Aug 31, 2026
*the following is from Rob Brezny, a writer and astrologer I follow on social media because he’s brief and witty, among other good things – including being a feminist ally. In my personal experience, I am most familiar with #3,4,8,& 9 – but they are all familiar, sadly. And, if we can make MAN THINGS aware, d’you suppose they will become a tad self-conscious, and make a lil change? There is always hope. But where is the word for that thing men do, when you air an idea, and it’s ignored or dismissed, yet not five minutes later when a man-thing suggests the same idea, it’s widely accepted and even acclaimed as terrific, even as ‘genius’?! What’s the term for that, because that’s sadly familiar to me as well? Sigh. Brezny:
Rebecca Solnit has provided the definitive understanding of the term “mansplaining.” It refers to when a man explains something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident way that assumes she knows less. It’s often about a topic she already understands or is expert in.
It’s not just ordinary explaining; the defining features are the patronizing tone, the presumption of female ignorance, and the gendered power dynamic embedded in the interaction.
Here are 10 more related coinages.
1. Mannotation
When a man adds needless comments, footnotes, or “corrections” to what a woman has said, as if her words require his editorial approval.
2. Manterjection
When a man inserts himself into a conversation with abrupt, unsolicited opinions that derail or dominate the flow.
3. Manspeculation
When a man confidently theorizes about women’s experiences, bodies, or emotions despite having little or no lived knowledge.
4. Manvocation
When a man invokes his status, credentials, or “logic” to shut down a woman’s perspective rather than engage with it.
5. Manoffense
When a man takes performative offense at feminist or critical comments, reframing himself as the real victim to recenter the discussion on his feelings.
6. Manstigation
When a man subtly goads or provokes a woman into an argument, then criticizes her for being “too emotional” or “overreacting.”
7. Manversioning
When a man rewrites events or conversations to cast himself as more reasonable, knowledgeable, or innocent, sidelining a woman’s account.
8. Manclosure
When a man declares a topic “settled,” ending dialogue once his own view is aired, regardless of whether others have been heard.
9. Manchoring
When a man positions his perspective as the fixed reference point—the “objective” center—against which all other views are judged as biased.
10. Mancision
When a man makes or imposes decisions affecting women without consulting them, assuming he knows what’s best on their behalf.
.
Aug 30, 2026
lighthouse
humans
don’t stop
the storm.
they stop
you from
believing
the storm
is all
there is.
they
remind you
the shore
still exists.
even
when
you
can’t
see it.
*from @reviveyourroar ~ & I know it’s true, as well as hoping I have been that for friends during dark times. I have tried, especially with my friend whose son passed away in 2024. There is so much pain and suffering in the world, at times it overwhelms me. Then, I go outside, I pull weeds or sit and soak up some sun while scritching and scratching the places Diego likes to be scritched. I breathe. The world is so beautiful, and, while slow, change for the better is coming. I remain hopeful, even in dark times, guided by the light that is the beauty of the world and all who are in it – especially puppies and lil kids. At the pool where I swim laps, a Saturday morning class for toddlers – omg, the cuteness! There is – along with the pain and suffering – so much more that is good.
Aug 29, 2026
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.
*from author and poet Ursula Le Guin, & perfect timing as I have been thinking a lot about what I bring (or don’t) to the table, to each relationship and encounter, versus or in addition to what I intend and hope I bring! Recently someone I don’t know well shared that he’d read a blog post I made ages ago now that concerned my relationship with his sister. He shared an update on their broken relationship (mine with her is also broken), and for days afterward I was overwhelmed by a sense of sadness and pain, real pain, for the experiences he shared with me and for the reality of what is continually a challenge in life: family ‘stuff,’ boundaries, betrayals, and knowing when, where, and how to draw the line. I felt, in fact, somehow responsible for their broken bond, even while logically I knew in that moment and since that I have zero responsibility, none, for their dynamic as siblings. Still, despite my inner turmoil, it’s much better to be a feeling human, than an unfeeling one, yes? Yes. It is. It is. Deep breaths.
Aug 28, 2026
“There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.” – Virginia Woolf
Woolf was a genius, a great writer, and a troubled soul who took her life in what was her 60th year on planet earth. It is painful, being alive and awake in this world, where human beans so often lie, hate, mess about messily — and yet. And yet. There is so much beauty, too. What if being awake meant being awake to that which is good, and full, and giving? Why is it we remember the insults, but not the compliments, the gifts, the smiles? Human-ing is hard. Often, we make it more so.
If and when I focus on what bothers me or what I know or assume I know or on who/what/where/when I hate or loathe, life is harder. And, it is a choice, focusing on the negative, the shitty. If I instead choose to focus on what I love, and how much – oh my garsh so so so so much – I do not know, I am worlds happier.
When I am able to live awake to and aware of the paradox, the paradoxes, of my little life, I am happier. I know so much; I take myself so seriously. I am as ignorant as the day is long, so ignorant! And so ridiculous I laugh at myself, constantly. I know a great deal about mySelf, and there are depths of me yet to be discovered. I know some things about some other people, places, movements, religions, literary and historical events and people. I know almost nothing about cars, machines, physics, algebra, chemistry, and so many more areas of interest (crewel work!) it’s a wonder I think of myself as smart, at all.
