perhaps at some point i will say something that is my own… until then…

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”
- Carl Jung

“When people consult me, it’s not that I’m reading the future; I am guessing at the future. The future belongs to God, and it is only he who reveals it, under extraordinary circumstances. How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.”

“Does a man’s heart always help him?” the boy asked the alchemist.

“Mostly just the hearts of those who are trying to realize their Personal Legends. But they do help children, drunkards, and the elderly, too.”

“I have always believed that I lack the authority my parents bring to being Indian. But as long as they live they protect me from feeling like an impostor. … The immigrant’s journey, no matter how ultimately rewarding, is founded on departure and deprivation, but it secures for the subsequent generation a sense of arrival and advantage. I can see a day coming when my American side, lacking the counterpoint India has until now maintained, begins to gain ascendancy and weight.” Jhumpa Lahiri

B: I don’t look like anyone in my family
S: Yeah you do, you look like your brother
B: Which one?
S: The fat boy.
B: Wait, the fat boy or the frat boy?
S: What’s a frat boy?
B: A frat boy is someone who doesn’t know how to act his age

Me: Hey Bennett, where did you hear that about frat boys?
B: Somewhere, i actually don’t remember now… i guess i heard it and it just became part of my vocabulary

listening to some mountain goats albums recently, i don’t think that i could have properly written a review for them before now… seeing as i’ve been listening to these albums for a few years now, that means that i couldn’t write a proper review for an album until a few years after i’d first listened to it… and think of all those album reviews written immediately after the album’s release… now i don’t really want to write a review for any of the albums… instead, i would like to write a letter to John Darnielle that goes something like this, “John, thank you… i’m not sure that that came through right… let me try it again… Thank You… did you get it this time? no… ok, let me try it again… THANK YOU!@#! still nothing? well fuck you then.”

You know, when i was a kid i didn’t really realize that certain people were human. I didn’t realize that parents actually had things that they wanted to do for themselves and the thought that a teacher actually does work never occured to me. I didn’t get around to grading my fifth grade class’ exams and the one girl was like, “but you had the whole weekend to do it?!?” This surprised me. Its not so much that as a middle schooler i was too scared of the teacher to say that or that i wanted to be more respectful, but that the thought of them not doing it because they had work to do was beyond me. Humans have lives and these lives impose restraints on them that make it hard to do things on time sometimes. But teachers didn’t have lives because they weren’t human you see… So if they didn’t hand in the exam it was because in that situation a teacher should not hand back the exam at that time. These people, teachers and parents, had roles that they fulfilled no matter what and that was the end of it. On another note, after meeting a friend after 5 years, i also realized that i never really looked at the people whom i had seen every day in high school. Sure i knew what they looked like and could recognize them but i never really looked closely… at their face… at what their face really looked like… the details… I saw them every day, this person was say John, i didn’t need to look any closer because this was John and i already had his image set in my mind, constructed from being in a similar social circle for a few years, the neuroloigcal circuits fired and things connected and i didn’t need to look any closer because i thought i already knew. Today i looked closely at the face of someone i hadn’t seen in 5 years… whose high school image i knew… and what i saw… was something different… i saw a new person… lsdkjflskdjfoie!!!@!!$#!#!

this one’s for the kids…

waiting

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