things of little relevance

Fluffy

A peek into people’s refrigerators (via Bitten).

Short Order Cook | Marathon,TX | 2-Person Household | She can bench press over 300lbs. | 2007

College Students | Waco, TX | 3-Person Household | Drummer for a Death Metal band. | 2009

Serious

Tiananmen Square, 20 Years Later

Heartwarming

Julian Barnes on John Updike

(this I actually read on paper, sometimes I lie.)

And I have a fetish for men with canes.

Love in the Time of Differential Equations

“To illustrate the approach, suppose Romeo is in love with Juliet, but in our version of the story, Juliet is a fickle lover. The more Romeo loves her, the more she wants to run away and hide. But when he takes the hint and backs off, she begins to find him strangely attractive. He, on the other hand, tends to echo her: he warms up when she loves him and cools down when she hates him.

What happens to our star-crossed lovers? How does their love ebb and flow over time? That’s where the math comes in. By writing equations that summarize how Romeo and Juliet respond to each other’s affections and then solving those equations with calculus, we can predict the course of their affair. The resulting forecast for this couple is, tragically, a never-ending cycle of love and hate. At least they manage to achieve simultaneous love a quarter of the time.”

Maybe George Eliot would have benefited from a mathematical analysis of her love life…

“The most intriguing aspect of George Eliot’s life has to be her honeymoon in Venice, in the summer of 1880. Her decision, at the age of 60, to marry John Cross, a young friend some 20 years her junior, had excited disapproval among friends and acquaintances, not least because GH Lewes, with whom she had enjoyed a long and loving relationship, had been dead for less than two years.

Like Dorothea in Middlemarch, who begins to love Will Ladislaw while she is still married to Casaubon, Eliot had been delighted by Cross’s youth and devotion long before Lewes’s death. But their honeymoon punctured the fantasy for both when Cross leaped from the balcony of their hotel suite, sailing over three or four gondolas before landing in the middle of the Grand Canal. He was rescued and carried back to his room unharmed.”

“Is all happiness solitary? Of course not. But one can be happy alone and this might even be the key to being happy with others. Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud when walking with his sister. However, I think that one can also experience this feeling of existence in the experience of love, in being intimate with one’s lover, feeling the world close around one and time slips away in its passing. Rousseau’s rowing boat becomes the lovers’ bed and one bids the world farewell as one slides into the shared selfishness of intimacy.

…And then it is over. Time passes, the reverie ends and the feeling for existence fades. The cell phone rings, the e-mail beeps and one is sucked back into the world’s relentless hum and our accompanying anxiety.”

Happy Like God- Simon Critchley

All moved in! Summer!

Now leaving to go peruse Morningside Books, followed by afternoon cocktails!

The swing in my backyard snapped while I was in mid-air. Fortunately I am more emotionally than physically perturbed. Aside from a few scratches along the right side of my body and thirty-pounds, I’m just as fresh as the day I turned sixteen. I guess twenty-one year old’s are too mature for swingsets. Maybe it’s time to try the other swinging.

Categorized as: “Social Thought/Bereavement”

If only self-control were as easy to download as Freedom or LeechBlock.

Some have graduated, some have made Dean’s List, meanwhile Lucy putters away at the library. Putter, putter. Somehow I am still not done with finals.

Nevertheless, it was strangely comforting to retreat into the confines of Butler today. Within three hours I had already seen four ubiquitous Butler scenesters (#1 and #2 have probably been on MTV; contrary to his nickname, #3 surprisingly does not live in Williamsburg, and #4 is not really a scenester anymore) and a few other staples. To my dysfunctional second family!

At least I am currently drinking wine that is not mine and sitting in a king-size bed that is not mine. Both solitary activities, mind you! No naughty thoughts!  (A movie version of my movie would be rather aptly titled Reveries of a Solitary Walker.)

Marquis de Sade/Margaret Cavendish/Montaigne/Rousseau anticipates the end Roland Barthes foresees for literature: “To make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text.”[1]

That sentence is literally in every single one of my final papers. Can anyone say crutching?  Barthes is the new Montaigne. But alas, Montaigne is still Montaigne. There is only room for one in my cold cold heart!