Awesome Online And IRL Events Happening This Weekend: May 15 - 17 - LAist
Awesome Online And IRL Events Happening This Weekend: May 15 - 17 - LAist |
- Awesome Online And IRL Events Happening This Weekend: May 15 - 17 - LAist
- You Have to Let Go to Move On - The New York Times
- Sometimes It's Not You, Or The Math | With Laura Prepon - WBUR
- I went into lockdown with my boyfriend after only dating for a month - Metro.co.uk
| Awesome Online And IRL Events Happening This Weekend: May 15 - 17 - LAist Posted: 14 May 2020 05:00 AM PDT  The COVID-19 virus is wreaking havoc on schools, stores, businesses, bars and restaurants — and events. As in-person concerts, talks and big gatherings are cancelled and people spend more time at home, LAist is temporarily switching our events column to a "nonevents" column to help us through this time of social distancing. Until it's safe to go out again, please consider contributing to your local arts organizations, or to individual artists during this difficult time. The Renegade Craft fair returns to a virtual venue. Atlas Obscura brings tours to armchair adventurers. The Orphan Black cast reunites for a fundraiser. And there are free storytelling hours from various writers and a drag queen. Friday, May 15; 5:45 p.m.Virtual Beastly Ball Friday, May 15; 3 - 5 p.m. - Saturday, May 16; 10 a.m. - noonRenegade Craft Virtual Fair  Opening Friday, May 15New French Shorts 2020 Saturday, May 16; 7:30 - 9 p.m.Storytelling Show Saturday, May 16; 12 - 8 p.m.Drive-Through at The Grove Saturday, May 16; 8:30 a.m.CHLA Walk & Play LA Virtual Event  Saturday, May 16 - ongoingDescanso Gardens Reopening  Saturday, May 16; 11 a.m. PDTDrag Queen Story Hour  Sunday, May 17; 2 p.m. PDTInside Look: Malpaso Dance Company Sunday, May 17; 3 p.m. PDTOrphan Black Cast Reunion Sundays in May; 11 a.m.Amy DiGi's Children's Workshop Sundays; 11 a.m. PDTTammercise! OngoingWonder From Home  Restaurant / Bar Updates and DealsMiss eating out or drinking at a bar? Here's what a few local establishments are up to as we start to move toward reopening.
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| You Have to Let Go to Move On - The New York Times Posted: 14 May 2020 11:06 PM PDT  My dating profile picture, a blurry, distant figure in a desert landscape, suggested a great deal about my ambivalence: I wanted, and I didn't want. At 47, divorced for nearly two decades and with my daughters grown, I cherished my solitude, but sometimes when I heard the mice rustling in the attic, I thought of the newspaper story I had read about a man not far from where I lived who had been found dead in his flat, partly eaten by rats. Sometimes I tired of my own company; occasionally I was lonely. I had forgotten what it felt like to touch someone or to be touched. When I held my own hand in the dark to remind myself, my hand seemed small and cool, as if it belonged to someone else. I wanted connection, but I didn't want what it always seemed to cost: the men who turned me into the sole focus of their lives ("You're the only thing worth living for"); the men who told me what I wanted and didn't want rather than what they wanted or didn't want; the men whose expression of concern for my safety revealed itself to be a mask for control and coercion — whose words moved from "You shouldn't" to "You can't" as they stood blocking the door, preventing me from leaving. If the profile picture I chose suggested my ambivalence, then the fact that I chose Edinburgh for my location drove it home. Edinburgh lies two national borders and a seven-hour train journey from where I live in a rural part of Wales. In reality, trying out online dating at a distance of 350 miles seemed a good deal safer than trying it out near home. Doing so could let me test the water without really taking a risk. And even if online dating was only a modern version of my widowed aunt matchmaking at an 18th-century barn-dance or ball, it seemed so artificial, so antithetical to the spontaneity and accident that creates romance, that I thought it would be safe. There were the usual suspects who ignored my photo and what it said about my ambivalence. The plump accountant who told me I was beautiful despite not knowing what I looked like. The purported U.S. marine in Iraq who used all caps and would no doubt be sending some scammer message about needing me to transfer money. A slightly alarming New York banker wanted to meet me, had to meet me, would get on a plane to come meet me the minute I replied. I looked at the profile of a man at sea; he seemed safely distant. And there was a climber with a kind face who was good at chopping wood. He lived in Carlisle, a five-hour drive away. I am fair with an ax but terrified of heights, so he seemed safe