June 2012
39 posts
I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.
Isaac Marion
There will always be something good in a person, all you have to do is look. Often the best way to do this is to find them alone, without their friends or their trophies or their reputation. When you see someone live life as their own person, there exists a certain level of vulnerability. What you experience will feel familiar, and with a little more age you will recognize this as an essential...
To achieve perfection in one thing, however small, makes it possible to face uncertainty in the more difficult problems in life.
Roger Bannister
1 tag
Why is the word yes so brief? It should be the longest, the hardest, so that you could not decide in an instant to say it, so that upon reflection you could stop in the middle of saying it.
Vera Pavlova
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
Sam Harris
A running list of things that are arguably worse than death:
Final seasons of your favourite television shows
Realizing you answered a question wrong as your exam time ends
Less than $5 on your person
Fictional characters dying
Getting rejected by someone you like
No wi-fi
Gay porn appearing on your dash when someone is behind you
Getting song lyrics wrong while lip-synching
Realizing you...
Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin
The Chinese woman who rose from her coffin to fix dinner
Two weeks after falling and suffering a head injury, Li Xiufeng, 95, was found lying motionless in her home by a neighbor. The friend couldn’t wake her up. She was placed in a coffin and, according to local custom, was supposed to rest there for several days before the funeral. A day before the burial, her neighbor went to check on...
Believe me, no flesh and blood human is scarier than your own imagination.
If you pretend that you have no needs, either for sex, or affection, or emotional support, you are lying to yourself, and you will wind up trying to get your needs met by indirect methods that won’t work very well. People who do this often get called manipulative and passive-aggressive - terms for people who have not figured out how to get their needs met in a straightforward manner. Do not...
Working hard and being lucky are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are both necessary conditions for any kind of success. If you want to achieve anything in life, you need to both work hard and be fortunate.
And then there’s the sickness I feel from looking at legs I can’t touch, or at lips that don’t smile at me. Or hips that don’t reach for me. And hearts that don’t beat for me.
Markus Zusak
The way your fingers move across someone else’s skin will be the most beautiful form of art you will ever make.
Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror.
Foucault uses the term heterotopia to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other...
1 tag
Turns out, the moms and aunts of gay men have an advantage over the moms and aunts of straight men for several reasons: They are more fertile, displaying fewer gynecological disorders or complications during pregnancy; they are more extroverted, as well as funnier, happier and more relaxed; and they have fewer family problems and social anxieties.
(Source: Gay Men Have Evolutionary Benefits for...
Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.
Margaret Atwood
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From things she said, I perceived she was unhappy because she was lonely. The nature of humans, it seems, is to want to be in pairs, and this human female did not have another of her own kind to pair with.
Neither did I, I realized. So I must have been lonely - until she came to me, like sun or rain, and began providing something I had needed without either of us knowing it.
Student: When I see someone carrying a child and I give it some thought, all I can see is that it’s a lot of suffering.
Ajaan Fuang: That’s right. Give it a lot of thought. Once there’s birth, there has to be suffering. We’ve all suffered in this way. First there’s your own suffering, then you take on the sufferings of others.
3 tags
Introspection Illusion
megutron:
The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
The illusion has...
5 tags
A villain is just a victim whose story hasn’t been told.
Chris Colfer
1 tag
The impostor syndrome, sometimes called impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It is not an officially recognized psychological disorder, and is not among the conditions described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the...
1 tag
The Four Stages of Competence
Unconscious incompetence - The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognise their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to...
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The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent...
2 tags
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the...
2 tags
Instead of Killing Yourself
wait until a year from now where you say, “Holy fuck, I can’t believe I was going to kill myself before I etcetera’d… before I went skinny dipping in Tennessee, made my own IPA, tried out for a game show, rode a camel drunk, skydived alone, learned to waltz with clumsy old people, photographed electric jellyfish, built a sailboat from trash, taught someone how to read, etc. etc. etc.”
The red...
Power is being told you are not loved and not being destroyed by it.
Madonna
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Depressive realism is the proposition that people with depression actually have a more accurate perception of reality, specifically that they are less affected by positive illusions of illusory superiority, the locus of control and optimism bias. The concept refers to people with borderline or moderate depression, suggesting that while non-depressed people see things in an overly positive light...
This course explores the history, significance, and representation of the zombie as a figure in horror and fantasy texts. Instruction follows an intense schedule, using critical theory and source media (literature, comics, and films) to spur discussion and exploration of the figure’s many incarnations. Daily assignments focus on reflection and commentary, while final projects foster...
1 tag
The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort; with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I will murder you in the woods, burn your body, keep your ashes and sprinkle it over everything that I ingest, so that every time I eat something I will be reminded of the sweet taste of vengeance and the gratuitous violence I inflict against anyone who dares stand against me.
Prose for my enemies.
to Jane Cooney Baker, died 1-22-62
I will not find you on the street nor will the phone ring, and each moment will not let me be in peace. it is not enough that there are many deaths and that this is not the first; it is not enough that I may live many more days, even perhaps, more years. it is not enough. the phone is like a dead animal that will not speak. and when it speaks again it will always be the wrong voice now. I have...
After all, my erstwhile dear, My no longer cherished, Need we say it wasn’t love Just because it perished?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
May 2012
32 posts
I present to you, my beloved followers, a (very...
Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.
Robert Brault
