persona non grata

Dream Deferred

2011-11-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes

"You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing."

2011-09-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

‎"I'd lost my closest friends in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You are here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and reasons for loving them."

--Shantaram

"But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly"

2011-06-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

"And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this".

--Jonathan Franzen
--The Corrections

I said no when I should have said yes

2011-06-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

"How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes."

---Jonathan Franzen

...

2011-05-08T22:11:00.001-07:00

"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get."

Show an affirming flame

2011-03-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

"Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it."

— C.S. Lewis

I am that I am

2011-01-29T06:53:00.000-08:00

This was our first,remote contact with the Plan.I could easily be somewhere else now if I hadn't been in Belbo's office that day.I could be- who knows?-selling sesame seeds in Samarkand,or editing a series if books in Braille,or heading the First Nantional Bank of Franz Josef Land
Counterfactual conditionals are always true,because the premise is false.But I was there that day,so now I am where I am.

--Umberto Eco

"Sometimes," she decided to say, "wonderful things happen to me, too."

2010-12-30T17:13:00.000-08:00

"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home."

— Alan Moore

--Watchmen

Nothing’s the way it used to be

2010-11-19T02:47:00.000-08:00

“Memory is dynamic, it’s alive. If some details are missing, memory fills in the holes with things that never happened.”

--Waltz with Bashir
--2008

Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

2010-11-11T07:40:00.000-08:00

"I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin.
And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.
I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies.
John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.
The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.
But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience."

-- Shauna Niequist
--Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

Merely this, and nothing more.

2010-11-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

"For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how."

--Mark Z. Danielewski
--House of Leaves

"Hope is a waking dream"

2010-11-03T07:04:00.001-07:00

“Hope is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.”

Matrix reloaded(2003)

The Present

2010-10-24T22:13:00.000-07:00

"We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment."

-- Audrey Niffenegger
-- The Time Traveler's Wife)

Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies

2010-10-10T23:58:00.000-07:00

"I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding— certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."

2010-10-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

"I don't want to be a man," said Jace. "I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can't confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead."
"Well," said Luke, "you're doing a fantastic job."

— Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes)

Lock and Key

2010-10-02T01:18:00.001-07:00

"What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right- we had many families over time. Our family of origion, the family we created, as well as the gorups you moved thorugh while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.

— Sarah Dessen (Lock and Key)

England, your England

2010-09-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

"Here are a couple of generalisations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic "world view." Nor is this because they are "practical," as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town-planning and water-supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out-of-date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency."

--George Orwell

Moving to UK for my post grad medical training..w00t!!!!w00t!!!!!!!

Change is the only constant

2010-09-25T05:09:00.001-07:00

"When we say things like "people don't change" it drives scientist crazy because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy. Matter. It's always changing, morphing, merging, growing, dying. It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting things be what they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones. The way we insist on believing despite every scientific indication that anything in this lifetime is permanent. Change is constant. How we experience change that's up to us. It can feel like death or it can feel like a second chance at life. If we open our fingers, loosen our grips, go with it, it can feel like pure adrenaline. Like at any moment we can have another chance at life. Like at any moment, we can be born all over again"

--Grey's Anatomy

Neurotic is what neurotic does

2010-09-23T00:53:00.000-07:00

"I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people."

— George Saunders

We Are Many

2010-09-19T22:15:00.000-07:00

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.

When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.

On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.

When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?

All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.

But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.

While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

--Pablo Neruda

So that’s how we live our lives

2010-09-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

"Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky. When it does, when one day you look around and nothing is recognizable, when you find yourself alone in a dark wood having lost the way, you may find it easier to blame it on someone else -- an errant lover, a missing father, a bad childhood -- or it may be easier to blame the map you were given -- folded too many times, out-of-date, tiny print -- but mostly, if you are honest, you will only be able to blame yourself.

--Nick Flynn

"wow, that's big"

2010-09-16T05:27:00.000-07:00

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of
the word "Infinite".
Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some.
Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a
totally stunning size, "wow, that's big", time. Infinity is just so
big that by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy.
Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly
huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here."

— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

It's a question of survival

2010-09-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."

Desmond Morris

choose your coffee and define yourself

2010-07-30T03:15:00.000-07:00

“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self - Tall - Decaf - Cappuccino.”

