Reading

Peedeel's Blog

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whisky, or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week’s supply of gasoline.

Often I hear people say they do not have the time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game?…

View original post 76 more words

I did love you

Peedeel's Blog

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

View original post

Nature will not name itself

Peedeel's Blog

There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a distant echo. Nature will not name itself. Granite doesn’t self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject… But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words.

Robert MacFarlane
The Word-Hoard: Robert MacFarlane on rewilding our language of landscape

View original post

(the king of swords)

via (the king of swords)

learned on my own

Peedeel's Blog

What I had to learn about poetry is that the poem wasn’t necessarily going to tell me something. It was going to be something that I learned on my own in the poem but maybe the next reader would learn something different. This also draws me to writing: I am free from having to know something. That’s the most natural mode of learning for me – questions, not answers.

Natalie Diaz
This Life is Supposed to Hurt

View original post

How to Tell if a Woman is a Bitch

I GUESS I’M ONE

Individual Empowerment

It’s not always easy to spot a bitch, but once you know what to look for it becomes easier to identify, label and put a woman in a box.

1. She stands up for herself and others. Think Harriet Tubman or Wilma Mankiller.

2. She doesn’t care about your opinion of how she should dress or that you want her to smile. Think Serena Williams or Angelina Jolie.

3. She is comfortable with her sexuality, even if it doesn’t exist in a standard form.

4. She is a feminist who publicly speaks for equality. Think Margaret Cho or Jessica Williams.

Now you now how to spot a bitch. What did I miss? Leave a comment below about how you are a bitch or a bitch you admire.

 I have a seesaw relationship with “bitch”. I don’t like the negative connotations, but at the same time it offends me…

View original post 229 more words

The 9 Best Spots to Hit an Attacker in Self Defense

I was taught this stuff in 1978, in Sex Ed/Health class. I was also told that the best weapon a woman could have was her BRAIN … any other weapon (such as a gun) could be taken away from her & used against her.

BRAINS.

Individual Empowerment

There are so many great self-defense moves to learn depending on how you are attacked. In my self-defense class I teach women and girls how to escape from choking, bear hugs, and to get out from under a man.  Of course if you can stop the attacker from every putting you into a hold this is best. Hitting the most sensitive parts of the body is just as important as learning to escape holds.

There are 9 points that I was trained to hit if I was ever attacked. These points are meant to disable an attacker by causing enough pain for you to safely move away from and if possible run away.  A perk of these points is that you don’t need to be a muscle builder to use them for self-defense. You just need the force of your body and momentum. Striking the most sensitive parts of a…

View original post 636 more words

fairytale

truth, this

Peedeel's Blog

A fairytale doesn’t exist in a fixed form; it’s something like a tune that can migrate from a symphony to a penny whistle.

Marina Warner
How fairytales grew up

View original post

(the queen of swords)

via (the queen of swords)

write a poem

Peedeel's Blog

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise, you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere because that’s always easiest.

John Berryman
Quoted by Phil Levine in ‘a memoir piece for Ploughshares’

View original post