Kelli > Recent Status Updates

Fantastic! Fried Green Tomatoes meets Fever Beach and have a teenager. Loved every minute! Highly recommend.

Perhaps because we’re so terrestrialy biased, air-breathing creatures that we are, it has taken us until now to realize that everything we care about is anchored in the ocean.

I want whoever reads this to understand what they’re getting, which is mainly confusion, because I don’t know how to be clear about any of this.

I can’t explain it, except to say that inaction felt obvious, a decision already made by someone else. The basic truth of the situation occurred to me only as if shouted and barely heard. I felt afraid, of course—but, beneath this, still in some sense quietly removed. I suppose a body has to find a way to cope with panic. I don’t know how this works. Panic, as I’ve said, is a waste of oxygen.

I see my mother in myself, though less in the sense of inherited features and more in the sense of an intruder poorly hidden behind a curtain.

And she was right. I would have accepted an apology. I probably would never have let them fully back into my life. I’d never really trust them. It would take at least a decade to ever rebuild any sort of relationship. But it would have been nice to have what my parents put me through be acknowledged.

“I don’t know why they still get to me,” I said. “Because they’re your first bullies. For some reason you never grow out of the way you feel about the people who hurt you when you were a kid,” she said.

“You can’t fake that kind of thing,” she said, softly. “It’s the result of a parallel life. A shared collection of experiences, like a snowball rolling downhill. And then you get to a point where you’re so far in, you can never replace that person. Not really. No one else can ever be the same kind of witness because you’ve lived through so much. It really is a once in a lifetime thing.”

She gazed at me. “That there is nothing more beautiful than being a witness to someone’s life. To know them inside and out and be with them through everything, share the same memories. Memories are everything. I want that.”

“A witness to your life?”

“Yeah. I want someone who knows everything there is to know about me, and I want to know everything about them.

“If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.”

“It’s a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.”

“Ain’t I doin’ wrong, though?” Huck said, troubled. “How am I s’posed to know what good is?” “Way I see it…If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ’splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinda God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” “But the law says…” “Good ain’t got nuttin’ to do wif da law.”

[I was born on April Fool’s Day, in Poland. I remember] my Jewish name: Ruchel Dwajra Zylska. My parents got rid of that name when we came to America and changed it to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and I got rid of that name when I was nineteen and never used it again after I left Virginia for good in 1941. Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live.

The boisterous cornhole competition gave him an opportunity to move around making small talk, eavesdropping on conversations. Every time he heard the n-word he felt like punching that particular asshole in the nuts, yet he did not. The degree of restraint he had summoned was, in his view, epic.

Once you let yourself believe someone cares for you that much – that they’ll never leave you – it is crushing if they do.

My parents had never loved me unconditionally. Never. So then why was I loving them that way? Why did they deserve that? Why did I think I had to sell my soul instead of them maybe learning to be open-minded or tolerant or just quiet about the choices their children were making?

Women garment workers in New York City, at the start of the twentieth century, gained inspiration for their own movement of resistance from the words of the poet Shelley:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many, they are few!

In the fall of 2006, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that allowed the CIA harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists in secret prisons around the world. The bill also did away with the right of habeas corpus for an “unlawful enemy combatant,” even a U.S. citizen. The loss of this right, which is guaranteed in the Constitution, meant that prisoners would not be brought before a court to challenge their arrest.

By the spring of 1846, the army was ready to start the war that Polk wanted. All it needed was an excuse.

Thomas Jefferson felt differently. He thought that such uprisings were healthy for society. Jefferson wrote, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.… It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

Laughter that was, in and of itself, Black. Laughter that could break glass. Laughter that could uplift a family. A cacophony of Black female joy in a language private to them.

The most extraordinary moment of any show was the hiccup of time between the last line and the applause. It took only a heartbeat for the audience to leave the world of the play to regain footing in this one—but, oh, those seconds were precious. It was the proof that they’d taken a journey; and that they’d come home changed.

Explosives. Opioids. Nuclear weapons. None of them could hold a candle to hope, the most dangerous commodity in the world.

“Hair is fine. Sharpies are fine. Idris Elba is fine. You,” he said, “are delusional.”

The Puritans claimed that if you attended the theater, you would not be able to tell the difference between what was fiction and what was real. A man might look at a boy actor dressed in the clothes of a woman and think him an actual woman. .... Emilia understood the true motivation: a play might make its viewers think. And when people thought, instead of blindly following the Gospel, they escaped from your control.

There was such magic in language. It could bring you to tears, pull you to the edge of your seat, make you sigh with relief. It could draw you out of the world when you needed to escape, and at other times hold up a looking glass to the world as it was.

Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.

It was the age of noise, and so suddenly playing music had a new importance. It made you a master of the world. Amid the accidental cacophony of modern life to be able to play music, to make sense out of noise, could briefly make you a kind of god. A creator. An orderer. A comfort giver.

‘People talk about a moral compass and I think that is it. We always know the right and wrong for ourselves, the north and south. People can tell you all kinds of wrong directions, lead you around any corner. You can’t trust any of that. What do they say in car adverts? About the navigation system? Comes as standard. Everything you need to know about right and wrong is already there. It comes as standard.’

‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’