There goes your afternoon:  My Parents Were Awesome is a great little Tumblr featuring submitted photos of parents when they were young and (most) without kids.   It’s a really strange but awesome display of fashion, time, and love of some of the people we love the most.

Found via Quipsologies

As you know, I usually don’t write a lot about my personal life, really for no reason other than this is a place for cool links of pretty things and not my Diaryland page from 2001.  BUT, I came across an article at GOOD about Wal-Mart and it made me think of something I thought of this weekend about life, and I figured we could all just have a family meeting about it and share.  Tops?  OK!

This weekend, we had a party in the town I grew up in for my brother, who got on a bus this morning for the Army.  He’s 18 years old and will most likely be in the Middle East within a year.   I don’t really visit family that live in this town anymore, since I moved away and went to college.  It always just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I try to avoid more than embrace that whole location of my life, really.

And being in my aunt’s city-suburban 2 bedroom house with babies and cousins and uncertainty, it brought to my attention my struggle with selfishness.  In a room full of loud, middle Americans, all competing for the attention of each other or the floor for a story, it’s easy to become isolated and snobby.

It’s easy for me to see myself far above all of these people because I have a degree and have seen the Mona Lisa.  It’s easy for me to justify my self-imposed social awkwardness because of uncontrollable anxiety that is brought on by family. It’s easier for me to complain about how they make me feel than to talk to my brother about car stereos and coupons for Marlboro’s.

That is why I’m trying to be selfless.  And that is why I don’t shop at Wal-Mart.

What I realized driving home from my aunt’s was that the mantra, the philosophy, the way I want to live, is to be selfless: to do the thing that is better or easy for everyone that just what is easier or better for me.  And I’m pretty good at it in some areas of my life.

I don’t shop at Wal-Mart because I know the evils that they do.  I know the workers they exploit, the jobs and businesses they demolish, the environmental and social harms they impose on their manufacturers, business, and the communities were they build their stores.   Here, it’s easy to be selfless.  I know that it is better for a lot more people to not shop there than it is for me.

See, what everyone says, the reason why 100% of people shop there, and the marketing angle Wal-Mart uses is that it’s cheaper.   It’s pennies and dollars cheaper to shop there.  It’s easier on the wallet, on the budget.  That’s the very basic idea of business and economics: the demand is for the best bargain.  DUH.

But when it’s easier for me to save 10 cents on a can of corn, it’s harder for my sister, who can’t find a job anywhere but there and only gets paid 5 cents over minimum wage.  Because Wal-mart shuts down local business, there are less places to work or less opportunity for jobs.

AND I KNOW: these are extremes that are really not based on extensive study or business research. You could argue that they’re good because they provide jobs.  Well, that’s also what they said about the Soviets, Mao, and people doing early drug testing on humans.  Just because it’s a job doesn’t mean it’s a healthy one for the person or the community.

I could seriously go on and on right now about even more evils of the Wal-Mart empire, but I won’t.  I’ll end it with this string of thoughts:

It would be easier for me to shop at Wal-Mart, to not take the time to read the paper and then not vote, work at a job that made a lot of money instead of something meaningful, or move to a bigger city for the sake of its coolness.

But it wouldn’t be better for everyone else.  It’s not better for my sister that I shop at Wal-mart.  It’s not better for our government or the People of this country to be ignorant and inactive.  It’s not better for my future or my family to live for a paycheck than for  a meaningful job or to live a cooler city with more access to sushi and thrift stores.

So I’m trying more and more to be selfless. I’m trying to be more aware of the impact that my lifestyle and choices have on the people around me and be responsible for whatever the results may be.  I’m trying to be more like my brother, who is putting his life in the hands of our government, so that he can be the man and the dad that his child can respect.

I’m not trying to yell just as loud for attention in the kitchen, but I am trying to figure out what each person is saying.

I can’t write anything here that hasn’t already been said by people much more qualified, but this movie was AMAZING!  My sister and I watched in in DIGITAL 3D (which is actually pretty freakin’ amazing in itself, bTW), over the weekend.  We got the glasses.  I had some twizzlers.  And cried pretty much through this whole movie.  I haven’t cried this much at a Disney movie since the Lion King, ok?  It’s sweet and heart-warming story, and yes, the animation is off the hook (as my mom would say).