too. I didn't answer the accountant or the marine or the banker, and the man at sea didn't reply to me, but the climber did. Soon we were writing to each other regularly across the shortening days of early autumn. Our correspondence reminded me of having a pen-pal: We told each other little details of our day-to-day lives, of things we had seen or done, but we never mentioned meeting. I asked him about the climbing, but I really didn't want to know. I experience vertigo at the top of a flight of stairs, and the pictures of him inching along a crag above a 100-foot drop gave me palpitations. Even if we ever were to meet, I knew we wouldn't get beyond that first coffee in a café, or — his preference — a pint of real ale in a pub. Ten months later, I'm stepping up to the foot of a crag. Everything has left my mind but fear. In my peripheral vision: a void, a nightmare of nothingness. Beneath me, a black slab descends steeply to a limpet-crusted causeway of broken columns. I tamp down the fear, but halfway up this sea-stack off the coast of Mull, I lose control of it and get stuck. My feet are wedged into a vertical crack. There's a foothold to my left, a bit higher up, but my left foot is pinned beneath my right, and I can't move it. I can't move my right foot either: there's nowhere else to place it. I can't shift my weight so that I might free my left foot. And I can't step back down, because that way is the void, the nothingness. I am stuck, and I cannot see a way that I can ever move. My brain toys with me, tells me it's insoluble. Even supposing my right foot finds a foothold beneath me, where can I put my left foot but back in this crack? My feet do a little dance in the crack but only end up wedged in more tightly. "I've got you," he calls down, from far above, out of sight. "You're safe." He has me secured by a rope, but his words just sound like meaningless noise. My heart races; I can't breathe. I have only the jangled sense of catastrophe. He takes in the rope a little, so that I can feel he's there at the other end, holding me, but I am frozen, panicking. My hands grip the rock convulsively, and my left leg begins to cramp. Somehow, though, remembering being in labor, I get my breathing under control. My heart slows from its mad race to a fast, painful pounding. I tell the disembodied voice above me to shut up, to stop making noise. I swear out loud that if I get out of this I will never, ever do it again. I jiggle my feet, lodging my right foot a little higher in the crack, and manage to slip my left foot out from under it. Then I jam it in somehow, scrabbling and slipping, as I bring my right foot back down and in under the left. My left foot is free to move, but now I have to lunge upward to get it onto the foothold to the left, and that means letting go of what I'm gripping so tightly. I don't know what I'll be able to grab hold of higher up when I lunge. I can't let go, and I know I have to let go to be able to move on, and this seems both a profound truth and at the same time the most trite and redundant thought I've ever had. "This isn't some personal growth seminar," I think, enraged at myself. "This is a disaster." And then, because in the end I have to, though I might have nothing to hold onto, I launch myself into the unknown. Miraculously, my left hand finds a great lumpy protrusion, and then there's a hold for my right, and suddenly everything is possible. The rest has its own logic, almost as though the handholds and footholds appear as I need them, a known thing before it's known. And with a kind of exquisite economy, I'm lifting myself from one hold to the next, and I am at the lip, and at the top, and there he is, the man who all along has been keeping me safe, whose voice has been carrying me, even though I told him to shut up, while I took the time to find my way and keep going. "Trust," I say, gabbling in the release of endorphins, in a delirium, lying on my back on the wide, flat rock. "Trust. It's all about trust." I watch him, this man who is not afraid of being afraid, who does not need to keep me from taking risks — I watch him coiling the rope with which he kept me safe, shaking his head resignedly over the slimy puddle of guano he landed it in, and I realize that, remarkably, he trusted me too. He placed his trust in me to keep him safe as he climbed first, even though I hardly knew what I was doing. "Where next?" I say, euphoric at having overcome fear, and now he's looking at me with something like pride and delight in my delight, and warm affection, and deep recognition of me that has nothing to do with words. And I think, "So this is what love is." |