Paradox. Knowing that when I am at my loneliest, I am not, ever, truly alone. Diego, for one large, furry thing, is here and barking at something, again. I am never alone because there are others in this world I love, who love me, and there are many, many others equally alone, and in that space, across oceans and time, we’re held in an invisible embrace. For some, too invisible, and I am not taking about G*D, I am talking about the loving, breathing, living, beautiful beyond words universe, which renews itself daily whatever sturm und drang I might be going – or putting myself – through.
Another former student of mine has committed suicide, and I have struggled with what I might have done, could have done to help prevent this terrible thing. There was nothing. Nothing. We cannot save anyone else, which doesn’t mean we don’t show up if and when we can. This complex, messy young woman was only a few years into her 30s, and lived hundreds of miles away; even in high school it was clear she struggled to love and accept herself. I did what I could, then, but we had not spoken in over a decade. Unfortunately, too, she had a gun in her house, which increases the possibility of a ‘successful’ suicide by a thousandfold.
We live in paradox. We are alone, each of us, walking this road to our inevitable end. Laughter. Flowers. Puppies. Babies. Swimming nekid in creeks in summer. A blazing fire when the snow falls. Love. Friendship. Old movies. Books. Books. Books. So many reasons to live, to stay here one more day.
I remember my suffering, when I was lost and flailing. How many times I thought I had to get out of here, putting an end to my pain, and my life, believing wholeheartedly that I was unlovable and unloved, a waste of space. Gosh, I was a dope, ignoring the beauty and generousity of the world, and my place in it. Oh Taylor. It gets better. If only you knew.
Aug 27, 2026
*from Rebecca Solnit, and if you weren’t feeling teary about the death of Dolly Parton – I wept openly when the news appeared and again this morning – or if you weren’t aware of the breadth and depth of her decency, philanthropy, kindness, intelligence, humor, feminism and so much more read this, and weep. Be inspired, too. #QUEEN
We will always love her, and there will never be another like her, this artist who came out of deep rural poverty in the 1960s to become not just a staggeringly great performer and songwriter but philanthropist, humanist, humorist, and – well there’s a way she demonstrated that lots of things often thought to be opposites could be the same thing, especially if you were her. Down home and brilliant, feminist and feminine, glitter-bedecked and generous, country and cosmopolitan, funny and soulful. In her songs and interviews and in 9 to 5, the movie about workplace sexual harassment she co-starred in with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, she was a hell of a feminist all the way back to songs like 1968’s “Just Because I’m a Woman,” with the lyrics:
My mistakes are no worse than yours
Just because I’m a woman
When I saw the first headline about her demise, it mentioned that she was eighty, and it staggered me to think that she was the same age as Donald Trump, because she was utterly profoundly magnificently opposite to him in every way. Born into extreme poverty in rural Tennessee, she made her own way with massive talent and ambition that seems never to have been decoupled from kindness and principle. Born into great wealth, he was helped along into late middle age by his father and then by his inheritance from that racist real estate tycoon father. He learned a particular kind of ruthless unscrupulousness from Fred Trump and from Joe McCarthy’s righthand man, Roy Cohn, as he stumbled, failed, scammed, lied, litigated, and got picked up again and again by Fred.
No matter how rich Donald Trump is he will never have enough because the poverty isn’t material, it’s emotional and spiritual. In exactly the same way, Parton demonstrates that she had inexhaustible spiritual and emotional riches even as a kid growing up in a one-room shack. That’s evident in her huge hit “Coat of Many Colors,” about wearing, because of the family’s poverty, mended, patched, patchwork clothes her mother sewed:
My coat of many colors that my mama made for me
Made only from rags but I wore it so proudly
Although we had no money I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me
She describes how other children mocked her but “And, oh, I couldn’t understand it for I felt I was rich/ And I told them of the love my mama sewed in every stitch.” Love might be the very essence of the difference between the two of them. The Partons were so poor that they lived in a one-room shack without running water or electricity. Her parents paid the doctor who attended her birth with a sack of cornmeal. Albert Camus once wrote, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Let winter be the inner poverty in which Donald Trump will always be stranded, that no amount of gilt tchotchkes glued to the oval office, no amount of cryptocurrency scamming will alleviate. Let summer be this immaterial wealth Parton had in who she was and how she lived and what managed to spread around in her art and her advocacy.
Because never forget, Dolly Parton wasn’t just a singer, songwriter, and philanthropist. She took stands, often in her own country way, trying to avoid what might seem like partisanship (especially since Reagan, country music has swung right and so have a lot of its audiences) and yet speaking up against racism and, in the summer of 2020, for Black Lives Matter, for queer and trans people, for women’s rights. And she sang it too, most recently in “Traveling Through” for the trans-themed film Transamerica and the song “Rainbowland” with her goddaughter Miley Cyrus. Dolly Parton was hugely loved by the queer community and she loved them back. In “Rainbowland” godmother and goddaughter sing:
Wouldn’t it be nice to live in paradise?
