December 2010
32 posts
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The Alligator
As a young child, my mother deemed it important for my development into a well-rounded adult to send me away and live with my grandparents. Through these adventures I was to bond with my lovely grandparents while simultaneously explore the country. I was fearless and five and boarded the plane to Florida.
Alone, I conquered the unknown Floridian land outside our condo, a place filled with new...
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“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The...”
– T.S. Eliot, from “Preludes”
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“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of...”
– Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
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“Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm, and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians...
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“If anywhere in your travels you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want...”
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
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The General
When he fought beside them, he was braced up by their broad backs and fierce faces. Knowing that any of his men could cut through with one full stroke a fair sized tree cheered him in battle. But when he rose early in the morning and stepped over them, snoring and vulnerable, then he felt for them as a mother might, wanting to draw a coverlet over this bare shoulder, and wondering if that one...
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Adventure and Satisfaction
“I have dreams I can’t make sense of,” she said. She didn’t mind that he couldn’t come with ideas of how to better their lives. The conversation had been repeated time and time again, after all. What could come from repetition? “I need to do something new. I have to learn something new, perhaps some sort of trade. I need to have a way to measure my growth. I feel like I never get anywhere new with...
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“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”
– Isak Dinesen
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Waiting for Winter
“I’ve got a couple of ideas,” he would say to her. She’d listen, but only halfheartedly, for she knew he was lying. Whether he knew he was lying or not was unknown. Perhaps he really did believe he knew what they would do after the semester. Idle bodies and restless minds mixed to make an insatiable Wanderlust that neither could indulge in while drifting aimlessly through life at a university both...
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Mein Leben (eine kurze Autobiographie)
Ich wurde am 16. Februar 1992 in Grand Rapids, Michigan geboren. Von meinem dritten bis zu meinem neunten Lebensjahr wohnte ich jedes Jahr für sechs Monate mit meinen Grosseltern in Florida, weil meine Eltern wollten, dass ich viele Erfahrungen mit meinen Grosseltern in verschiedenen Orten hatte. Während dieser Zeit entwickelte ich ein blühende Phantasie und machte oft kurze Filme,...
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Our New Normal is the Old Disturbed
“In one place after another, in fact, rates of alcoholism, suicide, and depression have gone up dramatically even as the amount of stuff also accumulated. The science writer Daniel Goleman noted in the New York Times that people born in the advanced countries after 1955 are three times as likely as their grandparents to have had a serious bout of depression. Indeed, one report in 2000 found that...
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Hedonics
I discovered today that there is a area of study that fits well with what I am most fervently interested in. There is a new field called hedonics, defined as, “the study of what makes experience and life pleasant and unpleasant. It is concerned with feelings of pleasure and pain, of interest and boredom, of joy and sorrow, and of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is also concerned with the...
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15 Authors
Here is a list of my favorite and most influential authors.
1. John Steinbeck 2. Victor Hugo 3. Sherman Alexie 4. Albert Camus 5. Jonathon Safron Foer 6. David Foster Wallace 7. William Faulkner 8. Shirley Jackson 9. Flannery O’Connor 10. William Shakespeare 11. Edgar Allan Poe 12. Leo Tolstoy 13. Vladimir Nabokov 14. ...
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“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were,...”
– The Fall, Albert Camus. (via mer-et-soleil)