sweepthesunshine: Rockstar Links&Things

“Two or three days ago, the author Iain M Banks was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he released a statement saying that he was giving up writing to spend his remaining months on honeymoon with the girl he’s finally going to marry, and with his friends and family, doing the things he loves and going to the places he loves. And I’d like to ask a simple question here, why?

“What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? I mean, people — Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. Nobody calls her disabled.” […] 

“People that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology — robotics, bionics — with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity.”

“Please.

Make life easier for those around you, not harder.

Every person you know is fighting their own great battle. Few of us ever know what those battles entail, and so often we say and do things that push others deeper and harder into the front lines of those battles. I know such has been the relentless lifelong reality for me.

Love a person for the person that they are.

Or dislike them for the person that they are.

But don’t love or dislike them for the sole reason that they see people differently than you do. Don’t love or dislike them because they experience the world differently than you do.”

“There’s no return to them being cute little boys,” said Christine, who regularly manages their tantrums and fights over Monopoly. “They’re big strong men—and that presents a quite different set of problems.”

[i love this. -y]

anthonybourdain:

“I don’t know karate—but I know ka-razy” –James Brown

For the past eight years, I’ve been making a television show called NO RESERVATIONS. I wrote it. I executive produced it. And I appeared in it. My partners and I always tried hard to make it good. […]

I like to think I’m a man of my word. If I tell you I’m going to meet you tomorrow at a movie theater to see a film at twelve o’ clock, I will be there. And I’ll be there early. I will expect the same of you. If I make an agreement—especially about something as personal as the use of my name and image, I expect that agreement will be honored. So it came as a shock and a disappointment to turn on the TV for the last two episodes of my show, and see that someone had taken footage that me and my creative team  had shot for my show, cut it up and edited it together with scenes of a new Cadillac driving through the forest. Scenes of me, my face, and with my voice, were edited in such a way as to suggest that I might be driving that Cadillac. That, at least, I was very likely IN that Cadillac—and that if nothing else, I sure as shit was endorsing Cadillac as the vehicle of choice for my show. All this following seamlessly from the actual show so you were halfway through the damn thing before you even realized it was a commercial.  

But this is what moved me: We think we move through the world unseen. But sometimes (just inches away even) is someone who can hold the hard stuff with you. Our vulnerability creates a space for connection. A tender place where others are allowed to step in and offer what they naturally want to give — their comfort, their kindness, their presence. […]

I was trained at a young age to give people their space, to not pry, not to ask questions, to not get into anyone else’s business. If I had a problem myself, it was not to be dumped on anyone else. But I can see now that this advice was from people who were terrified of their own vulnerability.

The truth is this

We need each other. And we need our friends (family, neighbors, anybody) to know the real truth about how we are doing. We need to remember that we all struggle, and if it ever looks perfect from the outside? well, it is far from that. We need strangers to comfort us too, to remind us that help can come from anywhere, even from the most unexpected places. We need to remember that (mostly) the world is safe and good and sometimes even a little bit magic.