scheduling and recording every minute of my time feels somewhat like my life is being reduced to a checklist in some of my darker moments.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to focus on time management without pondering time.
I’m feeling slightly adrenaliney now, so I’m going to eat my chilli before it gets any worse (hopefully).
is not a good idea if you’re uninterested in pondering the fragility and mortality of human life, and obsessing about side effects and rare complications.
I mean, if you’re already on them, what’s the point?
The Grammar of Happiness: An Interview with Daniel Everett
This reminds me of what I learned when I was doing research on the Dane-zaa people of peace river, and kind of makes me want to read over the interview I had with a Dane-zaa elder.
I just think this is amazing and fascinating, and has that feeling of truth.
You got it, Viola. Most people’s opinions do not matter.
I will get there – to the useful part of what still feels like a horrible, scary revelation.
BTW Laura’s blog is lovely. 🙂
Every time I read an article about conservatives being “pro- life” I am reminded of my brother who died of ALS at the age of 47. He spent the last 6 years of his life in nursing homes where the care, supervision and meals were abysmal. One of his former roommates was smoking a cigarette, fell asleep and burned to death because his diaper caught fire. Another roommate went home for the weekend to visit his mother and committed suicide in the garage of her home so that he wouldn’t have to return to the nursing home. I have to say that in all the years my brother was there I never once saw a group of conservatives out in front of the building shouting slogans about the sanctity of life and how all lives – no matter what age – are meaningful. I never once saw a group of evangelicals visiting with patients, pushing wheelchairs, or feeding the elderly residents. There were no Rick Santorums advocating on behalf of my brother who several years before had been a pro golfer and was still the father of two adorable young boys. When conservatives and evangelicals understand that ALL life really is sacred, including that of the elderly, the permanently disabled, the terminally ill, and the women and children who accidentally get bombed in the course of a war, then maybe I’ll listen to their opinions on contraceptives and/or abortion. For now, however, this is really just a politically heated argument about women’s reproductive rights and who gets to control those rights.
The ‘Safe, Legal, Rare’ Illusion – NYTimes.com
YES.
(via golden-notebook)
Might be a rerun on my blog, and if it is, it’s worth repeating.
(via timekiller-s)
Holy SHIT, this is a good point. Why aren’t those pro-life people reading this?!
(via aeoligus)
I fall in love with things pretty easily. Books, music, tv, movies, people, artforms, history, science, poetry, everthing.
But oh man is this show brilliant. It is definitely my favorite.
And really, it’s easy to tell why, I mean, I love glee like crazy, and what it stands for and the type of characters and issues they’re showing on like, popular tv, it’s awesome. But I mean, I’m not in the show, there’s no one there who I can say, that’s how I feel and what I act like and what I could plausibly be like some day.
Maybe in some ways I am more clueless and less clueless than Jess, and I’ve been thinking more and more about teaching high school, rather than middle school, and hopefully I won’t ever fall for someone just because of their hair, but I mean pretty much other than that she’s the closest character to myself I’ve ever seen in tv or movie. I mean, I wish I could say it was Hermione Granger, but what smart girl doesn’t wish that, and I don’t think she embodies me quite as much. And with books there are many characters I relate too and see parts of myselves in, I would have to sift through a lot of memories to see if there’s a clearer vision of me in there somewhere.
But New Girl, wow, it just makes me so happy. My quirky, whimsical, hopeful inner workings are remarkably Jess-like. Maybe that’s why it makes me so happy to watch it. She influences lives the same way I try to.
I could blather on forever about this, so this is it.
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.
Sylvia Plath (via fromtheweirdtotheinsane)
This is how I feel, and a part of what causes me to panic.
I clicked through to this blog thinking it was going to be stamps.
It wasn’t, but it is lovely, my favourite sort of blog, a blend of poetry and photography, a glimps at someones life, someone who makes things.
I have read 15 pages now and my heart feels strange, and it feels like a betrayal to follow the masses of people I do when there are people who write and draw like this, and somehow magically bring the realness, the liveness of the real world to these pixels.
My copy of tfios has yet to show up, and I haven’t gotten my hands on lola and the boy next door yet either, so today I made the cold, although short, trek to the library. I got a few books, but the one I read is Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr. What can I say except that I sobbed through the majority of the story. The story brought up some of my own fears and I felt myself close to panicking at a few points, but I stayed okay. It’s the story of a girl Deanne Lambert, who slept with her brothers best friend when she was 13 and he was 17. After almost a year of this, her dad caught them together, and he never looked at her the same since. Now she’s 16 and the boys in her school treat her like public property, her brother is a new father with his own problems, and her two best friends are in love with one another. But they make it through you know? There isn’t a flowery ending or a grand conclusion, just small steps taken to try and make things right and move on.
I don’t like hating things, I don’t like to say I hate things even, but I hate that teenagers treat each other like this. It’s so incredibly heartbreaking. What screwed Deanne’s life was not that she had sex when she was 13. I’m not saying I advocate 13 year olds getting it on, but it wasn’t the ugly thing that it was portrayed at school. She just wanted to feel chosen really, to feel closeness with someone, to have their attention, and that is not a bad thing. What screwed up her life is the way the story was twisted and spread and lingered over, by her classmates and her own father, until she started to believe that was all she was. Pathetic. Trashy. A slut. Yet she wasn’t, she was just a girl, trying to find compassion and love. It’s true that she didn’t find love in Tommy’s 17 year old arms, but that’s all she was really looking for. What right does anyone else have to judge her for that. What right does anyone really have to judge anyone. We just go around in our lives not knowing how to be or what it’s like to be anyone else. But trying to know, trying to feel, trying to understand, I think that’s pretty much the most important thing any of us really ever do. Now I’m tearing up again, but hey, that’s okay. Sometimes I just get scared that we’re not doing it right, we’re wasting all these precious moments we could make things better, but then I take a breath, and say, the only way we can go is forward, so we might as well embrace it and do our best.
And be grateful.
I am so grateful to this author for stirring up these feelings within me so that I am reminded of the things that are most important. So that I can remember to live my life the best I can, even if I’m still scared some of the time. Breaths, one, two three. Breate in and out. I’m also grateful for John Green’s book tfios, even though I haven’t read it yet, because I can feel in my heart from the general themes people have let slip, and the response overall, that it will be a positive and beautiful thing in my life at this time.
It’s okay. Remember to be loving to people, even those who’s choices seem silly, or stupid, or wrong to you, because no matter how smart or experienced or right you are, you still don’t know.