---You've Got Mail
--1998

The Men Who Stare at Goats

2010-07-08T01:13:00.000-07:00

“Your life is like a river. If you’re aiming for a goal that isn't your destiny, you will always be swimming against the current. Young Gandhi wants to be a stock car racer? Not gonna happen. Little Anne Frank wants to be a high school teacher? Tough Anne. That's not your destiny. But you will go on to move the hearts and minds of millions. Find out what your destiny is and the river will carry you. Sometimes events in life give an individual clues as to where their destiny lies."

--The Men Who Stare at Goats
--2009

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed

2010-06-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

The rain, it falls. The sun, it shines. The wind blows. And that’s what it’s like. You’re buffeted by this, by that, and it is nothing to do with you. Someone you love dies, or leaves. You get ill or you get better. You grow old and you remember, or you forget. And all the time, everywhere, there is this canopy stretching over you.
What canopy?
Things-as-they-are. Fate. Fate. Impersonal. Irrational. Disinterested. The rain falls. The sun shines. The wind blows. A bus mounts a pavement and kills a child. ...
I believe in no systems, no ideologies, no religion, nothing like that. I simply think – Oh, it’s very very boring, this. Very – I just think that from time to time, and at random, you are visited by what you cannot know cannot predict cannot control cannot change cannot understand and cannot cannot cannot escape – Fate. Why not? ‘S good old word.

--The Singing Detective
--Dennis Potter

Person in light of own individuality

2010-06-05T00:27:00.001-07:00

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

--E.E.Cummings

"....And I still ain't got a passport. "

2010-05-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

"Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?"

--Zadie Smith

Dreamin' a happy dream

2010-04-14T05:03:00.000-07:00

"At the end of the day faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don't really expect it. It's like one day you realize that the fairy tale may be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it may not be a castle. And it's not so important happy ever after, just that its happy right now. See once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you , and once in a while people may even take your breath away.”

Grey's Anatomy

Communication

2010-04-14T05:01:00.001-07:00

"Communication. It's the first thing we really learn in life. Funny thing is, once we grow up, learn our words and really start talking, the harder it becomes to know what to say. Or how to ask for what we really need.”

Grey's Anatomy

In fate or in chaos?

2010-04-02T06:20:00.000-07:00

"Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?"

— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

I am,therefore,I am

2010-04-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come."

— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

The secret life of bees

2010-03-27T03:45:00.000-07:00

“People can start out one way and by the time life gets through with them, they end up completely different.”

The Secret Life of Bees (2008)

Sum of our choices

2010-03-12T23:53:00.000-08:00

“We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made.We are in fact the sum total of our choices.”

-crimes and misdemeanors(1989)

Over the hill

2010-02-22T06:05:00.000-08:00

Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you’re over the summit, it’s downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you’re still going strong, when suddenly you’ve crossed the great divide. No one can tell. Some people peak at twelve, then lead rather uneventful lives from then on. Some carry on until they die; some die at their peak. Poets and composers have lived like furies, pushing themselves to such a pitch they’re gone by thirty. Then there are those like Picasso, who kept breaking ground until well past eighty.

And what about me?
My peak?
Would I even have one?

I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. Some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show. It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape. I felt like I was in a video game. A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines.

Haruki Murakami,
--Dance Dance Dance

Nostalgia

2009-09-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

"On any given day, something claims our attention [literally "grabs our hearts": kokoro o toraeru] Anything at all, inconsequential things. A rosebud, a misplaced hat, that sweater we liked as a child, an old Gene Pitney record. A parade of trivia with no place to go. Things that bump around in our consciousness for two or three days then go back to wherever they came from... to darkness. We've got all these wells dug in our hearts. While above the wells, birds flit back and forth."

--Haruki Murakami
--Pinball

it is at moments after i have dreamed

2009-08-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

-turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep

---e.e. cummings

Livin' la vida loca

2009-08-11T03:00:00.000-07:00

“There is only one way, really, to get into a state of living, and that's live! There is no substitute for an all-out, over-the-ramparts, howling charge against life. That's living. Living does not consist of sitting in a temple in the shadows and getting rheumatism from the cold stones. Living is hot, it's fast, it's often brutal! It has a terrific gamut of emotional reactions.
If you are really willing to live, you first have to be willing to do anything that consists of living. Weird. But it's one of those awfully true things that you wonder why one has to say it. And yet it has to be said.”

