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‘Keep biting the hand and it might slap you across the face one day,’ she said. ‘Boys like you are a dime a dozen out there. You think those Hollywood people will be lining up just to tie your shoes? You think you’re so lucky? You want an easy life? You want to roller-skate on the beach? Even the hairs on your head are numbered. Don’t forget that.’
I really did want an easy life. I looked out the window at the short little houses, the flat open plains, the sky purple and orange, blinding sparks of honey-colored light shooting over the western mountains where the sun went down. ‘Nothing ever happens here,’ I said.
sunset desc is nice
Sarah talking about her fabled student loans again while I pulled the trigger on some new dresses for my new lifestyle.
wow. such a good portrayal of privilege, amazing
[...] Oona wanted to be an actress. The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and breach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness. Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reasons Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through.
fascinating. perhaps the only valid use of "prettiness", then, is to wield it as a weapon in order to attack the hierarchy itself
How to explain - if Alice wasn't taking a class, if she wasn't otherwise engaged, that meant her terrible job, her terrible apartment, suddenly carried more weight, maybe started to matter. The thought was too much to consider squarely.
on dead-end jobs and the extremely "capitalist realism" idea that we must always be hustling for a better life, as opposed to trying to make our jobs better right now
There was no one ahead of him, there was no one behind, but still: there was waiting. A condition so chronic, so Messianically anticipant, that its trappings didn't matter. [...]
there's something weirdly poetic about this in a very religious way that i can't quite unpack but still like
[...] the flights were almost always full, booked far in advance, bought out by the sovereign wealth funds of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, and Hong Kong, as well as by corporate partners, the latter tricky at first, many corporations at first resisted - they had stockholders they were accountable to, they couldn't be spending millions on luxury travel - but soon it became clear that certain favors were being granted, playing fields tipped, regulations loosened or disappeared, sabers rattled more or less virogously, so that in numerous ways, plausibly deniable and otherwise, those in the Zeppelins were accruing certain advantages [...]
too real (also very DFW)
[...] another thumbs up to the YouTube livestream audience, to all those watching, those who still had internet, those still alive, and in the situation room, among and between all the generals and the members of the deep state and now even Trump's private security apparatus, a certain humming awareness, a panic that they were watching, just watching, the world end, and wasn't there something they could do, but there were too many, too many different strategies, they were each locked into their own roles, and Trump had already announced it, the big option, right there on the livestream, to the whole world, to all our allies and enemies, and around the world protocols and contingency plans were going into effect, there just wasn't any time, just no way to wiggle out of the moment, to say sorry, to say stop, to say we fucked up, nothing to be done, or rather, thy could do the big one, or just nothing, sit passively, hemmed in by life and by all the possibilities they couldn't quite dream into the real, and they understand that to play was to lose, but not to play was something worse [...]
good god
'I hated you at times. I saw all of your weaknesses, like your disease or your come face and, and at moments, I believed that's all you were,' I say.
'Likewise,' he says, very sweetly.
wow
[...] Those in the western sector don't see our gains though our actions do end in deaths - the deaths of their people - but since they are not united and lives are not purchasable, they do not see the deaths as theirs. They buy new panes and clothing and attempt to ignore us. [...]
love this
'I don't understand why anyone would want to stay in Gotham City. It's a stupid place with all these crazy motherfuckers walking around killing people and blowing shit up. Why don't they just leave?'
I laughed when he said it because I was too young to understand that Edwin was serious, that he was beginning to rework an idea our families had latched onto, fought for, years before, when they'd dragged Ghana-must-go bags onto the shores of this strange new land. You shouldn't stay somewhere that isn't working.
think about this in the context of "staying & fighting" vs the right to leave (as a refugee etc)