Pixar: you almost made me hate you after Cars (shudder), but you’ve redeemed yourself.  Tim & Eric, Great Job!

SEE THIS MOVIE! ITS FANTASTIC!

Vintage Illustrations, especially that from the 1950s-early 1970s, are some of my favorite things.  The style, the use of line work, the color, printing process-it’s just all awesome.  Anyways, I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite vintage illustration pools, sets, and groups from Flickr, which has an abundance of examples.  Enjoy!

1. Fun Ephemera

This is a fantastic collection of illustrated ephemera from Ward-o-matic.  Fantastic! (get it?…..har har…sad face).

2.  Mid-Century Illustrated

HUGE Flickr group with over 1,500 members.  Features everything from magazines, to brochures, to logos, childrens books, signs, ads, etc.  Great way to spend the rest of your afternoon.

THREE MORE after the jump!

3. Retro Kid

This a great one, with almost 3,000 members.  It features stylized illustrations from children’s books and kid-related stuff. Awe-some!

4. Grain Space : The GrainEdit.com Photostream

Though some of their pieces are not vintage illustration, Grain Edit is always my go-to blog for inspirtation and visual goodness.  Great stuff.

5. Vintage Cookbook Pool

Huge collection of vintage cookbook pages.  I just love the stylization of the food, with the line work and the colors used in these old books.

Well, that’s it!  There are TON more where those came from over on Flickr.  If you’ve been living on an island somewhere with no internet access or just haven’t watch the news in a few years, Flickr is an amazing online photo sharing community that is a great place to look at photos from all over the world, of almost anything.  They also have a huge collection of Community Commons photos, that you can use in your own work.

Cheers!

There are a lot of things that I can’t do: share dairy products, gymnastics or roll my tongue, for example.  And then there are a lot of things that I can’t do simply because I’m too sissy or attached to my belonging, and one of those things is sell of my possessions and move to an artsits’ collective to revitilize a dying Alabama community.  But Meagan Deal can.

Goodbye Wafflemaker is, simply, a site dedicated to selling stuff to fund a trip to Alabama.  But it much more than that.  It’s a visual collection of one girl’s material posessions–some of little value (confetti) and some priceless and meaningful (gifts from friends).   Arranged in simple rows and columns, with little more than 2 line descriptions and an item number, everything from rubber bands to an office chair are for sale.  And I think it’s a very profound, or at least a very strong, thing to do.

With an amazing effort of the WWF in an international effort to bring about a movement toward climate change, Earth Hour is 60 minutes of darkness, multiplied over millions around the world.  Fantastic method and heart behind the effort, I think this is great. The 2009 Earth Hour will be TOMORROW, March 28 at 8:30pm local.

You can read more about Earth Hour, donwload cool posters, stickers, videos, etc to share, at their website.  The site has a great international community and people are talking!  Fantastic!

The Indianapolis Civic Theatre is totally putting on West Side Story as their spring musical, and guess who has good seats at the show tonight??  ME! (and my mom). I heard it should be good.  I’m stoked!

Over on Hulu, you can watch a bunch of Sesame Street clips, which is sweet. But what is even sweeter is that they have a BUNCH of their animations, which just totally made my days. These where always some of my favorite parts of the show as a kid

QUESTION: Does anyone else get this song in their head? I do, all the time. Which is probably a good thing, if I were a toddler. But I’ve been able to tie my shoes for a long time now…

Cheers!

GOOD magazine with filmmaker Sam Slovick has put together a short series of docs about the Skid Row neighborhood in LA. Heartbreaking, humbling, and GOOD, these videos share the stories of the residents, the lawmakers, police, and pastors of the 50 block ward.

It’s something we should all be aware of, praying for, and talking about. Compassion comes from us and is a need everyone shares.

Our current economic downturn explained in a simple and meaningful visual. Great work.

Part two after the jump:

The Crisis of Credit: Part 2