“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
Invisible Cities,  Italo Calvino
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

It’s me.  I’m here.  I love you.  Stop waiting.

You know when you’re in an awkward situation with someone and you know it’s not going well and you’re just bidding the time until you can make a clean getaway?  I realized that I felt that way for the first 17 years of my life, with my family.

With family, though, there is no clean getaway.

“It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep for we temper our curiosity to fit in with others. They may have particular visions of who we are and hence may subtly prevent certain sides of us from emerging: ‘I hadn’t thought of you as someone who was interested in flyovers,’ they may intimidatingly suggest. Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observations of others; then too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the the companion’s questions and remarks or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for curiosity. But alone in Hammersmith, in the middle of a March afternoon, I had no such concerns. I had the freedom to act a little weirdly. I sketched the window of a hardware shop and word-painted the flyover.”
Alain du Botton, The Art of Travel

What is this that I live with?

the constant pressure to perform

i must not be too much the Other

i live here because the conformity that is asked of me

takes some of the pressure off of me to put pressure onto me

ughsughts

The chaotic banality of life.

I just spent two minutes of my life watching this: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4muob_zoom-into-a-tooth_tech.

the thing that blows me away is how apparently solid, “real” objects are made up entirely of space between such microscopic objects.  How the perception of solidity is entirely manufactured by the needs of our consciousness and perceptions.

Yet: the self-organizing principles of the smallest bits of matter (and whatever else there is in the world) gives me hope: how can there be a god?  The inclination of the universe is to organize itself.  It’s only when our chaotic destructive consciousness (a fabrication of itself—how it makes us thinks we’re unified, rational, self-determining beings)  that we need to look for a top-down unifier, rather than a bottom-up one.

(via papertissue)

(via papertissue)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

My bad habit is making mixes to which no one listens.

and now I will stop ending sentences with the dangling modifier.

The next person who says “peace” to me, I’m going to cut them.

Hmmm.

I’ve got my browser set up so that I can only get onto facebook at certain times of the day for no more than 50 minutes—no stalking or drunken facebooking.  Now I just drunkenly tumbl.