tic_tac_whoa

(The first speaker is a secretary/cook who has been caught typing late at night; the second speaker is Leon Trotsky.)



"I'm sorry, sir." Gather up the pages quick, put them in a folder. No confession unless forced. "It's nothing that will liberate the people."

He waited for more, standing wide-eyed at the doorsill in his shirt and tie. His white hair stood on end from a long day's work. He pulls his hair while he thinks.

"Sir, I'm reluctant to say."

"Oh, no. Some secret report to an adversary?"

"Please don't suggest such an awful thing."

"What, then? A love letter?"

"It's more embarrassing than that, sir. A novel."

The muscles of his face collapsed like a dumpling, all dimples and wrinkled eyes behind the beard and round glasses. Lev's smile is like no other. He pulled out Natalya's desk chair and sat in it backward, straddling it like a horse, leaing his elbows on its back and laughing until he nearly wept. "Oh, this is a mechaieh!"

There was nothing to do but wait for a more comprehensible verdict.

"I've been worrying where it is you go, my son. When your mind is not here." He clucked his tongue, said some words in Russian. "A novel! Why do you say this won't liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!"

"It surprises me to hear you say it."

When we think of the past, it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. -Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
 

 
taken with my jobpro on the medium brightness, 2-4ft close up with no flash.

 It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.

Poll of the day goes: if you love an artform long enough, you also start with it yourself. So I'd like to ask, do you write books, started on one, written several? "Quote yourself! If you can't, you have never said anything of value". (And if you haven't figured out where to publish it, try lulu.com)

I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now? ...

I have taken you into myself, whole.  You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved.

(Letter to June Mansfield)

It turned out that superhuman vampire strength came in handy when shaving a thirty-five pound cat. After a couple of false starts, which had them chasing Chet the huge shaving-cream-covered cat around the loft, they discovered the value of duct tape as a grooming tool. Because of the tape, they weren't able to shave his feet. When they were finished, Chet looked like a big-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots - the feline love child of Gollum and Dobby the house-elf

"…I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more."

"You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs."

"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."

"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need."

So I’ve been trying to figure out why my polaroids were always so out of focus and I figured out that there are settings to prevent that! Luckily I’m pretty stocked on polaroids to fool around so I now know how to use the functions which means my pictures should get better. The one on the left was with the flash on the 1.2m setting, I’m not sure what the lighting setting was but I am figuring it was probably on the lightest. The middle one was taken with flash override, I think on the middle light setting 0.6-1.2m away and the last one was taken on the middle bright setting 0.6-1.2m away with flash and you can actually see what my flyers say and everything. Anyways I’m excited I got some things figured out and I’m also excited that I have enough polaroids to last me until theimpossibleproject is ready to release polaroid film for us to buy that isn’t expired!

If anybody has any other tips or tricks that would be cool. Thaanks

''On the shelves, medical references, and meditations, certainly, but also the books that now filled the cubbyhole in the bungalow attic-the eighteenth-century poetry that had almost persuaded him he should be a landscape gardener, his third-edition Jane Austen, his Eliot and Lawrence and Wilfred Owen, the complete set of Conrad, the priceless 1783 edition of Crabbe's The Village, his Housman, the autographed copy of Auden's The Dance of Death. For this was the point, surely: he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility might make human suffering, of the self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men toward ill health! Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall-this was the doctor's business, and it was literature's too.''
          
               ~Atonement- Ian McEwan

One day when I had the route, the man-who-holds-his-hand-out was half a block up the street. He was talking to a neighbor, looked back at me more than a block away and knew he had time to walk back and meet me. When he turned his back to me, I began running. I don't believe I ever delivered mail that fast, all stride and motion, never stopping or pausing, I was going to kill him. I had the letter half in the slot of his box when he turned and saw me.

"OH NO NO NO!" he screamed, "DON'T PUT IT IN THE BOX!"

He ran down the street toward me. All I saw was the blur of his feet. He must have run a hundred yards in 9.2.

I put the letter in his hand. I watched him open it, walk across the porch, open the door and go into his house. What it meant somebody else will have to tell me.

I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low meloncholy wailings of his violin, and knew he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.

 A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.