therapy

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:46:11 GMT

Today I noticed how much joy I get from printing out papers at work (especially to pub2 for BW double-sided!), jogging down the stairs, sorting them out into neat piles, hole-punching them, and --BAM!!!--stapling them with one of the automatic staplers.

be still, my heart

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 23:12:38 GMT

whoa. i study these:

'pon my brow

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:51:59 GMT

Where I once thought was written "buy me things", I now think "walk in on me, I dare you" is written on my forehead.

Not that I mind terribly since we are all girls and I am not (very) prudish or ashamed, but it must be noted that one of my roommates--the owner of our new puppy, the reason why we keep the bathroom door shut all the time--has walked in on me four times in the past week! I suppose that says something about both our learning curves. This would not have been of such note except for the fact that I also was barged in on while I voted today in a large, intimidating, antiquated booth. Apparently I took too long.

Happy Super Tuesday to all.

i'm onto you

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:57:36 GMT

yes, that's right. i'm onto you, friends, and your sending me pictures of kittens when i get upset. it works.

darnit. sometimes i fear that i am the biggest sucker ever.

p.s. this has to be documented: googleEric to Joe-how dare you! you open IE and use MSN search on my computer?!
kehe. plus, that night...is "i've made a huge mistake" night.

"it's a little bit funny...this feeling insiiiide"

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 01:07:57 GMT

I'm sitting here, night before departure, still finishing up my maid of honor speech for my sister's wedding in Kauai. And suddenly it hits me, with a big, broad smile. My sister's getting married. My sister, my world, my first, closest, dearest friend. How happy! This is huge! I read through what I've written so far, and I'm already tearing up. This is going to be one heck of a week. <3

favorite passages from summer books

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:11:26 GMT

Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land:

‘Gratitude’ is a euphemism for resentment. Resentment from most people I do not mind—but from pretty little girls it is distasteful[…]you will [resent me] if you don’t root out of your mind this delusion that you are indebted to me. The Japanese have five ways to say ‘thank you’—and every one translates as resentment, in various degrees. Would that English has the same built-in honesty! Instead, English can define sentiments that the human nervous system is incapable of experiencing. ‘Gratitude,’ for example. –Jubal Harshaw

I like this because I have a similar take on gratitude, especially for things I would rather not have done.

Of course it was funny; it was tragic. That’s why I had to laugh. I looked at a cageful of monkeys and suddenly I saw all the mean and cruel and utterly unexplainable things I’ve seen and heard and read about in the time I’ve been with my own people—and suddenly it hurt so much I found myself laughing[…]you girls were the nicest part of the show. I grok now, that I they had laughed, you would have been hurt. No, they laughed when a comic tripped over his feet and fell down…or something else that is not a goodness[…] I had thought—I had been told—that a ‘funny’ thing is a thing of goodness. It isn’t. not ever is it funny to the person it happens to[…] The goodness is in the laughing. I grok it is a bravery…and a sharing…against pain and sorrow and defeat[…]I was not laughing at the little monkey. I was laughing at us. People. And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing. –Michael Valentine Smith, Man from Mars

Because I love to laugh, a lot, probably too much.

Anybody can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her hearth…no matter what the merciless hours have done. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn’t matter to you and me—but it does to them. Look at her! –Jubal

One of the book's more famous quotes.

I’ll give an exact definition. ‘Love’ is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own[…] Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy—in fact, they’re almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. Both at once can produce unbearable turmoil --Jubal

Ah, to define love!

D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

“But what about the other man?” she asked.
“Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very deeply?...You had that lover in Germany…what is it now? Nothing almost. It seems to me that it isn’t these little acts and little connections we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they? Where…Where are the snows of yesteryear?...It’s what endures through one’s life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections specially. If people don’t exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the life-long companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing…that’s what we live by…not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That’s the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in marriage. If we stick to what we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.”

Companionship vs. sexual relationships? In the best of cases, there should be both.

