cumulative years

my friends are all amazing. they inspire me and surprise me, and in that way remind me we all have the capacity to surprise. they are by turns hilarious, insightful, thoughtful, wise, stubborn, strong, witty, intelligent. fragile. i sometimes forget what it really means for every person to be a person, narrating their lives from inside their heads, and being by default the center of a universe of their own interpretation. we have a tendency, i feel, to assume the constancy and confidence of others since we can only see what they show us after all. everyone else is an actor secondary to your life, doing things you can't understand the motivation of, but which you can only interpret in relation to yourself. it seems fixed. but you are that for them, and they are that for you, which just goes to show how easily the roles can be flipped and are in fact the same.

ellipses

today was punctuated by moments of unhappiness which were fairly intense but dissipated quickly enough. maybe it's because i was looking forward to seeing friends i haven't seen for awhile at Jordan's but didn't get to. or maybe it's just the internet.

i hate that little nagging voice that you get in your head. it's hard to shut up sometimes. but everyone has down days and they go away i guess.

i don't know.

but i did think of a happiness. in fact, i took a picture of it. i went on a nice night run and took my phone because after getting yelled at by the car which i think almost hit me, it's probably good to be able to call in emergencies.

11/6 & 11/7

11/6/12
this: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/266031293945503744/photo/1
and everything it entails that came from everyone...

...doing that

11/7/12

no pic taken but lunch at steenbock's -- so much tasty fries! as well as buttery fresh veggie sandwich
also, "it's just synaptic pruning" and philosophy studying

why great literature is great + a few pics

just finished rereading the great gatsby. i remember why i loved this book so much. sometimes i read a sentence or passage in some book or other and get that fluttery feeling in my stomach just from the sheer beauty of the words, before the meaning or any of the meanings have settled in yet. i think something subconscious recognizes the power of what was written down.

one of my favorite quotations from the book goes: "And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. It's vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

the beauty of that passage is chilling, almost. it's melancholy too, as powerful things so often are. what is the most powerful emotion? maybe melancholy, for how pervasive it is and how long it lasts. but anyway, while mankind's encounter with an unadulterated america can't be recaptured, strictly factually speaking we encounter wildernesses and frontiers all the time. that's what's so beautiful about this. it may talk specifically of the first settlers but what it captures are the feelings that we repeat again and again, generation after generation. we were never the first to experience an emotion and we will never be the last. over and over, we seek thrilling, mysterious, vast unknowns and over and over, we lose them.

what is it that is sad about "last and greatest?" it's Ideological and Romantic in capitalized senses of both words. also, when was the last time an emotion compelled us, without our consent? finally, i strongly disagree with the end of the last sentence, but at the same time, i think it has perhaps the greatest weight out of all that passage. sure, life has to be realistic and it has to contain midterms, cold coffee, recycling that piles up, long boring work days; but life can be so much more meaningful if it also contains cardinal ideals which we think of every now and then. and how more meaningful can it get than to spend our days seeking or experiencing something commensurate to our capacity for wonder.

that being said, i wish i had a brownie to eat

11/4

Still 11/4 cheating but too pretty

umm 11/1?

10/31

what i want

i want to laugh and make other people laugh for always

we are all granted power to induce feelings in others. does that knowledge come with the responsibility to do so? i'm not sure, because it would be impossible to live always thinking about how you make others feel. but i do think that knowledge should come at least with awareness, every now and then. today i am aware that i want to spend my life inducing feelings that are good and joyful and laughing in the people that i love and care about. which is not to say that you should be an actor playing a specific part in order to create a reaction in the audience around you, but rather that the desire to induce these emotions in others teaches you what to demand and grow for yourself.
and as you cultivate who you are, slowly, what is good in you can diffuse to your environment.

i've still been keeping up with the daily happinesses, just not posting them here. maybe tomorrow i wil put up pictures.

10/30/12

 today- potato car

and i actually have that picture from saturday:
10/27/12

ketchup

oops so much for my posting one happiness a day thing...i wish the reason for not doing so was because i didn't use my computer for the past however many days (hooray! and: no the hell way!).

friday was becca's birthday & we all went out to the icon and logan's? i saw a banana, a dracula, a parrot, a pirate, an evil queen, a flapper, abe lincoln, an angel, a light-up balloon man, two ghosts, many slutty your-noun-of-choice_'s, and a partridge in a pear tree. just kidding. i saw more but i can't remember.

i love the middle ages! speaking of a partridge in a pear tree. they were probably a terrible time to live in with regards to the black death (we once watched a movie about that in third grade after which they served mac & cheese at lunch and i couldn't eat it ), childbirth, even more soulless 1%, wars, famine, etc. but they're so cool to read about. i read a lot of historical fiction when i was younger, including king arthur and his knights with all its heavy handed christian themes and thee's and thou's. british literature of that age is especially interesting because it mixes myth with fact in a way that you find in really early literature of say, china (the feats of the first emperor is not wholly factual) or in the bible (i.e. mythical feats of the real man jesus, if you're an atheist like me). i love mysterious things that exist in the realm of reality too, like stonehenge. plus, you see the appropriation of older mythic arcs from people like the picts or the celts into anglo-saxon stories which then do plenty of their own evolving to come down to our modern day. it's fascinating. i'd love to take a myths class, because i'm almost certain that there are mythical trends borrowed between cultures or repeated amongst cultures that weren't close enough to borrow.

here's something i want to think about: evolution of non-biological things, especially things that aren't tangible bc it's too easy to map the evolution of, say, a toaster. actually i guess that's cool too because it's a litmus test for the evolution of ideas.

um. happinesses. i did think of them during the days i missed:

10/26 -- those delicious tapas at the icon. spanish tortilla, stuffed flatbreads, and the calamari! wooooow.
10/27 -- when scott and i were walking back from the farmer's market, i looked up and noticed an actual tree growing up out of an apartment building balcony many stories up. the sky was completely blue, the building of golden brick lit up with sunlight, and from the really dramatic angle from the ground put sky, building, and unexpected tree in perfect juxtaposition.
10/28 -- cocoa the rabbit on her back being completely still
10/29 -- kelly's face at dinner