There is a menagerie of animals in her story, she grew up with pigs, ducks, turkeys, rats, rattlesnakes, bobcats, squirrels, porcupines, deer and more. Her dad, a taxidermist thought it was perfectly normal to make a hand puppet out of a dead squirrel and wake up his daughters in the middle of the night to surprise them with his creation. There is an unfortunate yet comical story about little Jenny running into a deer’s hollow carcass filled with blood while her parents were cleaning up the insides of the dead animal in the middle of their living room. From eggs of rattlesnakes bursting to turkeys following the girls to school and Jenny getting her hand in a cow’s vagina, there is never a dull moment in the book!
I burst into uncontrollable laughter when her dad insisted that the turkeys running amok in their front yard and scaring the mailman were quails. When the mailman told her dad, he needed to lock the turkeys up, her father picked up a large turkey, tucked him under his arm and said with great dignity and perfect poise,“ Sir, this bird is a quail. And his name is Jenkins.”
PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED. July 30, 2014 Jumping Dog is an ethical lifestyle brand for children. Founded by photographer and filmmaker Joost Vandebrug and operating under the wing of the CINCI LEI Project. Kid's wear, children, clothing, fun, antic. When you fart and pretend it never happened. Hotkeys: D = random, W = upvote, S = downvote, A = back.
This memoir is courageous because the author gives a raw and real insight into her struggles with social anxiety, depression, anorexia, infertility, and miscarriages. She speaks with honest candor and sharp wit about topics which are taboo to talk about. When Jenny was little, her mother used to say that she had a “nervous stomach” which was what people called “severe untreated anxiety disorder back in the seventies.” It is heartbreaking to read how shy she was in high school and how she hid in the school pantry to avoid the “sheer panic” of being around too many people. She feels embarrassed for being weird, for not being like everyone else and envies how effortless it is for her sister Lisa to fit in. She writes,'In short? It is exhausting being me. Pretending to be normal is draining and requires amazing amounts of energy and Xanax.'
I enjoyed reading her sweet love story with Victor, a young, republican Neil Patrick Harris lookalike whom she meets late one night in a bookstore when she is twenty-one. They get engaged fairly quickly and I couldn’t help but laugh when she writes“When I was in junior high, I read a lot of Danielle Steele. Upgrade os x to high sierra. So, I always assumed that the day I got engaged I'd be naked, covered in rose petals, and sleeping with the brother of the man who'd kidnapped me.”The relationship with Victor stays strong, they get married and have a daughter. He is her stable anchor, her calm in the storm and one who is always by her side even when she locks him out of the car with a rattlesnake on the side of the road.
There are around thirty-three chapters in the book, each of which reads like an independent blog and some of the titles include, “A Series of Helpful Post It Notes I Left Around the House For My Husband This Week”, “And Then I got Stabbed In The Face By A serial Killer”, “Thanks For The Zombies, Jesus”, “Stabbed By Chicken”, 'The Psychopath on The Other Side of the Bathroom Door' , 'And Then I Snuck a Dead Cuban Alligator on An Airplane' and 'Just to Clarify, We Don't Sleep With Goats'
Some critics have argued that while her writing is funny as she is a masterful blog writer, there is a lot of rambling in her chapters and her book is not as streamlined as it needs to be. I, however, love her style and the memoir is a veritable storehouse of quotable quotes. I love that even after the chapter ends, her mind is still working, and she writes postscripts and posts old pictures to validate her stories. Some of my favorite quotes in the book include 'A friend is someone who knows where all your bodies are buried. Because they're the ones who helped you put them there and sometimes, if you're really lucky, they help you dig them back up”and“I try to be appreciative of what I have instead of bitter about what I’ve lost.”
It is interesting that despite having all these mortifying incidents growing up in rural Texas, the author wants to move her family from Houston to a smaller city so that her daughter Hailey can have a small town upbringing. When Jenny visits Wall after a long time and the city has developed and changed so much, she quips, ““It’s just that…Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn’t actually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in your mind?” I could really relate to this feeling as I felt the exact same emotion when I visited my hometown after a few years.
Jenny Lawson has won the hearts of so many people who connect with her because she revealed her vulnerabilities and shared her story. This memoir was a New York Times bestseller and when the author did her book tour, she experienced crowded venues and the love and admiration of many fans. She muses, “I can finally see that all the terrible parts of my life, the embarrassing parts, the incidents I wanted to pretend never happened, and the things that make me 'weird' and 'different,' were actually the most important parts of my life. They were the parts that made me ME.” She goes on to say, 'you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing - rather than running from - the utter absurdity of life.”
Do pick up this book and read, it will make you own the embarrassing events of your life. If you suffer from anxiety, depression and/or other mental health problems, you will know that you are not alone. You do have a tribe out there that is understanding, accepting and supportive. This memoir will teach you to deal with life’s hardships with grace and a sense of humor. Most importantly, it will motivate you to love yourself, despite your flaws, quirks, idiosyncrasies and insecurities.
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Click on the book cover above to access this memoir in Richland Library's catalog.
Visit Jenny Lawson's multiple award winning blog at The Bloggess
Check out Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things , by Jenny Lawson.
Do watch the video below which has some real pictures of the anecdotes described in the book.
