I’m pretty sure every girl goes through a “horse phase” at one point or another. Maybe it’s because we’re peddled Marguerite Henry, C.W. Anderson, and Walter Farley books early on in our youth. Maybe it’s just because horses are pretty. Whatever the reason, I and all my friends played with Breyer horses, drew pictures of horses, and ran around the school playground pretending were were jockeys.
Watching the Triple Crown races with my mom was a large part of my “horse phase.” She told me stories about picking her favorite horse with her sisters during the post parade during her childhood, and she and I did the same together. Admittedly, after 20 years of watching a Triple Crown drought I got a little jaded toward this tradition. I still enjoyed watching, I still picked a favorite, but my inexperienced heart had been broken too many times by spoiler horses to expect anything of greatness. By the time American Pharoah rolled around, I was barely paying attention. Read More on Medium
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Roseanne Barr said something racist and her show got cancelled. There’s no need to spend a lot of time re-hashing what was said or why; Barr has a long history of racist vitriol, and it was only a matter of time before ABC decided she wasn’t worth keeping on their payroll.
The aftermath of Roseanne’s cancellation resulted in more than simple backlash from her fans. Her show was regarded as the sitcom for Trump supporters, so a comment from the Trump administration was certain. The result was a nearly two-minute speech from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which she began the “but what about MY apology” circuit. Read More on Medium For several years I have volunteered for an organization that partners with internationals attending our local university. By picking them up from the airport, helping them buy winter coats, hosting a weekly community dinner, and connecting them to neighborhood resources, the goal is to ensure that international students and their families are made to feel welcomed and loved.
Welcoming and loving foreigners is a distant concept to much of America today. Americans voted in 2016 based on “cultural anxiety.” Attacks against people of color in the form of white supremacist rallies and police shootings have been exposed. A country that prides itself in aligning with “Christian” morality has come to a point where Christians are the least likely to accept responsibility for refugees. Most recently, immigrants have been indefinitely separated from their children, and thousands of undocumented children have been subsequently lost. Read More on Medium February 14, 2008, I was at after-school rehearsal for my high school’s spring play when a classmate looked at her phone and exclaimed to us all that there had been a shooting at Northern Illinois University, the college just up the road.
This was before widespread cell phone access among teens, and there certainly were no smart phones. The rest of us without phones had no way of getting in touch with our parents and no way to look up exactly where and when the shooting took place. This was particularly alarming for me because my dad worked for NIU. For all I knew, my dad had been shot. Read More on Medium I have been casually making videos on YouTube since 2010. Back then, YouTube was not a career goal, and analytics and algorithms were practically unheard of. People made videos because they enjoyed it. They made videos because it was a creative outlet. They made videos to find a sense of community.
I am still in that place. I don’t make videos consistently enough to earn money or to garner a plethora of views, but that doesn’t matter to me. The friendships I have made through the YouTube community and the things I’ve learned from those friendships are more valuable to me than trends or clickbait or AdSense earnings. It’s difficult for some people to understand, but I make videos because I like to make them, and that’s that. I recently was confronted about this. Read More on Medium I recently started a new job as a retail display coordinator. Having been with my company for five years I assumed people would have a vague understanding of the display branch and, therefore, what I would be doing in my new position. Not so. A few dozen tragic conversations later, I’ve discovered it’s incredibly difficult to grasp.
Read More on Medium My church’s caring ministry is affiliated with GriefShare, an international grief support program. The first holiday season after my dad passed away, I went to a GriefShare Surviving the Holiday seminar. Going in, I didn’t think I had a lot to gain from it; I had already gone through several “firsts” with my dad’s birthday and father’s day, so the first round of holidays without Dad didn’t seem like a big deal.
However, as I went through the seminar, I realized I probably wasn’t as prepared as I thought, and I ended up gaining a few pearls of wisdom that I’ve taken with me over the years: Read more at Too Damn Young: SYCAMORE – Whimsical Perspective, a new store in downtown Sycamore, will open its doors Thursday. The shop is located in the Opera House building at 366 W. State St. on the corner of California and State streets. ... Laura Bright, owner of Whimsical Perspective along with her husband, Ron, hope to add a new, unique vibe to the downtown area. Bright has been posting on a blog under the same name for the past six years, featuring painted furniture pieces, DIY home décor and design, which will serve as inspiration for the store. When people think of environmentally damaging industries, they usually think of “dirty” industries like oil, mining, and sewage. But what about the industries that make the shoes on your feet, your trusty pair of jeans, or your favorite mascara?
