"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place"
1. I guess it's my fault for expecting better from popular music, but how can there still be blatantly sexist songs like "Daughters" (John Mayer) being written today and loved by both sexes? (This one fucks up everybody, boys are tough and can take it, girls are delicate flowers necessary for the boys to be human) and Demi Lovato is covering it and millions of kids are going to listen to it and WHY ISN'T anybody saying anything? Ok. You can go read the non-ranty part of this post.
2. Erin and me both love this song, especially the line "we both maniacally laugh and like all the same stuff", the woman's voice is actually pretty good.
Click to view3. Found an awesome website that converts youtube vids into mp3 for you.
4. Another personality test, according to which I'm very disaggreable and very open to new experiences (what can i say? people keep messing up) :
I'm a O88-C30-E48-A4-N14 Big Five!!
5. Booked the train tickets to go the town of books, Hay on Wye (/hei on wai/) in Wales next weekend (28-30). Verena's coming with me (after much procrastination) and we're staying in a farm. For some reason this does not mean I get to go horse riding (it's probably for the best since I'm spending enough money as it is, and that's not even counting the fact that is a town made of bookshops with really cheap books AND I'll be coming back by train so there's no weight limit.
6. Podfic and a random add I caught on TV are making reconsider watching House again. Mostly it's tv show withdrawal, Supernatural is over, Castle too, Glee has only 3 episodes to go (and the last couple haven't made me happy at all).
7. Have another personality meetup this Thursday and I have to host it because Marianne's not coming *panics* I need an extrovert NOW.
8. Found this awesome artist called Ruben Toledo:
9. Also found two awesome poems:
The first by Rudyard Kipling, whom I normally don't like for post-colonialist reasons but who is being so gay I couldn't but agree.
The Thousandth Man
One man in a thousand, Solomon says,
Will stick more close than a brother.
And it's worth while seeking him half your days
If you find him before the other.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine depend
On what the world sees in you,
But the Thousandth Man will stand your friend
With the whole round world agin you.
'Tis neither promise nor prayer nor show
Will settle the finding for 'ee.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine of 'em go
By your looks, or your acts, or your glory.
But if he finds you and you find him,
The rest of the world don't matter;
For the Thousandth Man will sink or swim
With you in any water.
You can use his purse with no more talk
Than he uses yours for his spendings
And laugh and meet in your daily walk
As though there had been no lendings.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine of 'em call
For silver and gold in their dealings;
But the Thousandth Man he's worth 'em all,
Because you can show him your feelings.
His wrong's your wrong, and his right's your right,
In season or out of season.
Stand up and back it in all men's sight -
With that for your only reason!
Nine hundred and ninety-nine can't bide
The shame or mocking or laughter,
But the Thousandth Man will stand by your side
To the gallows-foot and after!
10. The second one is a rec by bookshop, who thinks it's about fandom, I'm not quite sure it's about fandom itself, more about fannishness, but either way, awesome:
Marginalia by Billy Collins
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.