Five Star Friday's 187th Edition Is Brought to You By Jane Jacobs

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by confession, a child of a veteran, an adoptee reaching out to her birth mother, being honest, an argument for sustainable meat, habit failure, the suburbs of Detroit, and Jane Jacobs:

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

     — Jane Jacobs

Happy Friday!

"7 Things Happen to You When You Are Completely Honest" from The Altucher Confidential:

At first we hug our boundaries in chains. We think "if we tell the girl we like her, she might not like me back". We think, "If I say I like this candidate, my friends might hate me." If I say X, everyone else might say Y. And so on. But more and more we start to feel where those boundaries are and we push them out. We push them further and further away from ourselves. Until finally they are so far away it's as if they don't exist at all. You don't need money for that. Or a big house. Or a fancy degree or car. Every day, just push out those boundaries a little further.

"Forgiven" from Moms Without Blogs:

I got up from the pew without thinking too much. I was just doing what Phoebe was telling me to do. As I stood behind her, she shifted in her place with a nervous smile on her face as she looked towards the confessional door waiting for it to open. She was next. I gently rubbed her back and asked her if she was ready. She said she was. She had the sweetest look of innocence and excitement in her eyes. A new adventure.

The door opened, her classmate came out beaming and proud, and she slipped in without needing any final words of encouragement from me. She was on her way.

"Joel Salatin responds to New York Times' 'Myth of Sustainable Meat'" by Joel Salatin at Grist:

At Polyface, we only purport to be doing the best we can do as we struggle through a deviant, historically abnormal food and farming system. We didn't create what is and we may not solve it perfectly. But we're sure a lot farther toward real solutions than McWilliams can imagine. And if society would move where we want to go, and the government regulators would let us move where we need to go, and the industry would not try to criminalize us as we try to go there, we'll all be a whole lot better off and the earthworms will dance.

"ANZAC & PTSD: Acronyms That Go Together In My World" from Where's My Glow?:

I was part of a counseling group specifically for children of Vietnam Veterans a few years back and even though we were from such varied backgrounds; different socioeconomic groups, different religions, different ages... we all had identical stories.

From the shoes so highly polished you could see your reflection in them to the nightmares and the trauma.

From the school shirts ironed to within an inch of their life to the constant yelling, violence and alcoholism.

From the regimented schedule to the constant walking on eggshells, unsure of what was going to happen next.

"Crazy Talk: The Do-What-You-Love Guide" from zenhabits:

Crazy talk is what I’m going to give you today, in hopes that perhaps one of you will expand your possibilities. It is possible — I did it, all while working a full-time job, doing free-lance writing on the side, and having a wife and six kids. I did it, even if I never dared to dream it for the first three decades of my life.

I am not someone who likes to give career advice, or teach people to be online entrepreneurs. So I’m not going to do that here. I’ll just tell you this: it’s possible. Yes, it absolutely is possible.

"Search Started" from The Daily Smoke:

Years ago I met another adoptee — she happened to share my birthday. When we talked about our respective experiences as adopted children, I was shocked by her reaction of anger towards her birthmother. I could in no way relate to how she felt; I assumed that all adopted children would be grateful to the birth parents having made such a sacrifice for the benefit of their children.

Please know: I admire you; I am grateful to you; I have absolutely no negative emotions toward you or the decision you made all those years ago.

"The Fauxtopias of Detroit's Suburbs" from Sweet Juniper!:

I have never lived anywhere so burdened by nostalgia, which is a sort of enemy to history. How many older suburbanites will cluck on and on about the state of Detroit today and then wax nostalgic for how good it was in the good old days? If it was so good, why did anyone leave? Websites like this one sum up the nostalgia industry of the Detroit diaspora. Most of the folks who live in the communities I've discussed above do not trace their origins to whitewashed steeples or quaint one-room schoolhouses that have been saved as a nostalgic reminder of a past that never really existed. They trace their stories through Detroit, and the old world beyond it. While Detroit rots, the nostalgic, fauxtopian villages that surround that city are a vision of history some would rather embrace. This is what happens when we try too hard to preserve the past. We create towns without memories. We abandon buildings by saving them. We create history without any history. A history of nowhere. A history that is, I suppose, easier to contend with.

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Comments

[Colleen Devlin]

Lovely, I loved them all especially "ANZAC & PTSD: Acronyms That Go Together In My World". Thanks for bringing this beautiful writing to one spot.