| Sometimes It's Not You, Or The Math | With Laura Prepon - WBUR Posted: 22 Apr 2020 12:00 AM PDT If you're dating right now, you know it's a whole new world. You might be trying to figure out which of your app matches to go on a virtual date with, what the most flattering lighting is for a Zoom call, and what small talk you can make when you haven't left your apartment for a month. It might even be enough to make you nostalgic for how dates used to be. But this week's essay is a reminder that even when you could date in person, finding the right person to be with has always been a challenge. Sara Eckel writes about that in her essay, "Sometimes, It's Not You, Or the Math." Sara's essay is read by Laura Prepon. Laura is the author of a new book, called "You And I, As Mothers: A Raw And Honest Guide To Motherhood." Where Are They Now?Sara Eckel's essay was published in 2011. And the response to it was huge. "The first morning it was published, I woke up to an email inbox of people from all over the world," she says. "I remember the first email I opened, which was from a young gay man in Brazil. He said, 'You're describing exactly the feeling that I've had and the question I've asked myself: what's wrong with me?'" "It was overwhelming and really fascinating to me that this question that I had felt was so personal to me — what's wrong with me, why can't I make this happen — was so widespread, and that so many people were struggling with [it]." Sara and Mark have been married for nearly ten years now. They live in Upstate New York with their cat. They've bought a house. And Sara says Mark reminds her to step away from all the things she should be doing once in awhile. "It's become a thing that on Saturdays, we always do something where we accomplish absolutely nothing that's just for the fun of it," she says. "That might mean driving to Albany and seeing a movie and going to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, or going hiking, and he's taught me that. Every day I was making sure I was accomplishing something, and now, there's one day a week that nothing really gets accomplished." And Sara says she hopes listeners hear one central message of her piece. "The world is telling you that you're not ok, but I'm here to tell you that you are ok, the world is wrong. And deep down you already know this. You just need a reminder. We first spoke to Sara Eckel in February. And she sent us an update on how she and Mark are doing in quarantine. She says that their lives haven't actually changed too much since it began. "I'm so aware of how much more difficult this is for so many other people," she says. "I think it's just given me a renewed appreciation for Mark and for the fact that we had already had a very gentle relationship and a commitment to being kind to each other, and that's made a difference throughout all of this." We asked Sara, someone who's thought a lot about the single life, if she has any advice for single people right now. "I think it's really important that both single people and people who are not single respect the experience that single people are having," she says. "No one has really experienced anything like this before. And if you're a person sheltering in place with a spouse or family or friends ... it's important to recognize that what you're experiencing is profoundly different than the person who has to stay in an apartment by themselves for ... who knows how long." Sara adds that it's okay to be lonely, especially right now. "Loneliness is not a pathology," she says. "It's a normal human reaction like hunger or thirst. It's not an indication that there's anything wrong with you." She says that when she was single, she learned to sit with the feeling of loneliness and say, "Right now I feel lonely, and that's ok because it's a normal feeling that everyone feels. I'm going to investigate this feeling of loneliness." "It sounds like [bad] advice — just sit in a corner and feel pain," she adds. "But [although quarantine is] such a difficult situation, perhaps there is an opportunity to strengthen your own emotional resilience." Voices In This Episode 
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| I went into lockdown with my boyfriend after only dating for a month - Metro.co.uk Posted: 16 Apr 2020 01:46 PM PDT  'The time has now come for us all to do more. 'From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home,' Boris Johnson strictly stated via the telly in my small, solely-occupied flat. 