--L. Ron Hubbard

Home sapiens

2009-08-06T04:31:00.000-07:00

You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”

---the legend of bagger vance(1997)

Nah-Nah-Nah, Nana

2009-07-10T02:53:00.000-07:00

“Certain thoughts are better left unthunk.”

--Mighty Aphrodite

Now and Then

2009-06-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

“As we grow older, it becomes difficult to just believe. It's not that we don't want to, but too much has happened and we can't.”

of eternal sunshine and ice candies

2009-06-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Behold the Man

2009-06-17T06:18:00.000-07:00

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

Best case scenario

2009-06-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes its important to calm your self down with sheer optimism.

judgement is relative

2009-05-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

People judge you by what you have done,and you judge yourself by what you can do.

Aye or Nay

2009-04-24T01:38:00.000-07:00

"In life we all have an unspeakable secret, an irreversible regret, an unreachable dream and an unforgetable love"

---Diego Marchi.

Gary Jules-mad world

2009-04-21T03:13:00.001-07:00

♥

2009-04-17T04:04:00.000-07:00

“Only unfulfilled love can be romantic.”

--Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Small moments

2009-03-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments – we hear a word that sticks in our mind – or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly – we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed the mallard ducks in the lagoon…

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we could see certain trends emerge from our collection – certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realise that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real – this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story making events of our lives.

---Douglas Coupland,
Life After God

A map of love

2009-03-12T04:02:00.000-07:00

Your face more than others' faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

--Donald Justice

Choose one

2009-03-06T04:39:00.000-08:00

There are three kinds of souls and three kinds of prayers.

1) I am a bow in your hands,Lord.Draw me lest I rot.

2)Do not overdraw me ,Lord.I shall break.

3)Overdraw me,Lord.Who cares if I break.

Choose one.

Stayin' alive

2009-03-02T00:04:00.000-08:00

"You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel."

--Haruki Murakami
(After Dark)

Dealing with your lot

2009-03-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

--Haruki Murakami
(Kafka on the Shore)

Own it! :)

2009-02-23T22:23:00.000-08:00

"If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance"

---George Bernard Shaw

So true!

2009-02-23T02:37:00.000-08:00

“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans”

--John Lennon

The Smiths - How Soon is Now?

2009-02-20T02:42:00.000-08:00

Damned if you do,damned if you don't

2009-02-20T02:29:00.000-08:00

Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love.

-- Butch Hancock

Drama that is your life

2009-02-16T01:02:00.000-08:00

“I think everyone writes a story in their head that eventually becomes their life. If you don’t write it for yourself then someone else is going to write it for you.”

--Flicka(2006)

Feel the pain

2009-02-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

"People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain."

-Jim Morrison

Happiness and such

2009-02-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

"How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure."

-- William James

Don't Panic!

2009-02-13T02:45:00.000-08:00

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”

---Douglas Adams

Reluctance by Robert Frost

2009-02-13T02:43:00.000-08:00

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

--Robert Frost, Reluctance

"It is terrible to desire and not possess"

2009-02-11T07:20:00.000-08:00

"When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death."

----Denton Welch

Rihanna- Disturbia

2009-02-11T07:10:00.000-08:00

Nobody can hurt me without my permission

2009-02-10T01:25:00.000-08:00

“When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”

--Tom Robbins

On Being Human

2009-02-07T04:21:00.000-08:00

“I must learn to love the fool in me the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries"

--Theodore Isaac Rubin

Unsuitable for babies!

2009-02-07T04:14:00.000-08:00

My Christian Bale flips out big time.After all,to err is human:)
Here is a remixed version of his rant.

count your blessings :)

2009-02-04T05:38:00.000-08:00

Little is the luck I've had,
And oh, 'tis comfort small
To think that many another lad
Has had no luck at all.

A.E. Housman

To thine own self be true

2009-01-22T22:24:00.000-08:00

"Nobody wants to look like an idiot.And if I am ignorant,I'll just nod my empty head like a spring neck dog in back window of '63 malibu.
Cuz I would hate for you to think my mouth is tied to nothing and my brain has gone to sleep.I'd hate for you to find out that I am not cool."

