Tragedy Plus Time by Adam Cayton-Holland

 "Summers we took our road show to City Park, the crown jewel of the city. It was a mere three blocks from our house gowing up. Any iconic shot of Denver you've seen, it's taken from there: the lake, the boathouse, the downtown skyline, then the foothills rolling up into the mountains. Postcard City Park. And once we were old enough to cross busy Colorado Boulevard on our own, it was all ours. "

"We were making each other laugh, and that was all that mattered to us. It became how we related; every conversation between Lydia and I would quickly veer off into absurdity. It seemed more fun to laugh at the world then cry about it."

"Lydia was my go-to comedy collaborator. Not only did we share a sense of humor, but also a sense of mortification. And self-respect. We were never the drama geeks hyperventilating at their own hilarity...we were the cynical assholes watching those neckbeards and mocking them. ...Yet here we were staring down the barrel of a total comedy fucking disaster and Lydia's only response was to start an improv troupe. All we needed was a fat guy in a sweater."

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

I, Tina by Tina Turner with Kurt Loder

The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Fred Hampton.
Marcus Garvey.
Bobby Hutton.
Nat Turner.
Huey Newton.
Emmett Till.
Khalil Harris

"You know none of this is your fault, right?" Momma asks. 
How in the world did she do that? "I know."
"I mean it, baby. It's not. You did everything right."
"But sometimes right's not good enough, huh?"

You Can't Touch My Hair (And Other Things I Still Have to Explain) by Phoebe Robinson

To say that I am a fan of Phoebe Robinson is a gi-nor-mous understatement. Listening to 2 Dope Queens is one of my very facorite things to do. And redo. And I wish I still had a bus commute so I could do it morrreee. Ditto Soooo Many White Guys. (If these are things you don't know, GO FIND THEM NOW. Like, why are you still reading this? Go listen to some podcasts, yo!)

There are way too many highlights to capture them all, so I'll just generically slap some quotes up. But I'll also say that the first 30 pages of this book made me laugh out loud (something I rarely do), made me cry (another thing I seldom do), and made me think about things I've thought about before in a whole new way.

"Blackness is not a monolith. ...But some people don't want to believe that, because if varying degrees of blackness become normalized, then that means society has to rethink how they treat black people. In other words, if you allow black people to be as complicated and multidimensional as white people, then it's hard to view them as the Other with all the messy pejorative, stereotypical, and shallow ideas that have been assigned to that Otherness."

"i got into comedy partially because I was not hot. The other part was that I realized I could make people laugh with slick ans narky comments, but honestly, the not-hot factor played a huge role. I was always the girl that made all the boys laugh, and while that never got me any boyfriends, it got me male attention, which I was happy-ish to settle for while they all traipsed off with the better-looking, cool girls...It made me a better, more interesting person because I developed other skills to attract people, and one of those skills is my sense of humor and personality."

Perhaps the part that made me laugh the most most most is when Robinson makes a list of demands for Future Female President.

"3. OK, this is probably the most import request on this list, so if you can only do one thing, I beg of you that it's this: When you get sworn into office, yell, 'I'm a feminist,' and then throw your fist in the air like you're Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club.
   ...3A. I get that this may seem super aggressive and that politicians are not supposed to ruffle feather, but this would be the ultimate gesture to let women know you have their backs. Now, FFP, if you're Hilary Clinton, you're probably like, 'Can't people tell I'm a feminist because I wear Talbots pantsuits on the regs?' 1. Please don't say 'regs.' So not your stulye, and 2. No, because, your wardrobe screams 'very fancy judge at a chili cook-off in Minnesota' more than it does 'feminist,'so we need you to actually drop the F-bomb into the microphone. And when you do , so many crazy old white dudes are going to freak out that it'll seem like someone just told them there are only seven tickets remaining on StubHub for a Steely Dan concert."

on being one of two black girls in a predominantly white school: "There was always a tinge of loneliness that colored my high school experience. I didn't have a mirror, a soundboard, someone who knew the same things I did because we were from the same cultural tribe."

Robinson also tackles the history of black hair throughout pop culture, schooling me on Angela Davis, Res, and Erika Badu. She also hits many high notes of women on film that didn't lead with the pretty, but with their strength (see CJ Cregg, Felicity Porter, Denise Huxtable, Maxine Shaw...).