Where we’re free to be exactly who we are
Let’s all dig down deep inside
Brush the judgment and fear aside
Here I want to pay homage to Miley’s dad, longtime country star Billy Cyrus. When the teenage Black artist known as Lil Nas X leapt from nowhere to superstardom with the extraordinary hit “Old Town Road” in late 2018, the largely white country world didn’t want to recognize it as country or support it in Nashville or on the radio (it’s sometimes identified as country rap). It got dropped from the top of the Billboard country charts for not being country enough, which was widely seen as meaning not being white enough. So Billy Cyrus recorded a remake with the artist, in which the middle-aged white guy and the young Black guy who’d just come out as gay pair up.
Or rather in the video, Lil Nas goes solo until about halfway through. Then Cyrus pulls up in a long red convertible that sets off his fuchsia fringed cowboy outfit and takes the younger man with him while the voice on the soundtrack becomes Cyrus’s for a few rounds. It’s like when Marilyn Monroe got the Mocambo nightclub in Hollywood to book Ella Fitzgerald by promising she’d come sit in the front row for the shows. And then when Lil Nas X recorded one of Parton’s hugest hits, “Jolene,” in 2021, Dolly got right behind him: “I was so excited when someone told me that Lil Nas X had done my song Jolene song. I had to find it and listen to it immediately…and it’s really good. Of course, I love him anyway. I was surprised and I’m honored and flattered.” And yes, the new version didn’t change genders, so it was a man pleading with Jolene not to take his man.
In 2020, she’d given Billboard her take on the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country: “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” she told the magazine. “And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” She added later that year, “I love everybody. And, of course, Black lives matter. We all matter. We’re all God’s children. I hope people learn to love one another a little more than they do, and if I can be any help in that respect, then I hope to be.” She joined Beyonce on the latter’s countryesque Cowboy Carter album.
She had a way of treating social justice like down-home common sense. She was reluctant to seem partisan – the New York Times wrote of her a few years ago: “at the 2017 Emmys, Parton looked visibly, uncharacteristically flustered when she appeared onstage to present a best supporting actor award with her co-stars Fonda and Lily Tomlin — both of whom took a seemingly unscripted verbal swipe at President Trump. Steering the conversation back to more familiar territory, Parton did what she’s also done when some interviews have gotten too political or contentious: She pulled from her trusted arsenal of boob jokes.” But overall, she managed to just be on the side of people, especially the vulnerable and the marginalized, which is to say she was on the side of kindness.
In a lesser-known 1969 song, “Evening Shade,” the kids in a juvenile detention facility burn it down, and she’s with them all the way:
But understanding isn’t learned from punishment and anger
An iron hand has no gentle touch and love ain’t learned from hate
The reason we were there is cause we had no one who cared
She was love incarnate, and though she looked like a campy love goddess a la Venus on and off the half shell, she was a goddess of the other kinds of love, of empathy, compassion, kindness, and to use a term from Thich Nhat Hanh, interbeing. “She was the voluptuous embodiment of empathy,” her friend and 9 to 5 costar Jane Fonda said today upon hearing of her death, adding “To her gay and trans fans, I want you to know that she loved you.” Parton was so kind she couldn’t be a judge on American Idol, explaining, “If you make a mistake, it’s best that you pick it up and it turns into something positive. Sometimes the best part of my show is when I mess up and people know I’m human. They see how you’re gonna get out of it, and you’re right there in the spotlight. You have to deal with it. Same with life, I don’t punish myself for [making mistakes].”
I listed some of the paradoxes she resolved in how she lived, but one remains irresolvable: she was hugely public for sixty years while keeping her private life private, including her seldom-seen husband Carl who died last year, and never appearing without being elaborately styled in a glamorous tight outfit, full makeup, and a haystack of pale golden hair. “My wigs are my armor,” she said. While drag queens are most often gay men doing a glammed-up job of looking like someone else, Dolly Parton seemed like another kind of paradox, someone dressing up in drag as herself. Or a version of herself (she had to parry endless public jokes and comments from men about her breasts over the years and she did it with humor and grace).
One way her impact will continue long after her is with her massive, 31-year-old Imagination Library project to bring books to small children, inspired by her father’s illiteracy (and her generosity). She explained, “Before he passed away, my Daddy told me the Imagination Library was probably the most important thing I had ever done. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me because I created the Imagination Library as a tribute to my Daddy. He was the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams. Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission.” It is said, to date, to have distributed 300 million books and is now in five English-speaking countries after launching in the Sevier County, Tennessee, where she was raised. Three hundred million is a lot of books and a lot of kids. The benefit of those books, even if the program stops tomorrow, will be part of the lives of its young participants for their lifetimes stretching, in some cases, into the next century. One last Dolly Parton paradox: she rests in peace; she lives on in many ways in millions of us still.
Thank you, Dolly Parton.
*Amen. & here I go crying again. Crikey. Rest in Power, Queen.
