Five Star Friday's 220th Edition Is Brought to You By Rigoberta Menchú

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by the parenting of teenagers, manifestos, moving and letting go, getting back to basics, money and romance, writing and romance, the truth about our media, rape culture's portrayal of good guys, holes, and Rigoberta Menchú:

What I treasure most in life is being able to dream. During my most difficult moments and complex situations I have been able to dream of a more beautiful future.

     — Rigoberta Menchú

Happy Friday!

"Manifesto: That Thing You Want To Say" from Mocha Momma:

My first manifesto was born that day and so was my voice. I started using it and telling people that I was worth something and so was my fatherless daughter. Shame is a tool people wield over you to conform to their standards. It helps them feel better and live their own dismal lives in the caste system they create. What did I have to be ashamed of then?

Nothing. Not then and not now. Say that thing you want to say to people. I was an 18 year old with a toddler on her hip when I learned to take a deep breath and just say it. How could the Dirindas of the world possibly react when I opened my mouth and demanded they treat me better? If the Dirindas don't want me talking about them now, then they should have treated me better, because I have a voice and a story about being a girl who people tossed aside, ignored, or tried their damnedest to shame.

"Caterpillars vs. Butterflies" from Swistle:

I realize it's ridiculous, because it's not like the literature doesn't explain how this works, but I feel like I signed on for one kind of life and got another kind of life. It's as if I thought long and hard about a pet, and decided after much research and reflection to get a pet caterpillar. It's not that I don't like butterflies, but that's not what I wanted. Now I'm stuck taking care of a pet that's completely wrong for me.

"Ok? Ok." from Zizzivivizz:

There are pine needles all over my floor. In some places they're heaped up in little piles, and they smell like the sweetest, spiciest thing, but they can be sharp at the same time. They stick to my shoes and socks. They twist themselves into the fibers of the rug, at the same time that the rug fibers cling to everything. They follow me everywhere, and it is that way with life too. Things are sweet and spicy and sharp and clinging, and they follow me everywhere no matter how much I try to keep them in place. The world and history and the after-effects of the things I do, they are insistently messy like that. They don't stay in place. Or their place is everywhere, tangled up with everything, on the bottom of my socks and pressed — too late! — between the wrapping paper and the tape on your Christmas present.

"It’s Time to Take Back The Blog" from Girl Gone Travel:

...a lot of us really just wanna be able to write a good story and I say it's time. It's time to take back the blog. It's time to forget about the stats and the likes and the views and just write a damn good story.

And brands, come back to the reasons why you were intrigued with bloggers in the first place: our ability to genuinely connect with our community. Our ability to share with those who trust us and look to us for information because they know we won't steer them wrong.

"The Problem With Breaking Up With A Rich Boy is a Joseph Cornell Box" from Davka: Deer Girl Medicine:

The problem with breaking up with a rich boy is
the way I said to him, your mother is beautiful,
and he agreed and called her the Earth Mother
but didn't say it back to me
while I fingered her crystals and smelled her white sage
and prayed at her altar covered with paid for Grace
gilded in gold and layered in glass
of pique du jour stars like delicate lace
of infinite good luck, chance,
and zeros in sixes
and I say, so is mine, she is just a little polluted.

"Romancing the Writing / Sabbatical Update #3" from Sara Zarr:

"It's ingratitude that destroys that romance."

The romance of a long-term relationship is different than that of a new one, obviously. The nerve endings may not crackle. The pulse may not speed up. It may take more work to see beauty in what has become the everyday. The more I think about what Scott said, the more I think the heart of a long-term romance is in fact gratitude. I get to do this job. I get to love this good person who loves me back. I get these awesome friends. I don't have to despair that life is meaningless. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

"Just Shut Up." from not language but a map:

I know that as someone who has spent years being taught to analyze media, as someone who has actively worked to develop the skill of understanding what a given film is attempting to wring from me, I still want to see Hugh Grant kiss Martine McCutcheon. I know that the real trick to the continued, pervasive prevalence of shit like rape culture is that it's everywhere all the time, slipped in under the radar and riding on the fact that it’s the status quo, hidden in plain goddamn sight.

"Sexual Consent in Pop Culture: Waiting for Consent Doesn't Make You a Hero" from Balancing Jane:

Not being a rapist should not be a symbol of being a hero; it should be the bare minimum for decent behavior. Refusing to sleep with someone who is too intoxicated to consent or who is being forced into sex because someone is threatening her does not make you a "good guy;" it just means that you pass one of the lowest bars for basic humane treatment.

