fuckyeahblowies:

It’s very important that everyone know these pictures of Jack Johnson exist in the world. (x)

oh my god jmfj what are you like

tumblrfiction:

FOREBEARS Write a story about your ancestors.

Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts

It is the last year of my great-grandmother’s life, and she believes that she was born into royalty. She tells me of her girlhood in a Spanish castle, bare feet skidding across ancient stones and running grooves into the corners of the hallways. My great-grandmother is beautiful, with big almond eyes and dark skin that always seemed sun kissed, even in winter. She tells me, giggling like a schoolgirl, that she had been taught how to smile by her lady-in-waiting, a small Spanish girl from Cadiz. The houses there are white and the ocean is always grasping at the sidewalks. She and her lady-in-waiting would sit in front of the mirror and smile together, over and over and over again, until the melon of her lips burst so red and sudden across her mouth that everyone in the room stopped talking to stare at it.

“That’s how I met your great-grandfather,” she whispers, tender as a ragdoll on her bed while the sun slips in through the window and kisses her. “I saw him across the marketplace when I was buying fruit. I smiled at him and he gave me the fruit for free.”

I don’t know if this story—or something like it—is true. I don’t know if any of the stories she has told this year are true. I have built my great-grandfather out of the photographs he has been edited out of. My great-grandmother stopped speaking of him when he died, put his things away and never looked too long at my brother, who has my great-grandfather’s chin.

History says that my great-grandmother was a dancer, but she never talks about that. She never talks about anything except the way the trees grew outside her window at the palace and the sound that fingers made when plucked against the strings of her mother’s harp.

“Do you speak Spanish, Grammy?” I ask, sitting on the edge of her bed while she pushes a spoon through a murky bowl of soup.

Her eyes don’t entirely focus when she looks at me. “Heavens no, girl,” she laughs, faintly chastising. “Who on earth would understand me?”

There is a painting in my grandmother’s basement of a red-haired man. He has dark eyes and flushed cheeks, a faint but definite smile playing along the edges of his lips. He was painted with love. He is not my great-grandfather.

“That was Uncle Edward,” my grandmother tells me as she bends over to pull fresh cookies out of the oven. “He died before I was born. He was very dear to my parents.”

We love our dead in direct proportion to how little we speak of them. I have never heard my grandmother say her dead son’s name, nor heard any stories in which he was present. The year he died is absent from all our remembered calendars. I only know that I used to have an uncle because once, when he was very drunk, my father forgot that his brother was dead.

So I am surprised to find this painting. We do not hold on to our dead.

“Whose brother was he?” I ask my grandmother.

She hums thoughtfully, pulling her oven mitt off her hand and dropping it onto the counter beside the sink. She pokes at one of the cookies to test the temperature. “My father’s,” she says after a minute, sliding a cookie off the baking sheet with a fork and handing it to me on a napkin. “He died before they were married. I don’t know much about him, dear. My parents never said.” She waits, hands on her hips, until I take a bite. “How’s it taste?” she asks. My grandmother saves voicemails so that she can hear our voices when we are far away.

“Delicious,” I tell her, and she kisses my forehead.

“Did Grampy have a brother?” I ask my great-grandmother when she finishes telling me the story of how she escaped Spain wrapped in a rug like Cleopatra.

My great-grandmother blinks at me. Dust catches the sunlight and swirls over her head like a faded crown. She runs her hands down the worn surface of her blanket, humming the way my grandmother does when she is putting off an answer. “Yes,” my great-grandmother says at last. “Eduardo.”

“What was he like?”

She smiles her melon smile. “He was beautiful,” she tells me, and lays back against her sheets, beaming at the ceiling. “He worked in the palace kitchens. I loved him very much.”

“Did you love Grampy as much as you loved Eduardo?”

“I loved Grampy because I loved Eduardo,” my great-grandmother says, but refuses to elaborate. 

There is a trunk in the attic with the letter “E” scripted in embossed gold in the place where the lock should be. Thick lines of dust cling to all its edges. It’s empty inside except for a few papers and a photo album.

The letters are all addressed to Eddy and signed all my love. I don’t know what my great-grandmother’s handwriting looks like. These letters could be from anybody. But there is a certain twist to the prose: “I think of you daily,” the woman writes, “I think of you the way the ocean thinks of the shore when the tide is out.”

My grandmother speaks of a Spain she’s never been to with the same nostalgia, the same artist’s eyes. She holds her breath before she speaks so that the words rush out like waves.

The last letter is dated in December. It begins, “My mother tells me you’ve been sick.”

My father says he doesn’t know anything about Uncle Edward, either. He says my great-grandmother painted his portrait and that was all she had to say on the matter. My father knows better than to ask a crazy woman for secrets.

“Did we come from Spain, originally?” I ask then, not sure what I want the answer to be. I used to dream of being a princess.

He laughs and ruffles my hair. “No,” he tells me. “I’m pretty sure our ancestors came from France.”

“What happened after Grampy gave you the fruit?” I ask my great-grandmother. It is not the last time that I will speak to her, but it is getting close.

My great-grandmother is seated by the window, ensconced in a chair that seems to swallow her. She used to be a dancer, but all of that muscle is gone. She smiles out at a landscape that I can’t see. I don’t know where we are—where we must be—when she reaches out to take my hand and murmurs, “This is my daughter. Isn’t she lovely? Doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, of course. Kids these days have no respect for their cultural heritage.”

After a beat of silence, my great-grandmother cuts me with a look. “Don’t be rude,” she hisses. “Say hello. Curtsy.”

I curtsy. I say, “Encantada.”

