Simone

Moreover, if we openly construct our classroooms around the fact that we are feminist and that the course will occur within a feminist environment, we do not dupe our students into agreeing with us. Rather, we acknowledge how all reality is socially constructed and is, therefore, capable of transformation. In such an atmosphere, we should not fear that our authority will trick our students, for we will have declared our politics openly, yet we should also not fear influencing our students, because that is at least in part our goal as feminist teachers: to convince our students that we do in fact live in a world in which only particular social constructions that contain some ten percent of the population are valued(McIntosh, 1989, p.402), that we have in part been constituted by these constructions, but because they are constructions, they can be thrown off and a world that is more honoring and more accepting, more equitable and more loving can be achieved. p191.

Gunter, Kimberly K. “Authority is Not a Luxury.” Freirean Pedagogy, Praxis, and Possibilities. Ed. Stanley Steiner, H. Mark Krank and Peter McLaren. New York: Falmer Press, 2000. 185-192.

And surely it is more interesting to belong to one's own time, to share its peculiar vision, catch that flying glimpse of the panorama which no subsequent generation can ever recover
-Nella Larsen from a letter to Carl Van Vechten.

Some people are a sickness on this land
They're killing, they're taking, they're stealing
Whatever they can
Anything, anything, anything that is not bolted down

Your life, your money, your heart, your faith, your bike
Anything that is not bolted down

Learn from the animals, monkeys do
Monkeys do piggish things too
Learn from the vegetables, monkeys do
The way they strive towards the light
A small potato in the blight
Still strives towards the light
I know it's as dark as night
It's as dark as night

It is day though

Some would ask, what are we to do
With a world that crumbles to the touch?
A world that spins and dies where it stands,
Like trying ain't enough?

To family is all you can do
To family is all you can do
Even if it's just us two
To family is all you can do

And strive towards the light
Strive towards the light
It's as dark as night
Strive towards the light
Strive towards the light
I know it's as dark as night

It is day though

**************************************
My bike was stolen last week.
Leaving me feeling
angry and hopeless.

Poland is full of monuments. We commemorate the past because the past is a fate. We are natural pessimists, believing that what has happened will happen again. Perhaps that is the definition of an optimist: someone who denies the power of the past. The past is not really important here. Here the present does not reaffirm the past but supersedes and cancels it. The weakness of any attachment to the past is perhaps the most striking thing about the Americans. It makes them seem superficial, shallow, but it gives them great strength and self-confidence. They do not feel dwarfed by anything. p223

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves. p31

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder. p69

There are always dreamers on the frontier. p166

But the past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems located in the past, perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live.

I ask fewer questions these days.

The Dalai Lama (who generally speaks from the point of view of the Prasangika Madhyamaka) (2005: p. 46) states that:

"One of the most important philosophical insights in Buddhism comes from what is known as the theory of emptiness. At its heart is the deep recognition that there is a fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, including our own experience in it, and the way things actually are. In our day-to-day experience, we tend to relate to the world and to ourselves as if these entities possessed self-enclosed, definable, discrete and enduring reality. For instance, if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterises our individuality and identity as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence. The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for attachment, clinging and the development of our numerous prejudices. According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is simply untenable. All things and events, whether ‘material’, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence. To intrinsically possess such independent existence would imply that all things and events are somehow complete unto themselves and are therefore entirely self-contained. This would mean that nothing has the capacity to interact with or exert influence on any other phenomena. But we know that there is cause and effect – turn a key in a car, the starter motor turns the engine over, spark plugs ignite and fuel begins to burn… Yet in a universe of self-contained, inherently existing things, these events could never occur! So effectively, the notion of intrinsic existence is incompatible with causation; this is because causation implies contingency and dependence, while anything that inherently existed would be immutable and self-enclosed. In the theory of emptiness, everything is argued as merely being composed of dependently related events; of continuously interacting phenomena with no fixed, immutable essence, which are themselves in dynamic and constantly changing relations. Thus, things and events are 'empty' in that they can never possess any immutable essence, intrinsic reality or absolute ‘being’ that affords independence."

