blogger profile

Kelly Love Johnson

Skirt! managing editor

Writer, editor, author, independent girly feminist hipster, slightly neurotic, cynically optimistic, compassionately liberal, fiscally conservative, somewhat intellectual, and always irreverent. ...

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Desired vs. required...

Kelly Love Johnson

In 1998, I bought this Jenny Holzer sign from the gift shop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

I’ve kept it around for almost 10 years, moving it from office to home office to another office and another. Every time I look at it, it reminds me that it’s OK to want things that are bad for me, as long as I don’t act on those desires. From inappropriate men to cold martinis—I can want them, I can talk about them, but I don’t need them. I have to protect myself from those desires and this is my talisman. Because I will always find something that I’ll want to do without a net.

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”~F. Scott Fitzgerald