hoarding your goodness doesn't make you richer

Every morning I scramble to cram myself onto a crowded train full of already armoured commuters. Everyone’s staking their claim, chafing against the day, ready for a confrontation. It’s a bloody ego battle played out in hot looks and hair flicks. Who slams into you when the train judders, who’s going to be first off when the doors slide back – suddenly becomes this crucial measure of who’s best, or more important, or – something. I don’t know. Do any of us know?

I do it too, every morning. But I’ve been thinking about opportunities to be kind. This morning I decided to let everyone off ahead of me. I smiled. I gestured for them to move first. Even those people who met my gaze (Londoners are conscientious objectors to eye contact) looked at me suspiciously. But one lady looked surprised, and smiled widely at me, and said thank you, and she meant it. We gave each other the opportunity to be kind, and I felt a bit less of an army of me by the time I stepped onto the platform.

Maybe I’ll forget tomorrow, or be crabby, or late. But days are just ordinary moments strung together like beads on a string, and I want my fingers to hover longer over the sweet options. If you’ve got it, give it away.

image above from masaaki miyara via flickr.

i know this much is true

if you feel it, say it. or, as frank o' hara said with heart-stopping simplicity -

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

i know this much is true

i know this much is true

we all must die. but until then, we all must live.

the tectonic plates are shifting. i'm just glad to be here to see it, to have to squint through the sunshine to see the monitor, to smell my mum's skin again, the most ancient smell in my small world.


...and for further proof that a pink moon gonna get us all, look at Nicholas Nixon's lovely, unsentimental series documenting the ageing of his wife and her sisters, or the Family Goldberg's collective growing up, or The Chive's fast-forwarded life, or, or, or -

no-one's going to give you permission

i'm loving the NYSAT project in new york at the moment. from Cool Hunting:

Finding it difficult to locate a strip of space free from any advertising, Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign did some research and found many of the billboards around New York City are illegal. To propose an alternate use of these city spaces, Seiler organized the New York Street Advertising Takeover, a network of citizens set out to transform the spaces into their own works of art.


aesthetically, there's some really lovely work in there, but what warms my cockles most is the way that we're usually so cowed by the law of ownership and the money changing hands and the simple feeling that public spaces are not OURS. how much time do we lose waiting for an elusive somebody to grant us permission to do something we long to do?


i spend a lot of time waiting for someone to write me a note or issue authorisation to go ahead. but i think i might bunk off.

(belated) tuesday: i know this much is true

after we moved to australia, every week, my mum would get two aerogrammes in the post, one addressed in my nana's dense scrawl, and the other bearing my aunty peg's spidery handwriting (she was actually my great aunty peg, but woe betide anyone who called her that...). every week, without fail, they sat down to take stock of the days, think of my mum across the globe in this scorched new place, and fold up their observations and ideas and missingness.

i remember how my mum would sink into them, how she'd become far away, how she'd stop being mum for a few minutes and become someone's daughter.

tuesday: i know this much is true

i don't know much, but i know i love you. plus one or two other things besides.