"When I arise in the morning, I am torn by the twin desires to reform the world and to enjoy the world. This makes it difficult to plan my day."--T.S. Eliot

My mother has discovered that her local library checks out magazines on an honors basis, with no record of the issues that its patrons have borrowed.

This is the subscript to her enthusiastic report of having found an easy way to get free magazines.

I really do live by the sea. I really am happy ( Read more... )

I replied to the following in another person's journal before realizing the delicate contingency (see number eight) of the transaction ( Read more... )

"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves."
[John Berger]

...

Only God, my dear
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
[William Butler Yeats]

"And the crazy part of it was even if you were *clever*, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you *still* had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high school girl was awash in... ( Read more... )

P.S. My six-year-old niece's favorite pejorative, one that should have any dignified neologist catapulting OEDs with envy, is 'vomitrocious.' Ha! Nearly a perfectly revolting word--though I still think the perfect insult needs a few hissing sibilants (or maybe cryptic diacriticals?) to it...

Dearest Sub-conscious ( Read more... )

Alone in the exam room, I stare at the pain scale, a simple number line complicated by only two phrases. Under zero: "No pain." Under ten: "The worst pain imaginable ( Read more... )

Turns out, poring over arcane passages from Epictetus is of little credit to my intelligence ( Read more... )