--Unknown

Know thyself

2009-01-22T22:13:00.000-08:00

*Do you remember the last time you had an idea?I dont,I bet you dont either.I'have never had an original thought.Not last weak,last month,last year.Not ever.But I am gonna put words on paper and carry that shit to coffee house,stick out my chest and try to convince you I am really something.I dont need my brain anymore.*

--Unknown

life and such

2009-01-12T22:08:00.000-08:00

"sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. you just need to know what you're going to do next!"

— Sophie Kinsella (The Undomestic Goddess)

Are you listening?

2009-01-12T22:06:00.000-08:00

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."

— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle)

Sebastien Tellier - La Ritournelle

2009-01-12T22:03:00.000-08:00

pursuit of happiness

2009-01-03T03:09:00.000-08:00

"I'm thinking that sometimes you just have to make the decision to be happy. Just realize that things aren't ever what you hoped they'd be. Not ever. For anybody. The only thing that separates one kind of person from another is that there are some who stay angry about it and there are some who accept what comes their way."

--away from her (2006)

tere bin-Rabbi Shergill

2008-12-26T06:11:00.000-08:00

tere bin / besides you
sanu sohnia / my love
koi hor nahio labhna / i shan't find another
jo dave / who'll give
ruh nu sakun / peace to my soul
chukke jo nakhra mera / and indulge me
ve main sare ghumm ke vekhia / i have gone and seen it all
amrika , roos, malaysia / america, russia, malaysiana
kittey vi koi fark si / there wasn't any difference
har kise di koi shart si / they all had some condition
koi mangda mera si sama / some asked for my time
koi hunda surat te fida / some were fascinated with my face
koi mangda meri si vafa / some demanded my fidelity
na koi mangda merian bala / none wanted my demons
tere bin / besides you
hor na kise / no one else
mangni merian bala / wanted my demons
tere bin / besides you
hor na kise / no one else
karni dhup vich chhan / shall shade me in the sun
jiven rukia / (the) way you paused
si tun zara / slightly
nahion bhulna / i shan't forget
main sari umar / all my life
jiven akhia si akhan chura / you said, looking away
"rovenga sanu yad kar" / "you shall weep in my memory"
hasia si main hasa ajeeb / i laughed a strange laugh
(par) tu nahi si hasia / but you didn't
dil vich tera jo raaz si / you had a secret in your heart
mainu tu kyon ni dasia / why didn't you tell me
tere bin / besides you
sanu eh raz / none shall tell this
kise hor nahion dasna / secret to me
tere bin / besides you
peerh da ilaaj / what druid
kis vaid kolon labhna / has the cure to my ills
milia si ajj mainu / i found today
tera ik patra / a note of yours
likhia si jis 'te / on which you had scribbeled
tun shayr varey shah da / a varis shah couplet
park ke si osnu / upon reading which
hanjnu ik duliya / a teardrop fell
akhan 'ch band si / what was locked in the eye
seh raaz ajj khulia / was revealed today
ki tere bin / that other than you
eh mere hanjnu / these tears of mine
kise hor / won't be kissed by
nahio chumna / none else
ki tere bin / that other than you
eh mere hanjhu / these tears of mine
mitti vich rulnha / will wither in the dust

lyrics from http://rabbism.blogspot.com/

Eurythmics - I Saved The World Today

2008-11-28T23:59:00.000-08:00

Human make up

2008-11-28T03:20:00.000-08:00

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

---Anais Nin

Extraordinary!

2008-11-28T03:17:00.000-08:00

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

--Anais Nin

Livin' on the edge

2008-11-26T00:41:00.000-08:00

I want to burn, even if I break myself. I live only for ecstasy. Nothing else effects me. Small doses, moderate loves- all these leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat... sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I am neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous- lava, inflammable, unrestrained. I feel like a jungle animal who is escaping captivity."

- Anais Nin

The Clash - Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

2008-11-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

Red Hot Chili Peppers- Tell me baby

2008-11-19T06:16:00.000-08:00

what just happened there?

2008-11-19T06:12:00.000-08:00

“Just remember, the same as a spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps: Continued on page whatever. No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.”

--Chuck Palahniuk

Waka

2008-11-07T02:52:00.000-08:00

Though I go to you
ceaselessly along dream paths,
the sum of those trysts
is less than a single glimpse
granted in the waking world.

