"You’re always haunted by the idea you’re wasting your life."
— Chuck Palahniuk
THE WORLD IN PLACE OF ITSELF
November 25, 2012
November 19, 2012
November 12, 2012
If there is something to desire
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there is nothing to desire.
—Vera Pavlova, from If There Is Something to Desire: One Hundred Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, 2010).
Translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour
Painting: Harutyun Gulamir Khachatryan, Desire, n.d.
(Source: apoetreflects)
"But I know I live half alive in the world, half my life belongs to the wild darkness."
— Galway Kinnell, Middle of the Way (via word-digest)
October 12, 2012
I like that ol’ Chopin Barcarolle/That kind of music just soothes the soul/Just like they wrote it in the days of old/Keep playing that Chopin Barcarolle
October 7, 2012
"The truth will set you free—but not until it’s done with you."
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, as quoted in D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (via fishingboatproceeds)
October 4, 2012
On becoming the stereotype: Why yes, I did just use a coupon to purchase ingredients for matzah ball soup. And it’s going to be DELICIOUS.
"Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often characterized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to satisfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curiously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to boundedness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a distinction be made between inside and outside, between the relevant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position."
— Lyn Hejinian
(Source: poetryfoundation.org, via ohbethany)
September 26, 2012
"He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning…A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person."
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt on his character in 500 Days of Summer (via living-life-at-too-high-a-pitch)
September 21, 2012
de-conditioning
I am anxious, existentially wobbly, and mindlessly prone to crafting a self-brand instead of an identity. Lately, I’ve even found myself fantasizing more about the commemorative photographs associated with future goals than about accomplishing the goals themselves. It’d be easy to blame advertising and consumerist culture, but to do so would devalue my self-agency. Their ploys only work because I’m lazily allowing them to do so, rather than addressing the underlying pathology in a critical way and then ballsing up to it to change for the better.
P.S. That and OCD. I really hate my OCD. I want a better brain! A crystal clear organized brain, not a foggy, frantic, messy one that takes too long to load and has too little hard-drive space and limited battery life.
