You've Escaped

I’ll be coming home, wait for me.

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:17:00 -0400

I’ll be coming home, wait for me.

Earth, Wind & Fire — September Do you remember? I hated...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 20:47:00 -0400

Earth, Wind & Fire — September

Do you remember?

I hated September. As the leaves changed hundreds of miles north of me, so did everything around me. I’ve suffered more breakups, illness, loss of friends, death, accidents, screaming matches in a drafty apartment, overall pain than in any other month of the year. I have a notebook where I did the math on this. I made lists and carried the two and it’s a fact. September swept in and did not look over its shoulder. I kept my eyes down but felt it in my bones, the dread of things I couldn’t control.

I’m superstitious. I still hate September. I haven’t had a bad one since I was 21 but I’m always looking out of the corner of my eye for something, anything to happen. I remember too much. Maybe it’s not that things have stopped happening to me but that I’m not scared of the possibility of change. I’ve left people and things behind and grown, I know that I need less than I used to believe I did. Instead of letting things happen to me, I’m beating everything to the punch and doing it myself. I’m wary but ever hopeful. My glass is half full of something light colored so I won’t have a panic attack if it spills.

Wouldn't you rather people actually read your work and re-use it without credit rather than just not having it read at all? I mean, I could understand if you were explicitly making money from your writing (I'm not sure if you are) but if this is just a place where you express your thoughts, surely anyone liking them enough to re-use it is flattering?

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:45:00 -0400

In regards to this post: I hardly ever answer questions and I already addressed this in this user’s ask box but here goes my attempt to answer each of these.

1. No because as my friend anarchyandscotch has told me, that’s like saying “plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery”. It’s not. It depreciates how much work goes into creating something. It’s not that difficult to give a writer, photographer, artist, musician, whatever credit. End of story.

2. Here comes the question of whether something is more valid because you make money from it. Lots of people create for pleasure and to assume that one artist should have the right to credit because he or she makes money from what they produce is plain wrong. Making money as a creative type is tough going, ask the countless freelance writers and designers and whatnot on the internet. We create in order to get our work and NAMES out there and monetize our creativity.

3. I realize that for some, blogging is just an amusement and a place to express random thoughts, etc. but shouldn’t we all venture on the safe side just in case? Maybe the person who is just blogging about their work day wants to keep their name on it, those are his or her thoughts after all. Keeping credit isn’t hard, you can even just link to it as a clickthrough or “via”, etc.

4. On a random note, another tumblr, chrstn sent me info about checking up on others plagiarizing your work and there’s more about it here.

On the topic of removing credit from someone's work

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:38:50 -0400

Or as it is also known, plagiarizing. Or stealing.

Remember this post? About the ocean from the other day? Me too. Imagine my surprise when I learn it has been reblogged here: http://denisesfairytale.tumblr.com/post/1049074852/its-yourself-that-youll-find-in-the-sea

Also seen here:

Now, do you see the original poster, ie. the writer’s credit on this? Neither do I.

There are things on the internet that make me mad or annoyed or roll my eyes every single day. I let them roll off my back because they don’t matter in the long run.

This matters.

It is my work and I have taken time to write something and whether or not you like something I write or consider it valuable, it is an original creation to have the credit stripped like it’s some random dancing cat gif makes me super pissed off. I don’t care if it’s just the internet, you do not disrespect someone by passing off their work as yours or anyone else’s. That’s just fucking shitty. And no, I don’t care that a bunch of usernames “makes your blog layout look bad”. Either go and reblog from the original source or suck it up and deal with it.

This has happened to me in the past on tumblr and as always, I contact the person who posted it in case it was just an oversight and I also contact the tumblr staff because this is not what our blogging experience here is about. Many of us are sharing original work and we should not be scared for our words and photos and drawings and music. Eventually someone is going to figure out that you’re passing off someone else’s work as your own and call you out on it. I rarely ask people to reblog things but please, if you can, reblog this post. If not for yourself then perhaps for anyone you know who creates things. It is terrifying to see something you create, an extension of yourself, not given the proper credit it deserves.

WHAT’S NEXT? MOLLY?!

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:14:00 -0400

WHAT’S NEXT? MOLLY?!

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure,...

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:18:00 -0400

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece. (Vladimir Nabokov)

It is an early morning on a day when it does not have to be. No matter. Brush your teeth, wash your face, put on a favorite lipstick, make coffee. Elizabeth made this little gem for me, even mailed it to New York so I could show it off in the unrelenting heat. Vladimir Nabokov is easily my favorite writer (and Pale Fire my favorite book of all time). I once heard someone say that he is a gymnast with the English language and this is an apt description. He creates wonders, prods and pokes at language and the ideas that fill every day life. Who else to wear around my neck the way some people wear crosses with tiny messiahs hanging on them? Nabokov taught me to love language with a devotion akin to a martyr. Elizabeth makes lots of these lovely gems so if you’d like to throw some business her way (note: you should), get in contact with her for your very own delicious piece of art.

