"I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. “Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.” Or: “I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?"

Slate | Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford (via @KatieELambert)

"If this baby is a girl, I am hopeful that things will be different when it’s her turn. That she will read this essay in thirty years and laugh and say, “Mom, you were so crazy.” Because she will feel so in control of her life, her choices, her body, that she won’t be able to imagine a time when any small modicum of control had to be flexed, hoarded, treasured."

The Rumpus | On Pregnancy And Privacy And Fear (via @krcoyle)

"I used to cringe at pictures of myself because I didn’t look like the woman I wanted to be. Now I realize that the woman I wanted to be was someone who didn’t cringe at her own pictures of herself."

Cold Antler Farm | Beautiful

For the nine hundredth time, Internet, let me push this amazing chronicle of life as a young/modern homesteader (graphic designer, and writer) upon you. Jenna is the best, so honest and funny and smart. Also, BABY SHEEPS.

"If there is a line of demarcation in this story, a single moment where I crossed the boundary between debtlessness and total financial mayhem, it’s the first dollar that I put toward achieving a life that had less to do with overt wealth than with what I perceived as intellectual New York bohemianism. It seems laughable now, but at the time I thought I was taking a step down from the Chanel suits and Manolo Blahniks of my office job. Hanging out at the Cuban coffee shop and traipsing over the syringes and windblown trash of upper Broadway, I was under the impression that I was, in a certain way, slumming. And even though I was having a great time and becoming a better writer, the truth was that the year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions. Entering this particular graduate program was a rich person’s decision. But it’s hard to recognize that you’re acting like a rich person when you’re becoming increasingly poor."

Meghan Daum, “My Misspent Youth”

Not related, or at least not consciously related, to my brief rant last week about my inability to comprehend New York City real estate prices, I started reading Meghan Daum’s essay collection My Misspent Youth over the weekend and was of course kind of gutted by the title piece, which was written, I think, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, but, if adjusted for inflation and a few key economic differences (she mentions friends getting rich off the stock market—although, well, I guess that still happens, doesn’t it?), could have basically been written this month, or last year, or at any point since. Much of it seems very tied to living in New York specifically but the general warped patterns of thinking about money and class and ambition apply everywhere, of course. Or at least I have certainly witnessed it in my own very-non-New York life (if not in myself, then in others, for sure). It makes pretty gutting tax day reading, if you need some of that. Or you could just eat some free Arby’s and barf and die like you probably want to anyway.

My main beef with “Girls,” having only seen the trailer

…is that overeducated and privileged white twentysomethings “navigate their lives” in places other than New York City, too! I mean, COME ON PEOPLE. In Atlanta we have all the same problems except with INSANE HUMIDITY and PALMETTO BUGS and EVEN WORSE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION and NO GAY MARRAIGE and…

OK, I am totally kidding (although all those things are true). I am actually feeling fairly neutral about the show, possibly because I don’t have HBO so it hardly seems to matter anyway. But here is a smart thing and here is another smart thing I enjoyed reading about it earlier today, and Lena Dunham seems like someone I’d like to have a beer/a cupcake/a beer and a cupcake with.

Also I totally just learned that “palmetto bugs” are absolutely completely the same thing as cockroaches (which we also have). So gross.