"Deep Holes and Mountain Tops" from The Crimson String:

I remember once I went diving with my ex. We had our wetsuits on in the middle of the day, and people turned to stare at him striding down the beach and plunging into the water. I used to tell him all the time that he reminded me of poetry, and he was poetic in that moment. Anyway, the water was murky and filled with sand. We didn't find the wreck we were looking for. We got out and decided to just have a few drinks on the beach. We took our wetsuits off, and I remember him saying,

"Now, we aren't special. We are just like everyone else on this beach."

Please come back and share good writing with us over the coming week to be featured on the next Five Star Friday. If you have read a really good piece on someone else's weblog, submit it by Thursday at midnight CST to have it featured on Five Star Friday.

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The Best of Five Star Friday 2012

The Best of Five Star Friday 2012, the 219th edition, is brought to you by the daughter of an alcoholic, Newtown and the importance of our stories, the emptiness of tech gadget greed, mortality and the passage of time, the treatment of girls and young women in North American culture, the love and remembrance of a dear friend, the burden of nostalgia, what it is to be a real man, the grossest massage a pregnant lady could accidentally have, race and guns in America, and Chaim Potok:

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

     — Chaim Potok

Five Star Friday started up way back in 2008. In part, I was being lazy and just wanted all of you to bring me good things to read on a weekly basis, but I was also interested in seeing what was out there to see. I had largely been invested in only a small part of the blogosphere for the first five years of my online existence, and I wanted to explore. For over four years since then, we have explored together, and I am so thankful for your support and all of the writers we have featured here. I have been dragged over the emotional coals, sent into long meditations, and had my heart and mind changed by the pieces we have shared over the years, and I thought it only right to highlight the best of 2012's 44 Five Star Fridays.

I spent a good part of today reading, making lists, and culling the best I could find from all of this year's Five Star Fridays. I started with a master list of 65 links, and then I organized them by genre, and then I alphabetized the genres, and then I pared it down to 24 links, and then I pared multiple posts from the same sites down to one, and then I sweat out the last seven deletions like I was deciding which books would be included in the Bible's canon. That's ridiculous, I know, but I dearly loved 24 of the posts, and saying no to 14 of them just felt unjust, but that's the way it is. So saith my arbitrary rule that I could only choose ten.

So, without further ado, here are 10 really and truly excellent posts culled from 2012's Five Star Fridays. Comments are a rarer thing these days and a valuable currency, so comment as you go to show these writers the appreciation they so deserve.

Happy Friday!

"Day Fourteen" from Whiskey In My Sippy Cup:

I learned to compartmentalize. I learned that [I] was able, if I wanted it badly enough, to love someone so much for what was good in them while at that very same moment, being absolutely terrified of every single way they were probably going to kill a part of me the next day.

"Our Stories Matter Because We Matter: Thoughts On the Power of Our Voices" from Brené Brown's Ordinary Courage:

Our complex, nuanced stories are the path to healing and change. They are the truth and there's no better foundation for change than the truth.

We need politicians and policies that reflect the stories of our lives, not the stories that are easy to sell because they create fear and blame.

"Fever Dream of a Guilt-Ridden Gadget Reporter" by Mat Honan at Gizmodo:

I'm forever wanting something new. Something I've never seen before, that no one else has. Something that will be both an extension and expression of my person. Something that will take me away from the world I actually live in and let me immerse myself in another. Something that will let me see more details, take better pictures, do more at once, work smarter, run faster, live longer.

"April Flowers" from Crib Chronicles:

it is April. twelve springs this year since i've seen myself reflected in her eyes, and mostly — even living here — she seems like memory. time does that. my children grow and i wax wistful and i know these early days will soon feel gone and historical and… simply done.

"On Being an Object, and Then Not Being an Object" from Finslippy:

Being middle aged renders you invisible to the kinds of creeps who dole out harassment, so you're mostly left alone. I'm really enjoying it. Not only do I not miss my youth, I am pleased to be rid of it.

To be a young woman in our culture means that you exist, from an alarmingly young age, for the appreciation of others. Therefore, your every feature is fair game for public appraisal.

It means you become accustomed to a certain kind of gaze: a cold survey of your merits and deficits.

"In Our Hearts They Are Staying There" from Davka: Deer Girl Medicine:

She loved me so much. She loved me so much. See? She said so. She loved me so much. So much. I was loved in this single speck of a life amidst aeons of stars and lives, I was so loved by her. And there will never be another love like it. She did understand me and that is so rare. Now she is gone and I don't know what to say except I want to wear those words of love like a badge of honor as I walk through my own life to say to anyone who cares, she loved me.