Connie sat and listened in a sort of wonder, and a sort of fear. She did not know if he was right or not. There was Michaelis, whom she loved; so she said to herself. But her love was somehow only an excursion from her marriage with Clifford; the long, slow habit of intimacy, formed through years of suffering and patience. Perhaps the human soul needs excursions, and must not be denied them. But the point of an excursion is that you come home again.

--early conversation between Clifford and Constance Chatterley

Somewhat of a response from the wife from the first quote

“Are you sorry?” she said.

“In a way!” he replied, looking up at the sky. “I thought I’d done with it all. Now I’ve begun again.”

“Begun what?”

“Life.”

“Life!” she re-echoed, with a queer thrill.

“It’s life,” he said. “There’s no keeping clear. And if you keep clear you might almost as well die. So if I’ve got to be broken open again, I have.”

--Connie and Mellors

I just love awakenings at this point in life.

He stood back and watched her going into the dark, against the pallor of the horizon. Almost with bitterness he watched her go. She had connected him up again, when he had wanted to be alone. She had cost him that bitter privacy of a man who at last wants only to be alone.

--Mellors

“Tha’s got such a nice tail on thee,” he said, in the throaty caressive dialect. “Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody. It’s the nicest, nicest woman’s arse as it! An’ ivry bi o it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha’rt not one o’ them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha’s got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in ’is guts. It’s a bottom as could hold the world up, it is.” –Mellors, on Connie’s butt

Funny quote about butts, how can you miss?

Ah God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him. –Connie and Mellors

Confirmed as true by one male.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando:

Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now? […] Love had meant nothing to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He marveled how he could have gone through with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand—in fact he was rattling off one of his most impassioned sonnets when the Princess addressed him, “would you have the goodness to pass the salt?” (40)

I do love love.

Suddenly he was struck in the face by a blow, soft, yet heavy, on the side of his cheek. So strung with expectation was he, that he started and put his hand to his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realize that these were raindrops falling; the blows were the blows of the rain. (59)

And I love rain.

For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. (75)

The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she has never done before. The malady is too well known, and has been, alas, too often described to need describing afresh, save very briefly. There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams[…] (143)

But it was equally impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots, nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. (150)

“Madam,” the man cried, leaping to the ground, “you’re hurt!”

“I’m dead, Sir!” she replied.

A few minutes later, they became engaged. (250)

I liked this scene of a first meeting of lovers.

What has praise and fame got to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods[…](325)

“Here! Shel, here!” she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider. The aero-plane rushed out o the clouds and stood over her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent flare in the darkness.

And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, fresh-coloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head a single wild bird.

“It is the goose!” Orlando cried. “The wild goose....”

And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight. (328-9, the end)

Well, honestly, I just like this ending because of the goose. That's personal.

murray

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 15:52:42 GMT

murray
murray

slumber party

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:35:06 GMT

me (8:49:22 AM): why is it necessary for the senate to have all-night sessions?

Kt (8:49:47 AM): I dunno, it's like a sleepover party

me (8:49:45 AM): i know. sounds fun

Kt (8:50:04 AM): they do each other's nails on their off time

Kt (8:50:12 AM): or when someone BO-RING is talking

p.s. why?

household

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 22:50:48 GMT

I'm finding it amusing what you have to keep (yourself and) your family from doing when having a house guest.
In my crazy, female-dominant household, it shall always be entertaining when any of us brings a boy over.

i blame coffee

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:16:16 GMT

tongue-tied --the magnetic fields

, ,,,, ,, , , , ,,,, ,, ,,,

inquire about koi pond safaris.

= === = = = = ==== == = = = = = = ==
i forgot to learn morse code.
squeakface, i found this today. watch the video!
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/06/18/japan.manta.reut/index.html

watching "persuasion" tonight--said (by my esteemed lithum teacher) to be better than p&p.

immeemmi's Xanga