Dalai Lama (2005). The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (Hardcover). Broadway. ISBN 076792066X & ISBN 978-0767920667

self pity party.
i only care because i know i deserved the 3.0 semester.
i was distracted, uninterested and unmotivated.
i write only for myself, but if that is true
why do i find no joy only struggle?

So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp's breath the smoke of the wraith. There is that lead-like look. There is the lead itself, and all those bluey hunters, thieves, those pigeon flyers who relieve roofs of the metal, and steal the pipes too. There's the blue pill that is the bullet's end, the nose, the plum, the blue whistler and there are all the bluish hues of death.

Is it the sight of death, the thought of dying? What sinks us to a deeper melancholy: sexual incompleteness or its spastic conclusion? What seems to line our life with satin? what brings the rouge to both our cheeks? Loneliness, emptiness, worthlessness, grief... each is an absence in us. We have no pain, but we have lost all pleasure, and the lip that meets our lip is always one half of our own.. Our state is exactly the name of precisely nothing, and out memories, with polite long faces, come to view us and to say to one another that we never looked better; that we seem at last at peace; that our passing was -- well-- sad--still-- doubtless for the best (all this in a whisper lest the dead should hear." Disappointment, constant loss, despair... a taste, a soft quality in the air, a color, a flutter: permanent in their passage. We were not up to it. We missed it . We could not retain it. It will never be back. Joy-breaking gloom continues to hammer. So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

Just as blue pigment spread on canvas may help a painter accurately represent nature or give to his work the aforesaid melancholy cast, enhance a pivotal pink patch, or signify the qualities of heavenly love, so our blue colors come in several shades and explanations. Both Christ and the Virgin wear mantles of blue because as the clouds depart the Truth appears. Many things are labeled blue, thought blue, made blue, merely because there's a spot of the color here and there somewhere on them like the bluecap salmon with its dotted head; or things are called blue carelessly because they are violet or purple or gray or even vaguely red, and that's close enough for the harassed eye, the way the brownish halo which surrounds the flame of a miner's safety lamp to warn of firedamp is said to be a bluecap too. Or they are misnamed for deeper reasons: in the ninth century, when the Scandinavians raided Africa and Spain, they carried off samples of the blue men who lived there all the way to Ireland, hence higger-blue is applied to an especially resinous darkness sometimes by those who are no longer Vikings. And Partridge reports the expression: the sky as blue as a razor. Fin an eye as blue as indecency itself, and indecency as blue as the smoke of battle, or a battle as blue as the loss of blood. We might remain with such wonders: as blue as.. as blue as... for good and forever.

Dear Seattle.
please make this spring break awesome.
if you disappoint me, I will move somewhere else.

Dear Lucy the Versa,
please do not break down on this cross country trip.
thanks

At 830 am I will have 4 hours to write 2 essays.

there are 2 poems, 2 short fiction stories, and 1 literary theory to chose from.

I am fairly confident in my ability to sit down and spit out some coherent argument
yet. there are these flashes of me choking.(with my fingers) Really I have nothing to lose.
Even if I 'fail to receive a passing mark' I have another chance but I would
rather not have wasted this week for nothing.

Either way this is going to be easier than writing a thesis.

I am reaching the bottom of my first bottle of anxiety pills.
The only person that know that I am taking them is Justin (for how could he not).
I have not told anyone else mostly bc I am not sure of the level of friendship needed to make such confession,
I am only sure that I do not have that level of intimacy with anyone.
A part of me hoped that someone would notice something different about me
If they have perhaps they did not find my willingness to linger or my ease to initiate a conversation
important enough to comment on. 
Regardless of other peoples lack of perception the pills have affected me.

