I’m sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.
— Salinger, the one and only
I really hate leaving the TV on for background noise, which happens more often than I’d like. Today this situation took place in my living room while I was on my computer, and I heard Walt Whitman’s “O Pioneers” being recited over a Levi’s Jeans commercial.
It annoyed me, to say the least, but who am I to say that Whitman’s poetry should be reserved for an exclusive audience? I can’t pinpoint why it bothered me exactly. I guess I can’t stand something good and pure meshed with advertisements and capital gain. Which happens all the time anyways.
I want an epic adventure in my future!
(via luluthezulu)
Aha. I thought like that once!
Unfortunately, reality took over…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
“What do any of us really know about love?” Mel said. “It seems to me we’re just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other too. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person’s being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. So I suppose I am like Terri in that regard. Terri and Ed.”
He thought about it and he went on.
“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me. Then there’s Ed. Okay, we’re back to Ed. He loves Terri so much he tries to kill her and he winds up killing himself.” Mel stopped talking and swallowed from his glass. “You guys have been together eighteen months and you love each other. It shows all over you. You glow with it. But you both loved other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us - excuse me for saying this -but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we’re talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.
- Raymond Carver “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (via meredith hight)
Been reading a lot of Raymond Carver lately.
If you haven’t, I highly recommend reading his short story, “Cathedral”.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver, "Late Fragment"
Goals
- speak more Urdu
- cook. This would make Ammi very happy. Not only that, but let’s face it, I’m only punishing myself not learning how to make biryani.
- write in my journal more (aside from this virtual world, I need to write in my actual paper/pen journal.)
- have a strict schedule for next semester, to make sure no spare moment is wasted (write for the school paper regularly, maybe attend an ab-blast class twice a week, pick up a shift at the radio station)
- finish reading Midnight’s Children
- finish reading Unbearable Lightness of Being
- finish reading One Hundred Years of Solitude
- do more research on law school VS. __________.
Going to get started right now.
Guilt
For each answer you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger.
Entertaining for 3 AM.
And a good way for me to practice my Spanish.
“So in attacking scientists for falsifying data to support their theories on global warming, you have cited a poll that adds up to 120%.” -Jon Stewart
Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter. What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.
—
Dave Eggers (via tom armitage) (via unicornology) (via yesterdayifeltlikegod)
I seem to be facing this same conflict within myself, to do good work, something meaningful, and long lasting. The idea of purpose.
Eggers gets that.
