“And it’s not “clever lonely” (like Morrissey) or “interesting Lonely” (like Radiohead); it’s “lonely, lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder”
(To this.)
Maybe it’s because the setting is so familiar, which is a luxury I don’t usually have if I want to stick to well-written material, (with apologies to all my writer friends 
) but this is one of the most touching stories that I’ve ever read. I had read it quite a long while back, and forgotten about it until after I wrote that poem. I just read it again and thought I really should link to it.
Pixar’s Up: Paradise Lost at Paradise Falls | Overthinking It
“And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI
Go read.
Man, that was LONG!I’m not supposed to be this jobless!
Explanation:
()
for indicating “cross-overs” or ranges. Geeks who go from C+ to C— depending on the situation (i.e. mostly “C+”) could use C+(—).
>
The idea was to find a custom header, which this is not, although the theme has the option- I liked the default one so much that I decided to do away with my attempt at a dark blog header, which I had mostly copied from some guy (I googled for “blog headers”, I don’t even know who I got it from), anyway. It’s much cleaner( but is it clean enough, kalafudra?) and lighter, and although I wish it didn’t have such wide margins, I guess I can live with that. For now, I am content.
I am childish in my deviance;
chaotic, but obvious.
I am all buttons and knobs,
exposed,
to any passing stranger’s whims.
I cannot let you in
or you will play around
and change
these precise adjustments
these delicate proportions
of love and greed,
lust and anger, joy and fear,
that function;
that, if nothing else, survive.
Cupid waits for me at the bottom of the garden.
He is less willful now.
The years have tamed him.
He asks for consent.
I shake my head, and choose Identity instead.
Why do boys love sweets so much? When 6-year old Joey uses his allowance to buy a Clark Bar, this raises demand for sugar. Brazil is a major exporter of sugar so this raises wages for sugarcane farmworkers in Brazil, diverting Brazilian youth away from their next-best employment as footballers. Because Brazil is dominant in international soccer, this levels the playing field and makes soccer more exciting internationally thereby raising the demand for soccer balls. Most soccer balls are made in China where labor and resources in China are now diverted to the production of soccer balls away from other uses. Hannah Montana CD’s are also produced in China and the resulting drop in supply makes it too expensive for Joey’s sister Clara to buy *The Best of Both Worlds* and Joey gets a kick out of that.
This is funny even for those who don’t normally read Marginal Revolution, right?
PS: It’s a spoof, y’all. Or a “Halloween costume”, as he calls it.
I just finished The Gathering Storm, book 12 of the Wheel of Time. I badly need some sleep.
I have this book! On my shelf! Right now!
It is, of course, completely ridiculous to attempt a review of the book. I couldn’t even begin to make any headway into the plot if you haven’t read the other eleven books, and I’m sure anyone who is looking forward to reading the books will not appreciate spoilers, anyway. Hints or teasers, maybe. So I will simply say, frightening things happen. Rand’s mental stability teeters dangerously. He does things that I honestly cannot see him recovering from. Things that are usually “final battles” in other books are accomplished without all that much fanfare. Cadsuane is infuriating, as always, and infuriatingly ineffective, but she does some good, after all. Egwene’s little Mahatma Gandhi act works surprisingly well. Mat doesn’t feature as much as I’d hoped he would. Tuon is again infuriatingly blinded by prejudice.
But of course, so is everyone else. One of the central themes of the entire Wheel of Time series is how intelligent, emotional people can be so prejudiced so strongly and about so many things. These prejudices-often codified as customs and laws and enforced quite brutally, like in case of the Seanchan, or just present as a mistrustful whisper in the back of their heads- are the cause of so many of their problems, that the vast majority of these books are headdesk moments. Of course, it doesn’t make it any better knowing that we would all probably behave in the same way, in these situations, if we had the same knowledge/indoctrination. Well, almost. The lack of trust among nearly all the major characters, even those who are nominally on the same side, is another infuriating but central part of the series.
Egwene, thankfully, is a prominent counterexample.So is Siuan/Bryne. That whole thread is pure sweetness.
Is it a testament to MY mental instability that I could relate so much to Rand’s anguish, and understand his responses to the things that were going on, even if I didn’t wholeheartedly approve? I could literally feel his anger, feel myself shaking as I read so many parts of this book. Considering that I haven’t been tortured or imprisoned in a box or manipulated by absolutely everyone ever, I mean. It is, of course, testimony to Jordan/Sanderson’s literary skill and the superbly detailed world and fleshed out characters that Jordan created, but it’s strange that it worked so well. (There is a reason I like epics so much. Simpler narratives just don’t seem to have the emotional weight, don’t seem to evoke the same attachment, don’t make me feel a book so strongly.)
I don’t actually have much more to say. I think I’m going to re-read/skim through the book again, sometime this weekend, and maybe I’ll add to this post then.
For a much more detailed and professional review of the book, go here.
SPOILER: I have to say, I felt Jordan/Sanderson-this is a fairly pivotal point, and the end of the book, so I have a feeling Jordan had at least indicated that this should happen- used some rather tired philosophy to deal with Rand’s existential angst/nihilism/whatever. One feels they could really have come up with something a little more original than “love makes the world go round”. I mean, it wasn’t completely unexpected, of course. And it is a fantasy epic, not a philosophical discourse. But for a series that involves so much nuance for each moral decision, this one was just too… simple.
A friend of mine had commented on this post as yet another example of the “miniskirt theory of modernity”(“Afghan women not only attended Kabul University, they did so in miniskirts”). (For those not familiar with the term, it’s not considered to be a particularly valid theory.) And I thought, hey. Why not? Knowing fully well the subjective definitions of most of the terms I use below, I postulate that:
Makes sense, no? Of course, there is the fact that even in this “golden age” said miniskirts were worn only by the elite minorities in the cities, which partially proves (because those minorities, at least, were educated) my theory.
I was reading a paper by a friend today, as well as a post/report by another friend, and had some objections to both. For the latter case I think I was able to isolate my precise objections, and for the former I did realize what basically upset me, although when I did it was (partly) a somewhat heartless/selfish approach to the problem. But I had my reasons, so in neither case did I suffer the indignity of an irrational outburst, even if the only outburst was inside my own head. However, I can’t help wondering if perhaps it’s just some sort of innate bias that I have against the basic claims that both these rather academic articles made. Especially regarding the former paper, I was quite put off by what I interpreted as the moralizing tone of the article, and what I interpreted as its somewhat radical stance, without finding what it was that I disagreed with, exacly. As I mentioned, I did verbalize these objections properly as I re-read, but I wonder if that was reasoning or rationalization. And that worries me.
If anyone who doesn’t normally visit comes here after seeing my twitter feed, say hi! I want to see if that helps.