As Donald Trump lurches through the disastrous final days of his presidency, Republicans are just beginning to survey the wreckage of his reign. Their party has been gutted, their leader is reviled, and after four years of excusing every presidential affront to “conservative values,” their credibility is shot. How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era? To many Republicans, the answer is simple: Pretend it never happened.
“We’re about to see a whole political party do a large-scale version of ‘New phone, who dis?’” says Sarah Isgur, a former top spokesperson for the Trump Justice Department. “It will be like that boyfriend you should never have dated—the mistake that shall not be mentioned.”
The plan might seem implausible, but I’ve heard it floated repeatedly in recent days by Republican strategists who are counting down the minutes of the Trump presidency. The hardcore MAGA crowd will stay loyal, of course, and those few who have consistently opposed Trump will escape with their reputations intact. But for the majority of GOP officials, apparatchiks, and commentators who sacrificed their dignity at the altar of Trump, a collective case of amnesia seems destined to set in the moment he leaves office.
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Republicans Confront the Consequences of Their Doomsday Rhetoric
Ronald Brownstein
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Republicans Confront the Consequences of Their Doomsday Rhetoric
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People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of “healing” and “moving forward,” but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory.
When I asked Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist, how his party will remember the Trump years, he responded with a litany of episodes to memory-hole. “Republicans will want to forget the constant chaos, the lies, the double-dealing, the hiring of family, and the escalating rhetoric that incited hate for four years [and] directly led to what happened at the Capitol,” he told me. “Basically, any of those things that we never would have let an Obama or Clinton get away with, but constantly justified to ourselves in the name of judges.”
Macbook pro 2015 os update. But while some Republicans might be eager to “walk away from Trump,” Heye added, “many will continue talking about the things in the administration they supported”—from tax cuts and deregulation to flooding the judiciary with conservatives.
Indeed, the narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features.
Alyssa Farah, who worked for more than three years in the Trump White House as a communications adviser, resigned last month after the president refused to concede the election. She’s spent the past couple of weeks condemning Trump’s conspiracy theories and distancing herself from the havoc they’ve wrought. Still, when we spoke, Farah was eager to highlight America’s booming pre-coronavirus economy as proof of concept for traditional conservative policies. She lamented that Trump’s legacy might be defined by “the final days of it”—that is, the violent insurrection he incited and the re-impeachment it provoked—but she told me that Republicans shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Hoping to provoke a slightly more introspective assessment of the president she served, I asked Farah how she thought the Trump era would be written about in history books. After thinking for a moment, she suggested that this period might not be remembered for Trump at all, but rather for the “once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic” that happened to occur on his watch.
Other Trump allies hoping to reclaim the mantle of “respectable Republican” might choose to follow the Lindsey Graham model. The senator’s turn from truth-telling Trump critic to loyal acolyte—timed for his reelection bid last year in South Carolina—earned him a rash of savage headlines in the political press. But he’s already begun his post-Trump rebrand, starting with a speech on the Senate floor after the Capitol riot earlier this month.
“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said in the characteristically cheerful drawl that scans to so many inside the Beltway as candor. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today … all I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.”
Graham’s implication was that he’d cozied up to Trump only to advise him on issues of grave national import—and that he was now breaking with the outgoing president on moral grounds. This version of events conveniently ignores the senator’s hyper-partisan defenses of Trump (he called the first impeachment a “lynching in every sense”), or his sycophantic sucking up (“He beat me like a dog” in 2016), or any number of dignity-sapping acrobatics he’s performed to stay on the president’s good side. By deciding to denounce Trump after the riot, Graham—like many of his colleagues—could try to claim that he put country before party (even if it wasn’t until the final days of Trump’s term).
Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016, told me he was unimpressed by this sudden rush to righteous indignation. “The newfound outrage from former Trump supporters rings a bit hollow, given how quiet most were during Charlottesville and countless other escapades,” he said. “Forty-seven months of blind loyalty followed by one month of conscience doesn’t earn you much more than the Mick Mulvaney profile-in-courage award.”
Sullivan was less certain, though, about whether the revisionism would work. “I don’t expect the voters will treat them any more kindly than the historians—but I’ve been wrong before.” After all, some predicted that the Republicans who worked for George W. Bush, especially the architects of the Iraq War, would be shunned once he left office. Instead, many of them have settled into respectable—and lucrative—perches as commentators, lobbyists, and elder statesmen. As long as the cable-news bookers keep calling, redemption is always available.
Like many of the more high-profile figures who worked for the Trump administration, Isgur, the former Justice Department spokesperson, has spent the years since she resigned publicly repenting. She regularly criticizes the president on CNN and in The Dispatch, a publication founded by Never Trump conservatives. Last month, she published an essay in The Washington Post grappling with how she and her colleagues had “obscured the reality of a Trump presidency from the public.”
But Isgur also recognizes that these avenues aren’t available to every Republican tainted by the Trump era. Indeed, those with the least power may end up being the ones who find it hardest to recover.
Not Funny Didn't Happen
“I’m thinking about those 22-year-old kids who took a very junior job for very little money to answer phones in the White House press shop,” Isgur told me. “They leave with that on their resume but without the ability to explain themselves. They don’t get to write an op-ed in The Washington Post, or go on cable news every day to stake out new territory.
Let's Pretend It Never Happened
“I think,” she added, “it’s yet to be seen where those folks land.”