Five Star Friday's 106th Edition Is Brought to You By Joan Didion

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

     — Joan Didion

This Five Star Friday roundup is brought to you by Hug a Half Asian Day, a friendship breakdown, prejudice, avocados, bicycles, high hopes, a lack of windows, the notion of privacy, a doctor's self-revelation, the muck of life, overcoming fear, a great dislike for spooning, illness, and a daughter.

Please leave urls to your own good writing in the comments! Because I said so!

Happy Friday!

"Have You Hugged a Half Asian Today?" from Motherhood Uncensored:

Being the daughter of a full Chinese woman and a European mixed man was never a big deal until I got into my teen years and it became the world's worst pick-up line ever.

"What are you?"

Your worst fucking nightmare, asshole.

"The Breakdown of: Friendship" from 10% Fiction

" No Fatties: The Ethic of Funny" from The Cunting Linguist

"My Official Entry In the Unannounced Contest With ExLibris to Produce the Best Possible Blog Entry on Avocados" from In Palinode's Palace:

THE TITLE. Carrie Anne hooked my interest with the title "Ideas for Avocados," but she fails to introduce a single philosophical notion or aspect of intellectual history to any avocados in her post. Given the natural intelligence and curiosity of the avocado, this omission is baffling. The avocado on the right in the picture above, for example, has an excellent grasp of the notion of dualism, and the one on the left can give you a concise explanation of some of Kant's thornier ideas. The one in the middle is obviously dead.

" Teaching Kids to Ride a Bike is No Easy Task" from Mocha Dad

"Big Brother" from 20nothing.com

"E=mc²" from Slouching Past 40:

When Twelve was three years old, he stopped napping during the day. Swiftly I instituted quiet time: one hour in which he'd stay in his room and play with his toys or look at his books. That hour was less for him than it was for me. At least I knew my limits.

Quiet time lasted for nearly a year, until one Saturday when, heavily pregnant with Eight, I was half-reading, half-napping and heard a noise. I glanced up and startled to see the face of my preschooler peeking around the doorway. Twelve looked like he'd swallowed the canary and the cat, too. He'd never until that moment realized that he could simply open the door to his room and walk out.

"The Diving Board" from Ministry So Fabulous!

"Sisterhood of the Pootushies & Sinful Spooning" from A Blogoddess' Tale

"Ideas and Arms" from B. Hockey J.:

"Beyond" is wrong. There's a place prior to all the ideas you bat around to explain each other. It's the most fucked up mix of scary and awesome because, prior to your ideas, you're able to grasp in a comprehensive way that you don't know shit about shit and I mean nothing — you're fucked — but out of this soil of complete and utter fuckedness blooms the strange flower of knowing you can do whatever the hell you want.

Being fucked and free are connected. Let it blow your mind, smarty pants.

"Great Expectations" from The Web Log of Corey Lambert

"Dear Mark" from The Misadventures of the Frog Queen

"Gone Are the Teens. (Until We Meet Again.)" from Girl's Gone Child:

...I'll admit, I used to be afraid of all that. Of daughters, especially what it might mean, raising ours here, in this town. Of the pressures and the gamblers and her dreams. Of being yelled at through slammed doors as shoes went missing from closets. Dresses stained from being borrowed - warning her of the dangers of her body. Keeping her young without keeping her from life. Having to choose between telling her the truth about my past or lying to her.

"I never tried drugs. I waited to have sex. My fingers are crossed behind my back.

"Texas" from Hyperbole and a Half

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 Edition #105 Is Brought to You By Edith Wharton

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

— Edith Wharton

This Five Star Friday roundup is brought to you by self-loathing, a skunk, the Gulf, a red dress, face painting, Sassy magazine, privacy online, writing, and photographic meditation.

Please leave urls to your own good writing in the comments, because you are more awesome than you might think you are.

Happy Friday!

"Sneaky Hate Spiral" from Hyperbole and a Half:

Most of the time, I'm pretty even-tempered. Aside from the odd nervous breakdown or caffeine-induced bliss-seizure, I have the emotional variation of sand. However, every once in a great while, I'll lapse into what I like to call a "sneaky hate spiral."

"Shoving One Hand Up the Arse of Genetics" from Whoopee

"Love the Gulf" from Mommy Melee

"The Traveling Red Dress" from The Bloggess:

I want, just once, to wear a bright red, strapless ball gown with no apologies. I want to be shocking, and vivid and wear a dress as intensely amazing as the person I so want to be. And the more I thought about it the more I realized how often we deny ourselves that red dress and all the other capricious, ridiculous, overindulgent and silly things that we desperately want but never let ourselves have because they are simply "not sensible". Things like flying lessons, and ballet shoes, and breaking into spontaneous song, and building a train set, and crawling onto the roof just to see the stars better. Things like cartwheels and learning how to box and painting encouraging words on your body to remind yourself that you're worth it.

