Follow your inner star… into debt.
American Girl Dolls are expensive AF.
And it turns out their furniture is just as costly. So...
American Girl / Coleman Furniture
38 Beautifully Heartbreaking Quotes From Literature
“Always.” —J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Via Flickr: jcarlosn
1. "For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty. Now I am pretty lonely."
—Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Slippery Slope
Via jharissac
2. "So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be."
—Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Via staceys477e82669
3. "Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold."
—S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders
Via lissettg
17 Tips Every Netflix User Needs To Know
Alohamora the secrets to streaming.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Parooze the /r/netflixbestof subreddit.
Use less data when streaming from your phone or tablet.
You can't adjust streaming quality to standard definition with just the Netflix app.
Log into Netflix on your mobile or desktop browser, go to your Your Account > Playback Settings > Manage video quality, and set it to the lowest streaming quality (typically 480p).
Movies and shows are restricted to specific countries. You can use mediahint (free for a week, $5/month) or Hola (free) to unblock media in your location.
23 Struggles Only Book Nerds Will Understand
The struggle is very, very real.
Deciding which book to read next.
20th Century Fox
Being excited to see the movie adaptation only to find out that they got everything wrong.
UPN
People saying the movie was better than the book.
Universal Pictures
Waiting forever for a sequel to come out.
*cough* Looking at you, George R. R. Martin. *cough*
20th Century Fox
21 Life Skills You Unintentionally Learn From “Game Of Thrones”
Oh, you KNOW which end of that sword to use.
You have strong communication skills and aren't afraid to express your true feelings.
It's a skill more people should learn, really.
HBO / Via s1288.photobucket.com
You know better than to have someone else pour your wine.
Sorry not sorry, Joff.
HBO
And when you do drink, it's more a skill that you were born with than anything else.
Lannisters are Lions, after all...
HBO
You know EXACTLY who to call for help, in case of emergency!
Where are my dragons? Oh, don't worry, you'll see!
HBO
19 People Who Triumphed In Times Of Desperation
These people should run for President.
This guy who ran out of toilet paper...
And got creative with the roll.
This porn-less teen.
All aboard the struggle bus.
Myshaele / Via imgur.com
This totally non-passive-aggressive roommate.
"I said it was your turn to buy the toilet paper."
This child.
Excuse me, but I now have weekend plans.
How Finding A Fat YA Heroine Changed My Life
I spent my entire life looking for a hero I could relate to. Sirius Black came closest, and then I read Eleanor and Park.
Loryn Brantz / BuzzFeed
Fat girls have fucking nothing.
I've been reading for, it feels like, as long as I have had sentience and consciousness, and it has taken me my entire life to meet someone in a book who looked like me and felt the same way I do and has struggled with some of the things I have struggled with, and is still loved.
Fat girls have nothing, and fat girls are told they are worth nothing. Fat girls have Aunt Marge Dursley, and Jane Umbridge, and eating disorders to beat and people to prove wrong by losing a lot of weight and letting out Their True Self, aka the Thin Girl Within. The Thin Girl Within is worthy; she is radiant and triumphant and beloved. She cannot be all those things and also be fat; at least, not in the young adult fiction I had at my perusal when I really, really needed someone to tell me it was possible to be radiant, and triumphant, and fat.
The Harry Potter series is not the first thing I remember reading — that was Go, Dog! Go!. It's also not the first thing I remember reading that had a profound effect on me; that was The Phantom Tollbooth, and when I finished it, I cried because I didn't want it to be over. But the Harry Potter series is the only thing that stuck with me from age nine to age now. It is the only thing I never turned my back on, even when I was in college and decided that everything I had loved as a teenager wasn't worth anything, thereby deciding that who I was as a teenager wasn't worth anything.
I stuck with Harry Potter, and he stuck with me.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Harry Potter series, as a whole, has formed most of the bedrock of the person I am now. I did not have a happy or easy childhood; my parents loved me, but like all parents, they are human, and they had their own lives to deal with. They divorced when I was four. They weren't able to so much as speak to each other without all hell breaking loose until I was eighteen, and even then it was an uneasy ceasefire. It was the domestic equivalent of the Cold War, and at times I was a white flag, and at other times I was a nuclear warhead. I didn't feel I had much choice.
School wasn't easier. I was smart, and I used that intelligence like armor. I needed some — I was bullied early and often and constantly. Lifetime movie bullying: screws loosened in my chair, lipstick and pads on my locker, called a slut and a bitch and a cow and a hippo. I moved in what felt like an atmosphere of potential torture, under the weight of which I had to trudge without any real reassurance that it would ever end. I went to school with spitballs being lobbed at my head; I went home and had to tiptoe around my parents like one might tiptoe around a minefield.
Loryn Brantz / BuzzFeed
The only refuge I had were books, and sheltered in them like a fox in a burrow. But I didn't see any of myself in any of these characters until Sirius Black: loved, and lost, and tattooed in constellation form on my left shoulder as a reminder that everybody has light and dark inside of them.
Sirius Black, who was so tortured by the prison his life had become that he didn't need anyone else to beat him up — he did an admirable job all on his own. As I was doing. As I still do, all the time. It becomes second nature, you see, when you're told constantly that it's what you should be doing.
Because, if Hogwarts was a refuge for me, it was only that way because the version of myself I had in my head was an eventual version. She was a future Me who was older and thinner and less likely to be loathed. All character flaws were forgiven in Harry Potter's world except the cardinal sin of being fat; Uncle Vernon, Aunt Marge, Dudley, Professor Umbridge were all described as obese, and every time it was used as a hammer to drive home their innate unpleasantness. Not only were they cruel and stupid, they were fat! How disgusting! Right, kids? And, when Dudley was finally less unpleasant in book seven and said his borderline-heartfelt goodbye to Harry, all his fat had become muscle. Fascinating.
It's not new, and it's not Rowling's fault, but I think about how readily and completely I accepted that fat was innately and unquestionably horrible and I am terrified. Self-loathing in fat girls is condoned by everything around us. It's in the shows we watch and the books we read, in every other advertisement about a miracle weight-loss pill that will help you be happy as long as you're willing to also be malnourished and/or incontinent. It's in the "no fat chicks" bumper stickers, and the "fat chicks need love too" jokes. It's in reruns of Friends and Will and Grace, and it's in every diabetes joke on Parks and Recreation. It's behind the decision that cast a willowy nymph of a human being as Wonder Woman (an Amazon, for Christ's sake) and behind every question every actress is ever asked about her body or her diet regimen for a role in which she was literally supposed to be dying. It's in tabloid headlines and online anonymous messages. It's in the implication that the Thin Girl Within is the one we really are, and we won't be able to be happy until we become her — and that we don't deserve to be happy, or loved, until we become her. It's everywhere.
What I started to unconsciously understand as I worked my way through puberty, bombarded with TV shows and books and magazines and the opinions of other people that all collectively reminded me that beauty and I lived on separate planets — and, by the way, the planet I was on was my own expanding body — was that as I was, I was not worthy of love.
I was in high school. I finally had friends, and some confidence, and I wasn't consciously thinking about the girls in my books; I wasn't consciously thinking about much at all except how to get good enough grades that I could go to a college in a different state. I felt in no way attached to my body. My body was something that schlepped my brain through the mud. It was a stretch for me to imagine someone I liked wanting to kiss me. It was a God's-honest effort. And I couldn't do it at all unless I imagined myself as someone completely different — someone thinner, someone less loud and more secure, someone thinner, someone effortless and who did not take up as much space, someone thinner.