I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

"...maybe it means we've forgotten ourselves. And we keep forgetting ourselves. And that's the big grown-up secret to survival."

"You're only beginning to learn what you don't know. First you must relearn your senses. Your senses are never inaccurate -- it's your ideas that can be false."

"Most of the girls I knew didn't get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination. If they had anything in common beyond that they would go out and have a conversation."

"Just what is it that people got accomplished on their days off? She seemed like a writer -- but she never spoke of specific projects. And she never spoke of writing, of sitting down with pen to paper.  ...'Hmm. A writer. I try to engage in the task of setting something true on paper. But if you take art too seriously you wind up killing yourself.'"

"You don't care about consequences? Then it's too late. That he's complicated, not in a sexy way, but in a damaged way. I could tell you damage isn't sexy, it's scary. You're still young enough to think every experience will improve you and in some long-term way, but it isn't true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?"

"I liked having answers. And of course he understood. Maybe that was what unsettled me, the way he spoke in decrees, but I was always aware that he was  a man. There were no shared sympathies between us. He didn't ever seem to have a question, and I don't mean curiosity, but a throbbing, existential, why-is-it-like-this question. He had already mastered the answer to that Why?"

"Aging is peculiar. I don't think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy, when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you're abruptly outside the circle. now what do you do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?"

"How much I had taken for granted...That was the full circle, wasn't it? Learn how to identify the flowers and the fruits so I could talk about the wine. Learn how to smell the wine so I could talk about the flowers. Had I learned anything besides endless reference points? What did I know about the thing itself? Isn't this what you dreamed of, Tess, when you got in your car and drove? Didn't you run away to find a world worth falling in love with, saying you wouldn't care if it loved you back?"

"The lilacs smelled like brevity. They knew how to arrive, and how to exit."

"You love the truth as it applies to everyone else."

"That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge."

"I loved his ghost. How impossible it is to forget the stories we tell ourselves, even when the truth should supersede them. That was why he adored me for a minute. Because I saw a beautiful, tormented hero. Rescue and redemption. I never saw him. All promise."

"But I see the marks on people. Strangers who sit at the bar alone and order a drink with intimacy."

I Was a Child by Bruce Eric Kaplan

"this book is for my parents, who tried"

"although i wasn't able to put it into words then, i think what i found so compelling about that moment each week was the expression of a truth--we are all just little dolls of ourselves who occasionally pull back the curtains to reveal the real us."

"the wizard of oz was on tv once a year. it was like halloween or christmas. you waited for it. and then a week or two before , you knew it was coming on and thought about it a lot. our first television was black-and-white, so i never knew oz was in color, and had no idea the horse of many colors was changing colors. it didn't make a difference. once someone called during the wizard of oz and we all looked at one another, thinking, Who would call during The Wizard of Oz?"


hansel and gretl story..."i was driven mad by fright. cried and cried at how scary she was."=doug + gremlins (this is a random note from 1.5+ years ago. i don't quite remember the hansel and gretl story, but i do remember the gremlins one. in 1984, when Gremlins was released, i was 8 years old. my brother, doug, was 5. my parents took us to see it in the theater. doug was terrified and cried throughout much of this film. i thought this was HILARIOUS. this is perhaps the first time i remember being a touch evil. i went on to own everything Gremlins...velcro shoes, nightgowns, backpacks, and a pink babydoll t with a glitter Gizmo decal that i bought for myself when i was 26 years old. yep. all true. no shame.)

thrift store commercial of a woman transformed by a fur coat..."every time it came on, I was mesmerized by it. it was a very powerful message-this idea that you could change your situation, you didn't have to settle for what you had, you could become more than what you were."

The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

"The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you're only showing that your unworthy of it."

random words i noted/looked up/researched
while reading: refusenik, peristaltic, anodyne, fascism, mycelial, kalimba, nascent, disavow, solmnolence vs. somnolbulist, baleful, hinterlands, spavined, en passant, (bychance?), scion, assiduously, Bezier (curves), pith, metronomic syncopation, skeins (of fuzz & smoke), sardonic

Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton

"Life is cumulative, and you can't devalue any type of experience."

"If you're only true to your short-term self, your long-term self slowly decays."

"I want to make different versions of myself."