We are in a castle. Somewhere in the marketplace outside, a young man is selling fruit alongside his beautiful brother. My grandmother is well-loved by the sun and by a peasant girl from Cadiz. We have mouths like melons, red and bursting.

“Encantada,” my great-grandmother repeats, almost a song.

Encantada, encantada, encantada.

The year after my great-grandmother dies, I stand outside the Royal Palace of Madrid. The sun is setting. She must have come here once and remembered it, I tell myself, startled by how close her descriptions had come.

From a small stall on the side of the road, a dark-eyed Spanish boy with flushed cheeks offers me an apple. 

shakemedownandout:

hylandbenoist:

getsby:

koolkidseatgreens:

Well ok Kesha, maybe it’s because you’re an auto tuned peice of shit who shouldn’t be famous, you have no Buisness being in the music industry, it’s not even your music you fuck, someone else wrote it for you to record and them to auto tune yourself. And it’s not at all good . It’s not positive either. So complain some more.

I don’t know if you know this, tumblr user koolkidseatgreens, but Ke$ha is a certified genius. She has an IQ over 140 and an SAT score of 1500. When she was younger she would go to the library and do research for fun. Ke$ha is a both feminist and an advocate for equal marriage/rights for people of any sexuality, being a queer woman herself.

Ke$ha is a smart, professional woman, and just because she sings songs about wanting to let loose and have fun every once in a while doesn’t make her a piece of shit.

Ke$ha’s songs are meant to point out the sexism in our media. She treats men the same way many men in the music industry treat women, and she is hated on for it. Relentlessly. She sings on multiple occasions about taking charge in a sexual relationship, of how she only uses men for their body parts. She sexualizes men to make them uncomfortable. She sexualizes men for a reaction, so that people can both see why women are so uncomfortable with their sexualization and also to point out the inequality between the sexes both in the media and in the world at large.

She is judged so harshly for singing about things that make many men famous.

If you listen to Ke$ha’s deconstructed album you will see that she actually has some talent, which may be hard to hear because she does in fact use a fair amount of autotune. This is because of her genre and because of the kind of music she chooses to create as an artist. Ke$ha may not write her songs, but this doesn’t meant she isn’t a good artist or a good person. This doesn’t mean she deserves your harsh words. Some singers are good at writing, but that’s hardly a requirement. Last time I checked whether or not you can sing has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a poet.

You should not be calling anyone a piece of shit, my friend, especially someone you’ve never sat down and had a conversation (or even taken the time to wonder about her feelings!), but if anyone deserves that kind of language it’s not Ke$ha.

You may think that by shaming women for expressing their sexuality and having fun every once in a while, that you are somehow abolishing sexism. That in weeding out the less ‘deserving’ women you are gaining our sex more respect. This is not the case, and the fact that you and many others feel such a strong need to shame this woman who has done nothing wrong, especially not to you, shows that we still have a very far away to go.

Um I’m just going to add, Ke$ha actually does write her own songs. For example, here’s her first album’s tracklist:

She has also ritten for other artists, probably most famously “‘Till The World Ends” by Britney Spears, which is part of why she’s on the remix of it. She wrote for years and was even the female voice on Flo Rida’s “Right Round” but refused to be credited because she didn’t want her first single to not be her own work. She spent years, starting at the age of 15, writing music before she came out with her album because she wanted to make sure it was all her own and all what she wanted to do.

You can even get all her unreleased music which, combined with her actual albums, is 10.3 hours according to my iTunes playlist. Some artists have been around for twice as long as her and haven’t written that many songs. 

Not only have critics proclaimed she could be a country star if she ever leaves the pop music business (which is showcased on her unreleased track “Goodbye”), but she’s actually the daughter of a very talented country songwriter. Her music is actually fairly well praised by the music critics community and if you listened to any of her songs that her record won’t let her release as singles—“Last Goodbye”, “The Harold Song”, “Only Wanna Dance With You”, any of her ballads—she can write multiple styles of songs. She’s just stuck in a box of what she can release and then shallow minded people call her dumb for having fun.

That’s a big fuck you for hating Ke$ha.

the thing about ke$ha is

SHE’S FUCKING GREAT. 

(via notaflower)

thecakebar:

Peanut Butter Lava Cookies Tutorial {click link for full tutorial/recipe}

(via audrey1nd)

candles in the wind: completely impractical, just like your girlfriend

(via fuck-it-fire-everything)

ifeelbetterer:

sarahreesbrennan:

michaelpalin:

Mae West one-liners.

Who doesn’t want to be Mae like Mae West? ;)

I love to think about the fact that nothing but chutzpah made her the sexiest woman ever.

#mae west come up and see me sometime

ifeelbetterer, killin’ it with the mae west tag

particlesofspace:

Teen Wolf. Halloween in Hale House 

by ~Alex-JD-Black

Cora was born in a house that sighed, that scratched its fingernails down the windows on dark nights after rain. She was born in a house with doors that locked permanently in the summer when the wood expanded. She was born in a house with Wilma was here scratched into the basement floorboards, only nobody ever knew who Wilma was.

Cora was born in a house that screamed and buckled under fire’s impatient fingers, a house that came loose like a bad knot in somebody’s shoulder. It had ghosts before it burned down and it had ghosts after. Her mom was a ghost and her dad was a ghost and she and Peter and Derek were ghosts.

“This is the story of Wilma,” Laura used to whisper at night with a flashlight held under her chin. “This is the story of the Hale House ghost.” 

Laura, Cora thinks as the moon fills her up and Derek cries out her name, Laura, Laura, Laura, we are the Hale House ghosts.

sheercalculatedsilliness:

(via faultybeef)