'So, shall I come and stay with you then?' my new boyfriend, Matt, asked over the phone 10 minutes later. I paused. Matt and I had only been dating for a month and I was still deep in the swooning phase. The previous week, I even giggled coyly to my best friend: 'I think I love him a little bit.' Despite having a fault-free handful of dates, I found myself with mixed emotions at the thought of living with him – for god knows how long – in my tiny, 'single-gal-takes-on-the-world' flat. Advertisement Advertisement Visit our live blog for the latest updates: Coronavirus news live I still carry emotional baggage from past live-in relationships. Fall-outs from washing up or bickering about money strains. Not least getting fed up over who used the last bit of toilet paper. Read the latest updates: Coronavirus news live I at least knew we were safe from falling into the latter doom pit, as I'd just been out to the apocalyptic supermarket to purchase a 24-pack of loo roll. My brain quickly did the maths. It was a toss-up between total solitude with daily 'I miss you' phone calls and a bonafide live-in-lover. F**k it. We decided to leap in. I drove to pick Matt up. He packed a backpack with five pairs of pants, a few t-shirts, his guitar and half a bag of dried penne pasta from his house share. We're now nearing the end of week three of 24/7 dating. It's an amalgamated squish of daily lay ins, freshly ground coffee and country music, steamy shared showers, wobbly yoga attempts, and daily walks basking in gloriously warm rays. We've also virtually met each other's friends via Houseparty, which was far less daunting than a real-life scenario. We've gone to a series of gigs by queuing up an evening's worth of live YouTube recordings and even stood up and clapped between each song. We've made a very successful lasagne to accompany a 'when in Rome' themed date night whilst Dean Martin croons 'That's Amore' in the background. Advertisement Advertisement Via social media we saw others learning new skills such as Latin or embroidery, so we ordered a book about tantric sex and some more condoms.  The things you find when you eventually move in with a long-term lover have shown up early for us. Personal grooming, for example, was on this morning's agenda. My beau mused over his multigrain-hoop cereal: 'I'll tidy up my beard after this and I should probably trim the top of my ass too, aye?' Our daily exercise walks have been painted by romantic pastel pink cherry blossoms and letting stories from our past unfurl at ease without time pressure or limitation. We're able to dive into each other's deeper currents and feelings, with each other's full attention. Our dreams and desires have air time. There's no need to drop a conversation to hop on a bus or hurriedly get to the office. There's no mistaken mishaps with clumsy texts or work stresses to distract our attention. Of course a few blips have arisen. There's the cohabiting quirks you only find out about someone after giving them a key to your abode. Leaving the lid off the toothpaste so that the innards goop all over the sink. Guitar strumming the same riff over and over until the melody is carved in my brain forevermore. Matt also panic-bought a garish zebra print robe pre-lockdown and now lives in it until around midday. In the first week the scent was riddled with attractive pheromones, but I sense week four will bring a spin in the washing machine for this fleecy animal. Advertisement Boredom has encouraged a few little itches to be mindlessly scratched. Little anxieties presenting themselves like black smoke in a jar, just willing itself to be burst open. But through opening the jars together with care, we've discovered that we're a capable match to hold each other's feelings with respect, thereby accelerating our deeper levels of trust. Most importantly, we've laughed every day. In fact, most days we have taken each other to tears with some quip or quick wit. Whilst the world spins in complete precarity, I'm grateful for my lockdown-lover keeping my small section of the planet filled high with joy. I feel like I'm taking part in an intense dating social experiment, and for now, the results are very encouraging for our future. In fact, this scenario feels like we've popped our relationship on fast forward. We've not skipped past any sections, but progressed and grown quickly together. Living together post-lockdown seems inevitable at this point. As one of my friends put it, Matt moving in was going to be 'trial by fire'; and baby, I can't wait to keep it burning once this is all over. Do you have a story you'd like to share? Get in touch by emailing james.besanvalle@metro.co.uk Advertisement Share your views in the comments below MORE: 'Don't expect lockdown changes this week', Dominic Raab says MORE: Why some people are experiencing a crisis of identity in lockdown MORE: I am in self-isolation with my husband but I still sneak out to see my boyfriend Advertisement Advertisement Get the need-to-know coronavirus news, features and tips, right to your inbox. |
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