We rarely think about clothing and beauty products beyond our own closets, but the growing popularity of environmental activism has created a higher demand for environmentally conscious fashion and cosmetics. The fashion industry has been dubbed “the second dirtiest industry in the world next to big oil.” That claim has yet to be completely corroborated, but the severity of the fashion industry’s environmental impact is clear. Many smaller industries are involved in the process of producing clothing, including farming, processing, manufacturing, and shipping, all of which involve chemicals, water waste, and pollution. In fact, 4 of the top 10 polluting industries in the world are used in the creation of fashion items. The biggest area of criticism within the industry is “fast fashion,” which produces inexpensive clothing at a high turnover rate. Retailers like H&M, Zara, Forever 21, and Target are at the forefront of the fast fashion market, and they gladly supply the demand. The appeal is obvious; every time you go to Target to pick up a gallon of milk, you can glance at the clothing section and see something new that you have to have. Unfortunately, the desire for the “new” causes sweatshops and manufacturers to produce at all costs, using thousands of liters of water and several million tons of chemicals in production each year. But the impact doesn’t stop after production. When an item goes “out of style” after a short fashion season and consumers are ready to get rid of their clothing, thrift stores are unlikely to take the items; fast fashion items are often cheaply made to begin with, and because items go out of style so quickly they’re considered “worthless” and 75% of garments end up in the garbage. To make matters worse, many fabrics can take up to 50 years to decompose in landfills. Fast fashion isn’t the only industry contributor to environmental damage. High-end designers who use imported fabrics and ship their designs to-and-from their international fashion houses forget the impact that vehicle emissions have on their carbon footprint. For the average person, conscious consumerism is key to making sustainable fashion choices. Purchasing the majority of your clothing from resale shops and boutiques is an easy way to make sure you aren’t financially contributing to fast fashion. If you have more freedom in your budget, looking at the fabrics and materials of your garments (no dyes or non-organic cotton) can prove valuable. As fashion designer Vivienne Westwood has said, “Buy less, choose well, make it last.” While it’s unlikely that the fashion industry will convert to an entirely sustainable model, many designers and celebrities are taking a stand against its bad practices. Eileen Fisher, Stella McCartney, and Ralph Lauren are leading sustainable designers, and several prominent celebrities, including Emma Watson, Zac Posen, and Lupita Nyong’o, have made bold statements about sustainability. Many beauty brands are beginning to adopt a sustainable attitude as well. It is fairly common for beauty items to be sold in sustainable packaging like recycled (or recyclable) paper, plastic, or glass. Some companies have taken conscious consumerism a step further to address the global impact of factory farming. Most cosmetics use animal products in their formulas, and many companies test their products on animals. By adopting cruelty-free testing and creating vegan products, companies are taking a stand against factory farming. Unfortunately, the beauty industry has not developed a fully accountable system in their environmental activism. Some brands that claim to be cruelty free are owned by parent companies that are not cruelty-free, which can raise doubts over product sourcing within the company. In addition, product labeling isn’t always clear, and consumers could easily think a product that is labeled “cruelty-free” is free of animal products altogether. It is important to note that cruelty-free products only address animal testing, while vegan products address the product formulas themselves. Researching vegan cosmetics involves a careful look at product ingredients. Ingredients to avoid include keratin (found in hair, nails, and horns of mammals,) squalene (made of shark liver,) collagen (made from bones, tissues, and skins from animals,) guanine (made from fish scales,) lanolin (made from the grease of sheep’s wool,) carmine (made from insects,) and beeswax. Luckily, there are many cosmetic brands that have jumped on the vegan bandwagon, from affordable brands you can find at the drugstore lie NYX, Physicians Formula, Wet n’ Wild, Milani, and E.L.F, to high-end brands like Tarte, Kat Von D Beauty, Urban Decay, and Too Faced. While animal-hair brushes still dominate the market, many cosmetic tools, applicators, and brushes are going vegan as well. Whether or not eco-friendly models in clothing and beauty brands will become mainstream remains to be seen and will likely depend on continued consumer demand. With luck, awareness of the environmental impact of bad practices will continue to grow, and the desire for every industry to become environmentally aware will rise in tandem. Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet, well known for his political activism and exile. You’ve probably seen his romantic quotes on Pinterest, or books of his love poems featured prominently in bookstores and gift shops around Valentine’s Day.
Neruda also wrote poems about lost love, and about grief. No surprise, really since most of the people we consider to be “the greats” in creative fields were struggling with loss in one form or another. We can share commonalities and write what we can, but sometimes it takes an artist to put feelings to words. Read more at Too Damn Young: |
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