Photo

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:16:56 -0400

I miss winter. I miss getting drunk with you on blue Long Island...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:03:00 -0400

I miss winter. I miss getting drunk with you on blue Long Island iced teas, me on one and a half and you on probably four and a few beers. I miss fighting with you about how you’d put Samantha Morton at number 14 on your potential wife list even though I’m numbers 1 through 13 as we walk down Madison Avenue. I miss screaming drunkenly at you when you try to hold my hand. I miss you trying to steal my phone from me on the corner as I call my best friend to tell her what was happening. I miss the alcoholic haze that makes a New York January seem nonexistent. I miss holding my coat way out with my hands and trying to drunkenly convince the hostess at that restaurant to let me use the bathroom since “the baby was pressing down on my bladder”. I miss arguing as we bought hot dogs and cheese fries from the Jamaican men on the corner. I miss them laughing at us as we slurred at each other. I miss refusing to speak to you while pleading for you to eat so you’d sober up. I miss staggering down the stairs to the 1 train and letting you sit next to me with rolled eyes. I miss you spilling the cheese fries down the front of your jacket. I miss the way we laughed about it and how you tried to kiss me with a literally cheesy mouth. I miss the way how I said sorry for being a lightweight kamikaze by taking off my glove and putting my hand in yours. I miss the way you let me know it was okay and that you were sorry by rubbing the palm of my hand with your finger. I miss sharing the headphones to my iPod to listen to Talking Heads on the way back to the Bronx. I miss an empty subway car and how when we were almost to 231st street, we attempted to swing around the poles. I miss the look on your face when I wrapped one boot around it and twisted around. I miss walking home in the cold against you. I miss the way we drunkenly mumbled about the future and how we wanted to get married one day; I miss the way we didn’t even try to take it back the next day. I miss being too drunk to have sex but not so much that we didn’t try. I miss sleeping skin to skin and the snow and rubbing my foot against yours to help me fall asleep and our alternating breaths and slowing heartbeats and good night.

Fantasy Basketball anyone?

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:01:00 -0400

The time to play fantasy basketball is almost upon us and my boyfriend and I are doing a private league. If you’d like to play, please email me at anaisescobar [at] gmail dot com for the league name and password. We’re fun to play with, just ask the people in our fantasy baseball league. REBLOG and let your sporty friends know!

"A good soufflé and a good blowjob is all you need to get a man."

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:58:00 -0400

“A good soufflé and a good blowjob is all you need to get a man.”

- Bethenny Frankel

It's yourself that you'll find in the sea

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:46:00 -0400

(image via)

I swam before I walked. Literally surrounded by water, my parents assumed that I needed to learn as soon as possible. I was almost a year old and kicking around the pool with my parents. Once I was a little older and seemed strong enough, they took me to the beach. I waded into the water, my parents holding my hands, and felt the weightlessness of the ocean. Salt water got in my eyes and it was an entirely different burn than that of chlorine. It hurt but was clean all at once. It was home.

My family has an almost mystical appreciation of the ocean and its properties. If someone was getting over a cold, they were sent to go swim in the ocean for a few hours. If you had a healing cut or injury, get in the salt water. Even the proximity of the ocean seems healing. On summer days in New York City when the buildings seem to trap the heat in a stagnant cloud around your head, I yearn for the clean air of the sea for just a moment. Sometimes it’s less about being in the ocean than just being close enough to hear its call.

I was an unhappy girl at 18, 19, 20, unlike myself and numb. I didn’t feel much nor did I want to, having been burned before. I moved smack dab in the middle of the state to go to school and found myself suffocated. I paced my dorm, my apartment at night, unable to sleep. I drove my car north into the mountains, I took flights alone to see old friends and have conversations where I had nothing to say. Once, in the middle of this country, I assumed I was unused to being landlocked. I flew home and drove to a stretch of quiet Atlantic, as close as I could get to the edge of the ocean.

It was night time and the water was black. I’d always been petrified of the ocean at night, unable to see the things swirling around your legs but I took of my clothing and swam in anyways. I swam hard without paying attention to my stroke until I was far out. The moon seemed huge as my head bobbed from the silvery water. I took a deep breath and let myself sink underwater. My eyes were closed and I stayed submerged until I could feel my lungs prickling for more air. It scared and excited me all at once. I breathed slowly and floated on my back, watching the glow of moonlight on my nude skin. I did not think for the first time in years and stared at the sky. I crawled into my bed covered in salt and sand that night, sleeping late the next day.

