the pitch against BYU without some prior hair-pulling, come-from-behind-tackling and cleating experience. Lambert knew exactly what she was doing, and she's only apologetic she got caught.
All she did was retaliate, and, sure, it was a little more than what the opponent dished out, but that's what retaliation's all about. Lambert was continually trying to get the upper hand, or even force her opponent into exacting her own vengeance, then get caught by the ref. Instead, she got caught. It's a risk you take, and it sucks for her.
So I suppose I'm actually a little sad for her that she got suspended, because those BYU girls weren't saints either, but how many of them will be suspended for their own unsporting behavior? #forthoodmassacre
11/06/09
If the Military Industrial Complex is such a dominant force in this country, why does it care so little for the human beings that carry out it's missions? #forthoodmassacre
11/06/09
"Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers."
--George Carlin #forthoodmassacre
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#forthoodmassacre
11/06/09
breastfeeding is great if it works for the mother and baby, but it does not work for everyone, and that should not contribute to the giant everlasting guilt trip that is motherhood.
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11/06/09
The hair pulling down to the ground? No excuse. It's not a play for the ball. It's the equivalent of cold-cocking someone which DID happen in Oregon and guess what? Suspended for the whole season.
It was absolutely unacceptable.
ETA: The Oregon situation I'm reference refers to the football team incident that began at the beginning of the season.
11/07/09
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11/06/09
They realize we know that most cars come in many many colors right? Why would color be the most important factor? #forthoodmassacre
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11/06/09
Her: I just bought a car!
Roomies (incl me): What kind?
Her: A red one!
(It was a Scion and her decision was affected by reliability, price, fuel efficiency and other reasonable considerations. But it was still funny.) #forthoodmassacre
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Mr. Pietra wanted a black car. He hasn't lived in the desert before. I won. #forthoodmassacre
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(Seriously, though? In my experience it's usually men who are more interested in how cool the car looks than in fuel efficiency and reliability.) #forthoodmassacre
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11/03/09
That big guy upstairs can be one fickle bitch. #marykarr
11/03/09
When I started writing my story seven years ago, I had no intention of turning it into a book. Instead, I just wanted to tell my story, and so I typed it up, pasted it onto a bunch of pieces of paper, photocopied it and sent it to people for $3. There was no grander desire at play beyond a need to tell my story and a desire to publish a zine of my own.
Imagine my shock when people started writing back, from all over the country and even in other countries, telling me how much they appreciated reading my story, how it gave them insight into a religion they'd never really had before, or how they had gone through something similar and it was so edifying to know they weren't the only ones who had experienced it.
For the next seven years, I continued to get emails and letters at the rate of about one per month, all of them uniformly positive. At that point, I said to myself, well, if it's helping this many people, I might as well write a book, help even more people and achieve one of my life's goals in the process.
But this is the deal - my book isn't about ME as much as it uses my life as a critical entry point to examine something else. Yes, I write about the things that happened, but I also write at length about: the history of my former religion, strains of feminism within that religion, the history of the areas I lived in, notable people in my ancestry, the role of riot grrrl and zines and punk rock in making me who I am, and so on and so forth. These things give wider context, and I hope my reader will come away from my book knowing things he or she didn't know before.
Besides, if I just wanted to write about myself, I'd write in a fucking journal. #marykarr
11/03/09
I love the bitchy-pants tone of this post, Anna! "The other option is just to be convinced that your bullshit is intrinsically worth reading. " Whoa ho ho. OK.
Here's another option not presented, wrt Karr: Maybe she think her life is interesting enough to write about --and maybe she's right! She's a supreme talent, and she has, in fact, had an interesting life.
I've written and published two memoirs, both after a late-90s aversion to the Bad Girl memoir of that era (Wurtzel, Harrison, et al etc ad infinitum). Laura Miller, of Salon and the NYT dubbed the genre of writing about the troubled part of one's life as "Pathography," and I've loved that term ever since. And I knew I wasn't hugely interested in dwelling entirely on the downer parts of my life on the instances when I wrote autobiographically. That aversion was instructive to me: Hey, I'm a writer, and I like the intractability and stark declarative nature of autobiography, but I can't spend an entire book in the dark. It's just not who I am.
But I DID have to learn to stop being a fucking bitch about other female writers who did like to write that way.
Memoir is visceral to write, but also, to read. On one hand, it can be irritating, especially if you just don't warm up to the narrator or find the particular pathology or life story refreshing or sympathetic. (I'll be frank: I read memoirs of women, queers, and alt.people. Privileged white boys? Next to never. OK. Never.)
On the other hand, I personally have learned a TON from reading good memoirs. Dorothy Allison's autobiographical essays? Jeanette Walls? Shawna Kenney and the rest of my sex business cronies? Forgetaboutit. I love these books not just because of the "souls laid bare" aspect, but because of the entry into a world that is either foreign to me, or close enough to my own life that I'm curious how they trod similar roads.
But mostly, I just like to read about how women and those outside the mainstream live, and how they choose to tell the world about it.
The complaints against memoirists are also the complaints against bloggers: How dare you disturb the universe with your mewling, self-indulgent, narcissistic, navel-gazing wha wha wha wha whaaaaaa? In some cases, it's first-person burnout, in some cases, sour-grapes, and in many cases, it's just life: if you step into the spotlight for even one second, someone whips a rotten tomato at you.
I didn't write memoir to "help people," per se. I wrote like a travel writer, wanting to take readers someplace they have curiosity about--I have had the (mostly awesome) opportunity to live/work in two very misunderstood and under-examined worlds (strip club world/Army wife world), and, in a way, the memoirs shaped up as default extended FAQs. The incessant questions about these stages of my life indicated enough interest to support book-length projects. Luckily--and I thank my stars daily for this--I was right.
I'm no Mary Karr, and I'm sure as hell no Dorothy Allison, or even Dorothy Allison's cast-off potato peels, but I jumped in and wrote the books anyway, to the best of my ability at the time.
But I found that even though it wasn't my intention to "help" people, readers have told me that I did! GIRL POWERRRRRR. And I love it. I'm just a midlist plonker, so I can't say I write "for the money," (ahahahahaha. AS IF) so hearing that there's some soothin' going along with the schoolin' helps me live to write another day.
Will I write another memoir? Doubt it. Not unless there's enough interest in a book about a dork who farts around on Facebook and Jez all day, and needs to get her fake nails filled.
I don't believe that narcissism is a requirement for writing autobiographically. That is a punitive word, and one that people love love love to throw at women who irritate them! Spare me the "pathology as dart" amateur weaponry. SRSLY.
Anyhoo, read on, and write on, fair Jezzies. #marykarr