RE-ELECT EDDIE

Hi, OK, life newz, this week I accepted a job at Habitat for Humanity. Habitat is my favorite nonprofit*, I’m thrilled to be working for them, and my job will be Volunteer Engagement Specialist, coordinating build trips to Africa and the Middle East.

Here is the weird part: I will be moving to Americus, GA, the absolute middle of nowhere, one town over from Jimmy Carter and this 15’-tall fiberglass peanut with squinty eyes and buckteeth, three towns over from the Watermelon Capital of the U.S., and zero towns over from lots of cows and pigs. I am going to live in the country. It’s probably only for a while; they are trying to move the position to Atlanta.

Questions like What will I do there? and Who will I do it with? and Will I be miserable? feel so distant that I can’t imagine answers to them. All that is in my head now is that I’m curious, excited, and confident that I am making a good decision. Historically my blogs are funnier when I’m bored or lonely, so we could be heading into Peak Eddie Blogging.

You are invited to my going-away party with the “Dress Sexy at My Funeral” theme. 

*Habitat is my favorite nonprofit because: (1) They don’t do that imperialist charity bullshit where a bunch of white people in the U.S. tell brown people in the majority world how to live. They partner, not bulldoze. (2) These trips do new construction but also building repair and water treatment projects. There’s merit to the work beyond photo ops. (3) North American teams who go on build trips must contribute double their expenses; the second half remains in the community they visit to fund further projects. (4) If you accept “human rights” as that which people have a responsibility to provide for each other, then I take housing as a human right, and Habitat is excellent at building decent, affordable housing.

**P.P.S. So it’s a Christian organization, but look: if you don’t have much patience for Christians, you can be glad that they’re spending their money building houses and hospitals and water treatment, right? It’s work that we all want to see done. Habitat is run by a bunch of communitarian hippies and libs, and it’s an advocate for the poor to shitty governments and corporations, a rare opportunity to come by.

dumbassfils:

stop reblogging people being dumb about the health care decision

how about

if you see some monster man being monstrous

you just giggle discreetly to yourself

and make a little note

in your day planner

reminding you to have them murdered during the revolutionary peoples war

Dad (requires my manually thinking about love)
Arianne (effortless affection)
Bill Callahan (one-way affection)
Jeff (pursuing same truths, doing same activities)
Jennifer (privacy vs. the fruitfulness of a community)
Cornel West (public relationships)
Ol’ JC (self-giving)

Laurie Anderson said that what attracts her to Buddhism “is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.”

Always amazing to me what interests people. I can no more imagine wanting to feel the way she describes than I can imagine wanting to experiment with cutting off my head at the neck using rusty desk scissors.

Molly Young doesn’t like “Moonrise Kingdom” in part because its aesthetic vision is airtight and inhuman. I agree with that much.

She puts the romantic story between two tweens at the center of the movie and has this problem with it:

It is a confusing premise, this love story, given that Sam and Suzy hardly talk and are largely presexual. (Communicating and making physical contact are the primary ways I can think of in which people demonstrate love to one another.)

I think she misidentifies the type of love that the movie is concerned with. The kids haven’t struck out in search of romantic love, which is expressed by communication and physical contact; they are looking for love in companionship, common cause, understanding. Y’all, I’m gonna talk Greek: they want PHILIA, not EROS. They are looking for people to love them, and they happen to find it in the form of a romantic relationship, but that form is incidental to the movie’s love story, not essential to it.

I wouldn’t put the kids’ story at the center of the movie anyway, because the adults feel the kids’ same disenfranchisement. Everyone in the movie experiences the same arc: they feel isolated, then they find a community. Only because the kids experience this larger problem of isolation do they recognize hope in and for each other, running away to the ”minutely curated picnics, camp sites and coves” (M.Y. is an exceptional observer and describer, always). Their hopefulness about beating despair leads the adults to rearrange themselves into new communities, too.

The movie doesn’t end with one perfect romantic couple being formed; it ends with the creation of a new ecosystem of relationships that complement and sustain each other. The kids are happier, but so are Bruce Willis and Frances McDormand and Ed Norton and possibly Bill Murray. The movie is concerned with this farther-reaching type of communal love, of which romantic love is one component among others.

But I would like to go on record for this, too: Wes Anderson’s sexualization of the tween girl is disturbing.

“Aftenbladet apologizes because the review of my Works of Love is so disproportionately long. A few days later the same paper produces an article just about as long that is a police report on the trial of a thief. Here no apology is necessary, for it is enormously important.”

Kierkegaard snarking in his journal like a big teenage baby (WOL 477)

Friend announced she is pregnant by saying, “[My son] is getting a sibling.”

By that strange phrasing it sounded like she might adopt a pet or her husband is having a love child.

Hope For My Future Life: If I conceive a baby with someone, I hope that we are excited enough about it that we use the active voice; e.g. “I am pregnant as hell” or “There is a fucking baby inside this woman.”