I am able to handle small talk.  A huge step for me considering I spent those first akward moments of contact devising a plan of escape from an impending conversation that could have the possibility of having me talk about myself.
More importantly I feel calmer all of the time. Needless anxiety does not plauge me for days the way it once did and I have come to realize how much of it I carried around with me at all times.  I do not consider myself by any means cured or freed from anxiety, I don't believe I will ever be either since it has irrevoracbly shaped who I am as a person but I do feel a relief that I have never had before.
There are downsides. 2 glasses of wine takes me from sober to beligerant but I'm not much of a drinker anyways.  I find my self yawning and fatigued randomly and a little difficulty waking up but this can be counter balanced coffee. 
For the first time. ever. I actually feel like my life has the possibility changing that I am no longer trapped in my comfortable routine and shrinking circle of human contacts.

Pathos, the subdominant
Joycean emotion, inheres in the inspection of such limits: men longing
to become what they can never be, though it lies in them to be it,
simply because they have become something else.
- Kenner.

New Year's Eve use to be my favorite holiday.
After the month of family holidays it seemed so wonderful
to drink and watch the clock with friends.

It is still is the only holiday I take seriously.
Finding some relief in the division of time.

Yet I find no new joy in feeling light headed
amongst strangers and companions. Just the same
burden of the previous year.
So instead midnight slipped by unnoticed and I
was asleep shortly after because that is what I wanted.

I didn't expect life to be this boring until I was thirty.
A part of me hopes for a gritty revolution.

If my life is contained in essays books and libraries
I will not be disappointed. It is expected to play that way.

I have always needed books to make up for the lack of friends.
I have always needed books to create meaning.
I have always wanted drama that can be picked up and put down.
My favorite thing about books is that you get to decide how they will change you.
I've grown timid. believing that I do not change other people.

Planes flying into buildings!
Voting for the first black President!

I didn't think witnessing the exciting milestones of history would ever be so annoying.
I find it unnecessary that CNN has thanked me for sharing this moment with them
As if the almost instantaneous knowledge of events changes my involvement with them.

History its self is a fantastic fable. One that I am neither enchanted by nor the author of.
"Living in history" serves no purpose but to imagine a conceptual future in which we will still believe in our same horror or exultation immediately felt.

The books and bullets on my syllabi are shrinking.
Giving me the first sign that the end of another semester
is closing in fast.

My diary is always filled with sentences
starting with 'I must..'

It becomes difficult to find words for the page
that comprehend what my mind has
been tinkering with for months now.

I will write (something! somewhere!)
everyday until this semester is over.
While a voice of authority has not
confirmed this, Next semester could
be my last, if I wanted it to be.

Despite all my continuous dissatisfaction
and every moment before now attempting to
push me beyond all the here and nows.
I am unwilling to bit the so-called bullet
and move on with my life.

My body is a cage
That keeps me from dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key

I’m standing on the stage
Of fear and self-doubt
It’s a hollow play
But they’ll clap anyway

I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head

I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow

My body is a cage
We take what we’re given
Just because you’ve forgotten
Doesn’t mean you’re forgiven
**************************
We walked arm in arm
But I didn't feel his touch
A desire I'd first tried to hide,
That tingling inside was gone
And when he asked me:
'do you still love me?'
I had to look away
I didn't want to tell him
That my heart grows colder with each day

He said he'd take me away
That we'd work things out
And I didn't want to tell him
But it was then I had to say
Over the times we've shared
It's all blackened out
And my bat lightning heart
Wants to fly away

What's a girl to do?
What's a girl to do?
What's a girl to do?

can there be pleasure without context?
does pleasure always create its own context.

what is difference.
difference |ˈdif(ə)rəns|
noun
a point or way in which people or things are not the same : the differences between men and women.
• the state or condition of being dissimilar or unlike : their difference from one another.
• a disagreement, quarrel, or dispute : the couple are patching up their differences.
• a quantity by which amounts differ; the remainder left after subtraction of one value from another : the gross margin is the difference between the total cost of the goods and the final selling price.
• Heraldry an alteration in a coat of arms to distinguish members or branches of a family.
verb [ trans. ] Heraldry
alter (a coat of arms) to distinguish members or branches of a family.
PHRASES
make a (or no) difference have a significant effect (or no effect) on a person or situation : the law will make no difference to my business.
with a difference having a new or unusual feature or treatment : a fashion show with a difference.
ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin differentia (see differentia ).