--Ono No Komachi

Imagination

2008-11-07T02:24:00.000-08:00

"The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. stone crumbles. wood rots. people, well, they die. but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on."

--Chuck Palahniuk

Coldplay - Viva La Vida

2008-11-01T00:39:00.001-07:00

Perfection?

2008-10-31T22:12:00.000-07:00

Nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Job vs career

2008-10-30T01:57:00.000-07:00

Evidently this new career wasn’t all thrills. There were spills, too, for some, maybe for me. Already I’d noted a few slippery patches. Little jobs had no such peaks and troughs, what you saw was what you got. You did what you were told to do, had as good a time doing it as possible and at five on the dot you forgot all about it. Little jobs didn’t raise ripples in the mind, didn’t disturb the surface at all. A career, on the other hand, seeped into evenings and weekends, popped up even in dreams, in fact took up so much of life that to all intents and purposes it was life, which might explain why it kept coming up with the same kind of questions: what am I here for, where am I going, is what I’m doing right or wrong? And, like life, the answers were never straightforward, often depressing. Very often there were none at all.

--Jill Tweedie, ‘Eating Children’

This and that

2008-10-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives.When any event occurs to us,we make it ordinary.And through becoming ordinary,we lose our pleasure.

--Tim Wilson

Red Rider - White Hot

2008-10-21T00:17:00.000-07:00

To be or not to be

2008-10-19T02:47:00.000-07:00

"In every generation, there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness so that we mostly conform, we hide our secret identities beneath false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds—because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves—we soar, we fly, we flee."

--Salman Rushdie

Love is contradictory

2008-10-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

“When we fall in love, we are seeking to re-find all or some of the people to whom you were attached as children. On the other hand, we ask our beloved to correct all the wrongs that these early parents or siblings inflicted on us. So, love contains in it the contradiction, the attempts to return to the past and the attempt to undo the past.”
--crimes and misdemeanors(1989)

we were a generation

2008-10-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

We took the world as given.Cigarettes
Were twenty-several cents a pack, and gas
as much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber
And veiled in supernatural scruples—call
Them chivalry. A certain breathlessness
Was felt; perhaps the Bomb, which after all
Mushroomed us as we entered puberty,
Waking us from the newspaper-nightmare

Our childhoods had napped through, was realer then;
Our lives, at least, were not assumed to be
Our right; we lived, by shifts, on sufferance.
The world contained policemen, true; and these
Should be avoided; governments were bunk,
But well-intentioned; blacks were beautiful
But seldom seen; the poor were with ye always.
We thought one war as moral as the next,

Believed that life was tragic and absurd,
And were absurdly cheerful on that basis.
We loved John Donne and Hopkins, Yeats and Pound,
Medieval history was rather swank,
Psychology was in the mind; abstract
Things grabbed us where we lived; the only life
Worth living was the private life, and—last,
Worst scandal in this characterization—

We did not know we were a generation.

--John Updike

Change

2008-10-14T02:49:00.000-07:00

You’re never going to be the same person you are right now.
--Lions for lambs

2+2=22

2008-10-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

When you are thinking about something you don't understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. The confusion is, because we are all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid trying to figure out how to put two sticks together to reach the banana, and we can't quite make it. So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, I put the two sticks together, and I reach the banana.
--Richard Feynman

Come to the dark side,we have cookies

2008-10-10T05:07:00.000-07:00

"The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind."

- Katherine Mansfield

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Hump de Bump

2008-10-09T03:13:00.000-07:00

Ono no Komachi

2008-10-06T04:42:00.000-07:00

though I go to you ceaselessly
along dream paths
the sum of those trysts is
less than a single glimse
granted in the waking world

-Ono no Komachi

Love again

2008-10-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

"Love is a perky little elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun."
-Matt Groening

the choices we make..

2008-09-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.It is my personal approach that creates the climate.It is my daily mood that makes the weather.I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.I can humiliate or humor,hurt or heal.In all situations,it is my response that decides whether a crises is escalated or de-escalated,and a person is humanized or de-humanized."

-Goethe

Furictionary

2008-09-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

"OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

KNEE-JERK IRONY: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflective matter of course in everyday conversation.

DERISION PREEMPTION: A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. Derision Preemption is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony."

-Douglas Coupland, Generation X