My Life in Rain Drops

did you know that Chomsky is the eighth most cited source of all time, trailing Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud? 

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. He is considered the “most cited living author”. 

I would love to have him as my grandpa. I’m just saying.

It was the morning of one casual perfect day.

Someone rolled a dice,

The other said, ‘Let’s tickle my fancy a little.’

Once decreed,

There was no erasing it,

No turning back.

On that perfect casual day

My funny bone was hit - twice.

The bus left me a few seconds away

My hair turned into eighty’s rockstar.

Did I curse the gods?

Sure. ‘It’s natural’ says the humanist.

Natural. (Whatever that is).

Then I stood there and laughed.

Someone was laughing up there too.

So I joined in and went about my day.

Date: October 26th, 2010

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn wtih pity, — let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

*One of my favorite sonnets by Millay: bold, audacious and dangerous for her time. I quite like her courage.

I get a weird sort of pleasure peeling soft thin eggshells off boiled eggs. The crackling sound makes it fun. You have so much control over this eggshell and you have to carefully peel it so it doesn’t disintegrate into tiny bits that stick all over the nice white surface of the egg, which makes the job of peeling those tiny bits off so much harder. Because then you have a beautiful egg that you are eating with nasty crackling taste of eggshells in your mouth. That is total yuckiness.

Yes, I like peeling eggshells. Does that make me weird?

Am I allowed to feel like this? Or is this illegal?

This is one of my favorite poems that I read in my 2nd year of uni. It came back to me as I was doing research for film studies on Woody Allen and Jean Renoir and I was watching “Anything Else” by Woody yesterday and Christina Ricci’s character suddenly quoted this. Flashback! Had to post it on my blog. Simple, short and sweet :)

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —
It gives a lovely light!

In a critical response to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of The Game (1939), Christopher Faulkner’s writes in the conclusion:

There is a case for arguing that the failure of the 1930s is a failure we are reliving today: an acquiescence to inflationary ideological appeals that lead to war (WW II), and an inability to respect, accept, and negotiate the human differences that foster peace.

How right you were Faulkner. To a great extent I think we are still stuck in that time today. I wonder if human kind will ever learn.
 

Non Sequitur: Latin, stands for “it does not follow”. It’s used a lot in literary Surrealism and is often used as a conversational or literary device, mostly for the purpose of evoking comedy or humor. It is a comment that because of its lack of meaning (which can be very random) seems absurd to the point of being humorous.

For example: “This war is righteous because we are French!”

You’d think that lying down on a comfy leather sofa with your feet dangling down from the side, with eyes closed and a small hand towel wrapped in ice cubes strategically placed over your brows would freeze your headache. No, it really doesn’t. The fan is helping the air circulation and the light is perfect - a dim neon green where the exit sign is lit. You’d like to think with such peaceful tunes you can lie down, close your eyes and let your pupils and eyelashes rest so you can think like a sane person; you hope that the headache doesn’t engulf you. You need to eat it up first before it can eat you. But no, that doesn’t always happen.

The headache, like a slimy and patient predator won today. It’s still winning. It’s like some awful game of badminton where some underdog comes around and ruins your game. And then your game face falls. And then you plummet into a darkness and your eyes just want to burst out of its sockets and jump around. Every noise is irritating my pulses, my senses. My laptop has started making a new kind of noise which kills my brain. Yet this is all I have to live with now. Thanks to the puny government loan I am receiving for my education this year, I currently can’t even afford a laptop.

The headache, like all the other licentious things in my life, is taking over. It’s taking over viciously and I can’t seem to do anything about it. This is hopeless…I need to win this battle. I have to. I must. I just don’t know when I will see the fading light. Maybe in a while through the transparent wings of a butterfly. I can’t help but kill my senses with unconscious sleep because the headache, mercilessly, is taking over. Like poison. I need to sleep.

*  Reporter: Jude! One word for your fans?
Jude: Astronaut.

* Jude: Doesn’t really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can’t use anymore. What I’m talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it’s mathematical music, it’s based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels - I mean, you know, they’re not going to die. They’re not folk music songs. They’re political songs. They’re already dead. You’d think that these traditional music people would - would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they’re all so full of mystery.
Keenan Jones: And contradictions.
Jude: Yeah, contradictions.
Keenan Jones: And chaos.
Jude: Yes, it’s chaos, clocks, and watermelons - you know, it’s - it’s everything.

* Claire: I would like to know what is at the center of your world.
Robbie Clark: Well, I’m 22, I guess I would say me.

* Billy the Kid: People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. Course the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, uhm, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time.

* Arthur: Y’know, it’s nature’s will. And I’m against nature. I don’t dig nature at all.

* Arthur: …a song is something that walks by itself.

* Reporter: You sound, for someone so widely known, a bit fatalistic.

Arthur: I’m not fatalistic. Bank tellers are fatalistic. Clerks are fatalistic. I’m a farmer. Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer?

You can’t be my close friend if you don’t love sushi. You need to go mad on it. That’s the spirit of a true sushi addict.