I’m not saying the ocean is magic, I’m not saying that it’s going to fix you. I’m not sure that it did fix me. What it did do was make something click in my brain, it woke me up. It reminded that there was something bigger than the numbness and the bitterness I felt, that you had to feel the terror and the pain in order to feel the moments of ecstatic joy you sometimes get. I was reminded that sometimes joy and terror can be the same thing. I don’t know that I need the ocean like I used to but I do think that sometimes you just need a reminder that you are alive and hopefully, feeling something, anything.

It’s true that things could always be worse and that you have to keep your life in perspective...

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:58:00 -0400

It’s true that things could always be worse and that you have to keep your life in perspective in order to see the good things you do have but there are just days where I want nothing more than to stomp my fucking foot and say enough, I’m sick of this shit, when will it be my turn, why does this happen to me, why can’t I get what I want exactly when I want it? And you need to stomp and to scream because no matter how easy your life may be, living is fucking hard sometimes. It’ll never be easy but it’ll always be worth it.

Family nostalgia project '10 continues and thankfully ends.

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:17:00 -0400

Tap shoes and the training potty at my abuelita’s house.

My entire family went on vacation when I was almost two and my mom didn’t want to deal with my hair since it was so hot out so she chopped it off and this is why I am ambiguously gendered in this photo with my grandpa.

This is newborn me. I was three weeks late and a monstrous baby at birth. I just typed “at bitch”. very telling.

I have no words for my father’s fashion choices.

I am going to flip furniture over Teresa Giudice/RHONJ-style, just wait.

My mom reading in the 70s. She commented: “You see, it wasn’t just glitter and cocaine. Not that I ever did cocaine. You know.” Note: she then married a man with the last name Escobar. I rest my case.

I’m surprised the Sartorialist didn’t come calling.

I don’t know either. Also, PUBLIX brand foil. Nice.

See my dad’s balding patch? Well, I learned how to crochet around age 5 and I made him a little pink yarmulke-looking thing so “no one would”. I’m pretty sure he cried.

Re: The Idiots Who Continue On About The So-Called 'World Trade Center' Mosque

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:23:00 -0400

klendathudrop:

As a New Yorker, I am ashamed that this remains a popular conversation topic amongst the media, politics, and retarded laymen. This is one big heaping slice of non-issue. The building in question would be a sorely-needed community center, TWO BLOCKS AWAY from the WTC disaster, with swimming pools and a library. It has zero relevance to the World Trade Center bombings, and to imply otherwise is naked racism. And lest we forget: the building is PRIVATELY OWNED, and it is unconstitutional in EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD for the government to tell the property owners what to do with their own PRIVATELY OWNED PROPERTY.

This matter has been distorted not only by politicians using 9/11 as political tool to rally support, but also by COMPLETELY OBVIOUS RACISTS spreading non-truths like the opening of the mosque being on SEPTEMBER 11TH and, for non-NYers unaware of the geography of the area, the lie that it is being BUILT ON THE REMAINS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ATTACKS. People who say these things are not entitled to their opinion because they are RACISTS trying to SPREAD HATE, and should NOT BE TOLERATED, whether they are FRIEND, FAMILY or CO-WORKER.

Please reblog so that some people can realize how ugly they’re being.

This is why I love my boyfriend. Also, yep, he tumbls, mostly about movies, occasionally just to drop truth bombs.

Remember when this used to be a book blog? Me either! (It...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:29:00 -0400

Remember when this used to be a book blog? Me either! (It was!)

From top to bottom, here are the books (two textbooks not yet arrived) I’m reading this semester as well as the classes they belong to. I’ve read the ones marked with asterisks:

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (Toni Morrison)*

Night by Elie Wiesel (The Holocaust)*

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (Toni Morr…let’s just presume that the rest of the Toni Morrison books are for the Toni Morrison class, ok?)

Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Playing in the Dark, The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (Pomo Brit Writers)

The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard (Pomo Brit Writers)

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (Pomo)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles (Pomo)

East West by Salman Rushdie (Pomo)

Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (Pomo)

Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Pomo)*

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (Pomo)*

Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) by Samuel Beckett (Pomo)

Maus by Art Spiegelman (The Holocaust)

Cuba by someone or other (History of Cuba)

Selected Writings by Jose Marti (History of Cuba)*

From the House to the Streets: The Cuban’s Women Movement for Legal Reform 1898-1940 by Kathryn Lee Stoner (History of Cuba)

Not pictured: The Elements of Style and another grammar reader for The Roots of Modern English and a few other books for The Holocaust. Happy reading!