"Working the 1rst Grade Picnic Face Painting Booth" from Mom O Matic

"Are You Tired of Sassy Yet? THE ANSWER IS NO." from Style Rookie

" Facebook - Why I Choose to Stay (For Now)" from Making Strange:

I've... held onto my Facebook profile because I don't think walking away will necessarily deal with what I think is potentially a much larger issue. My mother, sister and two aunts are on Facebook and I can guarantee you that they probably don't understand the nuances of these privacy issues. If everyone who cares and understands what they are doing leaves the platform, who will challenge Facebook when they make the next update to their policy?

In the real world, if a business does something offensive or illegal, I am more apt to try and do something about it then just shrug and say, "Well, it's their store. If I don't like it I should suck it up or leave." Big companies should be publicly challenged - they are paying a lot of lawyers a lot of money to defend them. They don't need our help.

"Words Are Meaningless" from Stop Motion Verbosity

"Meditation" from Chookooloonks

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.

Five Star Friday Edition #104 Is Brought to You By Jeffrey A. Carver

Write from the soul, not from some notion what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.

     — Jeffrey A. Carver

This Five Star Friday roundup is brought to you by friendship, difficult adoptions, bathroom etiquette, living with multiple personalities, the 1980s, acceptance of randomness, random acts of kindness, female body hair, Facebook, gender variance, rednecks, death, sisterhood, and movies.

Also, don't be shy if you want to share urls to your own good weblog writing in the comments. The more the merrier!

Happy Friday!

"Threads" from Is There Any Mommy Out There?:

We have to meet people where they are if we want to help them. With open hearts, not wagging fingers. We have to meet people where they are and I will tell you something that I know for a fact about a parent, like me, who considers disrupting an adoption because they have reached their capacity to parent a traumatized child - I will tell you something that I know in my heart about a parent that places a child in foster care or in a mental health facility or at ranch for troubled kids, or even a parent who abandons a child on a plane alone - they are at rock hard bottom.

They are already wearing the hair shirt of guilt and self-loathing and it is cutting them to the core every single second of every single day.

"Men and the Courtesy Flush" from The Megalomaniac Mommy

"Suggestions for the No-Speak List" from sweet | salty

"Mismatched Boots" by Leah Peterson at The Huffington Post:

When a person with a Dissociative Disorder has more than one personality "out" at a time, it's called Coconsciousness. Throughout my life, I've experienced coconsciousness about half the time, sometimes more successfully than others.

"I Have a Friend" from All About Avacakes

"My Birthday Was AWESOME!!!" from What a Ride!

"Ya - I'd Always Wanna Be There" from Doobleh-Vay:

It was the music that I really cut my true blue romantic heart on and it never went away really. Years later when I would discover that I was alternative and much deeper than most of the student body at my school and that my musical tastes were governed by skater boys and what I saw on my neighbors MTV 120 minutes program weekly- I realized that my love for Bryan had to be hidden away because ballads and cheesy love songs were not what cool was made of.

I had to be firm with my heart. Only I couldn't. I would listen to the Violent Femmes and The Cure and all the music that I learned to love like a sickness, but I would secretly make myself Memorex tapes of Bryan Adams and think of nothing but tight pants and blond hair and the country of Canada. I would think of the day when I would be loved like that

"Flower Power" from Attack of the Redneck Mommy

"Facebook, Radical Transparency and Privacy: It's Not Just the Techies Who Are Mad" by Zephoria at BlogHer

"Righting" from Dead Baby Jokes:

Nothing was certain, but this much was clear: something had gone wrong, someone had blundered.

"On Being Whiskey Tango" from Ooph

"S/he: Stuck" from Schmutzie.com

"Traffic Patterns" from Flutter:

We held you, laid hands on you, talked to you. We absolved and loved and forgave and mourned. Cars drove down the street, in their careless living. Breeze rearranged the leaves across the sleeping grass. Your heart fluttered like a tiny bird, beautiful and fragile until it couldn’t fly anymore. 11:34 came and claimed you and granted you your rest.

"Cannes #3: Greed May Still Be Good" from Roger Ebert's Journal

"Life Lessons from Sister Little" by Surrender Dorothy

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.