round-up: 5/6
reading recs, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
U.S. students are clashing over the Israel-Hamas war. What can colleges do?
PEN America ceremony canceled due to protest, Tony Kushner will donate prize money
13 days that rocked USC: How a derailed commencement brought ‘complete disaster’
Housekeeping:
An update: I am decidedly back in my jewelry-making era.
& some things I bought in April:
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Self-pleasure is an enormous, enormous part of my life, and a huge, huge help for me. People should be jerking it, man. I can’t stress it enough, as somebody with extreme body issues and dysmorphia that I’ve had my entire life.
She just came in and said hello, and she was so luminous. She’s still luminous. She walks in and it’s, like, there’s too much light in the room.
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.
-Judith Butler
I do keep going back to gender, even though I feel so exhausted by it and wanting very much to be liberated from it [...] There’s a history of handling it in extreme isolation, without a vocabulary or a community. It is important for me to be part of that vocabulary and community, and say this thing that I say throughout ‘Who’s Afraid of Gender?,’ that people have a right to move and breathe and love, or to walk the streets without fear of violence.
It happens in life all the time. You’ll sit down at a restaurant and they’ll be like, ‘Hi ladies!’ and I’m not the kind of person that instantly makes a big deal about things. But if it’s about someone in my life, I do, and I try and do it in a nice respectful way. You have to understand that we’re filming a TV show that will go out to 190 countries, so it is absolutely my duty to correct that. G’s the most beautiful human I’ve ever met in my life, and to see the amount of hate they get sometimes just because of something so simple, it really is heartbreaking. It also brings out a fierce, protective [sic] to me that I, sometimes, don’t even have for myself.
In the beginning, it did feel terrifying and exposing because I had questions and people were asking me questions that I didn’t have the answers to. It feels like this was all meant to happen. I feel like my life has been that way, my journey and growing up with this extreme shame of being homeless. Then, having to sell multi-million dollar homes on television. All these crazy things sounds like a writer wrote it! It’s almost stranger than fiction. With my sexuality being a touch point for so many conversations, I’m surrendering to the idea that it was meant to be. I’m meant to help other people understand it a little more. Maybe for kids watching Selling Sunset, it could be something as simple as not bullying someone who doesn’t have the right clothes or not bullying someone who is using a pronoun you think is silly. Maybe they didn’t know someone who was queer before, and now they see me on TV and see that I’m the same person; a regular person and a person they liked.
I also think that as soon as you put the pen to the paper, you’re making shit up. Anytime I’ve been at something with friends or family and I write about it later, people are like, “That’s not what happened.” I don’t believe I’m writing about myself any more than anybody else. Stuff very much like the stuff in Chelsea Girls did in fact happen to me, but it’s still an illustration of it rather than the Lord’s truth.
I love to read. It’s my problem. I think I like reading more than writing. That flavors what I give people; I want them to really enjoy the reading of my story. I’m repeating myself now, but I have a very human need to say that these things happened on this planet, and you should know, and it will change.
When anything is a new condition, you have to invent a new language.
come closer
consider my fisted hands trembling
how the nails bite into the first layer of my flesh
watch it break skin
see the blood
like a crimson fuck this
perfect for lipstick
to paint on my lips
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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