this is a weird advice column from salon; sometimes cary tennis is off on his own planet somewhere, but sometimes he just hits the mark. today, i think he was channelling anne lamott.

(if you want to go read the full article, you'll have to watch an ad. suck it up!)


this particular column is responding to a woman who is very carefully planning her life around her future children, and how angry she is with people who had unplanned pregnancies or are lousy parents or who hate having kids. but the advice is applicable in other places as well.


Salon.com Life | Help! I'm insanely jealous and full of contempt:

You can let go of this by loving the world and everyone in it. That's the only way I can put it. We could chip away at your attitude. We could agree that you're no better than the people you are mentally criticizing. But that wouldn't fill your lungs with fresh air. I prefer to sing: Love the assholes you hate. Love the cocksuckers you judge. Love the idiots. Love your dismally incompetent sister. Love the numbskulls too lazy to roll on a condom. Love the zeroes who shouldn't be parents. Love Vice President Dick Cheney (love your enemies out of sheer perversity). Love all the babies in vitro and otherwise, love all the sperm donors jerking off in sterile rooms, love all the unwed parents in their blithe unconcern, love the children blooming on the roadside like wildflowers, love the one-eyed mistakes, the legless mistakes and the heartless mistakes because they too are perfect, it's only our vision that is flawed, love the woman in line before you at the grocery store with the unruly children and the woman behind you with no children and the atheist at the checkout counter and the Greek Orthodox bookkeeper in the manager's box and every other ethnic and religious designation too numerous to mention, love them all, love every category that serves to divide, love the atom and the chromosome of indivisible creation, love the falsehood for its beauty and the truth for its fragility, love all social classes and economic classes and love all the prisoners in all the prisons and all the soldiers in the sand and all the babies emerging into the cruel light of day every day and every night and love your own hatred and your own bile and your own contempt.

so, if you see me walking around kicking things muttering "love the cocksuckers", now you'll know why.