"I don't want to be happy because I don't think that's realistic. But I would like to be able to deal with life."

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

When Less Is More
I should love Orange is the New Black for the same reason I should (but do not) love Red Tails or The Butler or 42. Here is po;ular culture about people who look like me. Thats all I should need, right? Why are we still talking about Orange Is the New Black? The conversation is a measure of how much we are forced to settle, or, perhaps, how much we're willing to settle.

How to Be Friends with Another Woman
3. If you are the kind of woman who says, "I'm mostly friends with guys," and act like you're proud of that, like that makes you closer to being a man or something and less of a woman as if being a woman is a bad thin, see ITem 1B. It's okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, well, soul-search a little.
3A. If you feel like it's hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren't the problem. Maybe it's just you.
3B. I used to be this kind of woman. I'm sorry to judge.
5B. If you and your friend(s) are in the same field and you can collaborate or help each other, do this without shame. It's not your fault your friends are awesome. Men invented nepotism and practically live by it. It's okay for women to do it too.
9. Don't let your friends buy ugly outfits or accessories you don't want to look at when you hang out. This is just common sense.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

"It would be very nice to have a friend again. I would like that even more than a date."

"I didn't know that other people thought things abou tme. I didn't know that they looked. And I started to cry. And nobody in that room looked at me weird for doing it. And then I really started to cry."

" I wonder if it's all a lie. A permanent record, I mean."

"You ever think, Charlie, that our group is the same as any other group like the football team? And the only real difference between us is what we wear and why we wear it?"

"There were other stories and other names. By the end, all I could think was what these people must feel like when they go to their class reunions. I wonder if they're embarrassed, and I wonder if that's a small price to pay for being a legend."

"It's strange to describe reading a book as a really great experience, but that's kind of how it felt. ...It wasn't like you had to search for the philosophy. It was pretty straightforward, I thought, and the great part is that I took what the author wrote about and put it in terms of my own life. Maybe that's what being a filter means. I'm not sure. ...'I would die for you. But I won't live for you.' Something like that. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. Maybe that is what makes people 'participate.' I'm not really certain."

"I didn't say anything for a while because I didn't know what to say. And that was that. He just let me hear what he had to say in my own way and let things be. That was probably the best part."

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

"As intrigued as I was by this new dynamic of disrespect, at my core I didn't want to be spoken to like that. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself.    ...The end never comes when you think it will. It's always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

...This is what it could have been like. This is what it had never been like. And so I was angry. ...After the best night we had ever had, the first night he'd let me feel like myself, I wrote him an email sayin ghe had hurt me, taken adventage of my affection, and made me feel disposable. I told him that I wouldn't be available any longer. And then I made myself sick to my stomach waiting for an apology that never came."

"My mother understood, implicitly, the power of it. See these hips, these teeth, these eyebrows, these stockings that bunch and sag at the ankles? They're worth capturing, holding on to forever. I'll never be this young again. Or this lonely. Or this hairy. Come one, come all, to my private show."

"We talk about enlightened beings, what it would mean to transcend the human plane. 'I want to be enlightened, but it also sounds boring,' I tell him. "So much of what I love -- gossip and furniture and food and the Internet -- are really here, on earth." Then I say something that would probably make the Buddha roll over in his grave: 'I think I could be enlightened, but I'm not in the mood yet.'"

On running away:

"Soon you will find yourself in more and more situations you don't want to run from. At work you'll realize that you've spent the entire day in your body, really in it, not imagining what you look like to the people who surround you but just being who you are You are a tool being put to its proper use. THat Changes a lot of things. ...Sometimes that old feeling slips back in. OF being invaded and misunderstood. Of being outside your body but still in the room... You used to own the night and put it to good use. Is togetherness killing your productivity? When's the last time you stayed up until 4:00A.M. testing the boundaries of your consciousness and Googling serial killers? ...But you remember how hard it was, that moment between wakefulness and sleep. how the moment of settling down was almost physically painful, your mind pulling away from your body like a balloon being sucked into the atmosphere. ...People need sleep. You've learned a new rule and it's simple: don't put yourself in situations you'd like to run away from. But when you run, run back to yourself..."

Data, A Love Story by Amy Webb

Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook by Charles Bukowski

Things About Me by Marcel the Shell

Bonk by Mary Roach

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran by Rob Sheffield