"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.

"Self-Made Man #17: Real Men" by Thomase Page McBee at The Rumpus:

We all get the message of what a man is meant to be but, unlike feminism's unbraiding of the ideal feminine, hypermasculinity sits like an elephant on steroids, stinking up the living room. It's complex to examine what being a man means because most of us, whether we realize it or not, are committed to a monolithic answer.

"How I Might Have Just Become the Newest Urban Legend" from Pamie:

And the masseuse opens the curtain at this point and sees me naked on my knees, giant tits and belly facing him and he’s like, "Do you need more time?" And I'm like, "Uh! Um… no, it's just… uh… there's something…" — you guys, I don't know what made me want to be polite in this situation, maybe it was the Enya or the romantic lighting, but mostly I was thinking of all the other people in their tents around me and while part of me is like "NO, I NEED YOU TO COME IN HERE AND DEAL WITH THE FACT THAT I AM COVERED IN JIZZ."

But instead I’m like, “Uh, there’s something on the bed here and I’m… it’s not… well, I think it’s… from a man. Don’t smell it.”

"How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance" by Kiese Laymon at Gawker:

I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life but I've definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.

Please come back and share good writing with us over the coming week to be featured on the next Five Star Friday. If you have read a really good piece on someone else's weblog, submit it by Thursday at midnight CST to have it featured on Five Star Friday.

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Five Star Friday's 218th Edition Is Brought to You By William Boyd

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by the far-reaching effects of seemingly simple things, simple things that can better our lives, our connectedness, the fact that our stories matter, our ability to help carry and release each other's grief, and William Boyd:


photo credit: Michael Fennell

I have taken refuge in the doctrine that advises one not to seek tranquillity in certainty but in permanently suspended judgement.

     — William Boyd, Brazzaville Beach

Happy Friday!

"Churches Without Chairs: How Christians Used to Worship" from The Second Eclectic:

The injustices that came with pews show us how much influence a technology can wield when we thoughtlessly adopt it. Who would have imagined that a few pieces of furniture would reinforce the class system? Today, segmentation still happens. People still tend to sit in the same general locations each Sunday. But the class conflict has diminished more or less—the pews have been better integrated.

But it took a few hundred years. It took a few hundred years before the injustices of pews were acknowledged and put right.

Today, with the technologies we’re installing, chairs seem benign. And as our technologies become more powerful, the extremes can run further and their impacts deeper before we see well enough to reverse them. Who knows what effects they will have had by then.

"After Newtown" from The Gallivanting Monkey:

I see so much "we're helpless, it's hopeless" and it makes me want to grab every last person by the shoulders and shake them furiously until their heads fall off. You are NOT helpless. It is NOT hopeless. Stop repeating that toxic, soul-killing, planet-harming lie. We're connected to each other. It's not a metaphor. What takes place within one of us affects all of us. If you genuinely don't like feeling helpless, then rejoice. You're not. Get to work.

"28 Brilliant Tips for Living Life" from zenhabits:

Sometimes the littlest change can make a world of difference.

Start waking a little earlier and spending some quiet time to start your day? The rest of the day has been transformed.

What little change might change your life? You can pick one or two from the list below at random — I can almost guarantee that one of them will do worlds of good for anyone.

"Bearing the Unbearable" from Planting Dandelions:

Maybe these sudden pangs of sorrow were invitations to carry a bit of her burden for a moment. Maybe, by taking in that pain, I was somehow converting it at a collective, unconscious level, so that my friend could catch her own breath for a second. Maybe human suffering is meant to have an overflow valve — what one of us cannot handle alone, spills over into the hearts of others. Who knows? But the thought gave me peace, and forever changed the way I meet grief that arises from other people’s tragedy.

"Our Stories Matter Because We Matter: Thoughts On the Power of Our Voices" from Brené Brown:

In times of national crisis we often think, "My stories don't matter – this isn't about me" or "I'll stay quite because I'm somewhere in the middle of the obnoxious people raging on TV." The truth is that in the midst of tragedy nothing matters more than our stories. Our complex, nuanced stories are the path to healing and change. They are the truth and there's no better foundation for change than the truth.

Please come back and share good writing with us over the coming week to be featured on the next Five Star Friday. If you have read a really good piece on someone else's weblog, submit it by Thursday at midnight CST to have it featured on Five Star Friday.

And because you are a fan of finding good new writing on the internet:

• Subscribe — Subscribe to this website to keep up with us every week.
• Show your pride — Take one of our badges for your website and spread the word.