"I was telling Max the other day that you have to be like, the worst of the worst to actually ruin a..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:33:59 -0400

“I was telling Max the other day that you have to be like, the worst of the worst to actually ruin a facial hair style for the rest of history.”

- My best friend Corey on Hitler

needed today: brie, apple, baguette

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:28:38 -0400

needed today: brie, apple, baguette

"Romanticized and misapplied, individualism keeps us self-indulgent. It keeps us ignorant of..."

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:21:15 -0400

“Romanticized and misapplied, individualism keeps us self-indulgent. It keeps us ignorant of contracts, of money, of benefits, of rights, of how the partnership between author and publisher ought to work, of the areas that threaten both publisher and writer. It keeps us in an adversary relationship at certain junctures where such a relationship is counterproductive. Individualism can also keep us dependent on foundation largesse, grants, fellowships, campuses, cloisters and handouts. And if things go on in this manner, individualism will idle us-it will keep us from the work we have chosen to do.”

- Toni Morrison on the need for a community of writers, “For A Heroic Writers Movement”

little girl with the full red lips

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:29:36 -0400

little girl with the full red lips

"Too ." "Not _ enough."

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:59:00 -0400

My professor was late to my first class of History of Cuba today. I sat watching the sky outside slowly turning gray and internally high fived myself for bringing an umbrella. It was cold in the classroom. I sat on one foot. The classroom slowly filled up, everyone spreading around so as to not sit next to someone else. Some random girl in jeans sat next to me.

“I like your glasses,” she said. “They’re very different.”

“Thank you.” I smiled politely as this tended to happen on the first day of the semester a lot. She spoke after a minute.

“So are you a history major?” she asked.

“No, this class just fits nicely into my schedule and goes towards my second major,” I replied. “Plus, I’m Cuban so it’d be interesting to know more about my heritage.”

“No way, you’re Cuban?” She looked shocked.

“Uh, yeah, definitely am.”

“You just don’t seem that Cuban. I mean, you seem too white to be Cuban.”

“Well, I am.”

Too white. I’ve heard it before as people question the fair skin and generally on the European side features I inherited from European grandparents and great-grandparents. In my private high school, it was said with pleasure and respect by a lot of my white classmates: “You don’t seem that Hispanic at all!”. By other Hispanic people, I’m often seen as betraying my ethnicity by not neatly fitting into a stereotypical role as Latina. I grew up in a fairly affluent, mostly white suburb. You may be surprised to learn that I speak and write fluent Spanish, know much about my cultural background, and make one of the meanest plates of ropa vieja around. I do not really listen to Latin music or wear big hoop earrings or do any of the things that many people see as markers for “Hispanic” but I am Hispanic.

To you, girl who sat next to me in class as well as you the reader, I say this: as long as you continue to classify and judge people based on your knowledge of stereotypes instead of actually getting to know a fully formed, unique individual who is made up of any number of backgrounds, you will be ignorant and you will miss out on understanding just how complex and beautiful people are. To assume that there is one common Hispanic or Black or Asian or Christian or Muslim or LGBTQ or female or even, yes, White experience or identity, is to put people in a box before you even know them. There is no right or wrong when it comes to identity, you cannot be “too black” or “not Asian enough” or “too boyish”, you are what you are, that’s it. I’m sick of hearing that I’m too white, that Obama isn’t black enough, that lesbians would be more accepted if they all fit into some feminine stereotype, that all Muslims are terrorists. That’s fucking enough. Everyone’s life experience and identity are valid and while communities share aspects, every single person has their own story, their own face that the world sees; you can’t just lump everyone together and expect to understand who a person really is.

I am a part Jewish Catholic Cuban Spanish (along with other things!) cisgendered woman who grew up in the suburbs. Pa que sepa.

You've Escaped

I’ll be coming home, wait for me.

Earth, Wind & Fire — September Do you remember? I hated...

On the topic of removing credit from someone's work

WHAT’S NEXT? MOLLY?!

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure,...

Photo

I miss winter. I miss getting drunk with you on blue Long Island...

Fantasy Basketball anyone?

"A good soufflé and a good blowjob is all you need to get a man."

It's yourself that you'll find in the sea

It’s true that things could always be worse and that you have to keep your life in perspective...

Family nostalgia project '10 continues and thankfully ends.

Re: The Idiots Who Continue On About The So-Called 'World Trade Center' Mosque

Remember when this used to be a book blog? Me either! (It...

"I was telling Max the other day that you have to be like, the worst of the worst to actually ruin a..."

needed today: brie, apple, baguette

"Romanticized and misapplied, individualism keeps us self-indulgent. It keeps us ignorant of..."

little girl with the full red lips

"Too ______." "Not _______ enough."

"Too ." "Not _ enough."