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A few words
"When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness." ~ D.H. Lawrence "Is the meaning of life defined by its duration? Or does life have a purpose so large that it doesn't have to be prolonged at any cost to preserve its meaning?" "Living is not good, but living well. The wise man, therefore, lives as well as he should, not as long as he can... He will always think of life in terms of quality not quantity... Dying early or late is of no relevance, dying well or ill is... even if it is true that while there is life there is hope, life is not to be bought at any cost." ~ Seneca "People will tell you nothing matters, the whole world's about to end soon anyway. Those people are looking at life the wrong way. I mean, things don't need to last forever to be perfect." ~ Daydream Nation "All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories-- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death." ~ The Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes "The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me - not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience - that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good. It was a pleasant diaphragmal melting, with elements of diffused tactility, all this enhanced by the thought that nothing could be nearer to the elimination of basic physical laws than deliberately driving on the wrong site of the road." ~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." ~ William Blake Think about it Musicalities! Kill that boredom!
Binder Paper Comics Web Comics and Such A Distant Soil (Some nudity) The Adventures of Gyno-Star (Some explicit stuff) Aquapunk Axe Cop Basic Instructions Bear Nuts Beeserker Blue Milk Special Bug Buttersafe ChannelATE Cigarro & Cerveja Crunchy Bunches Curia Regis Cyanide and Happiness dead winter (has some explicit stuff) Devilbear: The Grimoires of Bearalzebub (PG-13?) Diesel Sweeties DUBBLEBABY Eat That Toast! E-merl.com The End Evil Diva Evil Inc. Existential Comics The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon For Lack of a Better Comic Forming (Explicit) Girls with Slingshots (some explicit stuff...?) Mirror The Last Halloween Last Train to Old Town L.A.W.L.S. The League of Evil Genius Legend of Bill Living With Insanity (some nudity) Love Me Nice Married to the Sea Meaty Yogurt Medium Large The Meek Metacarpolis Monsterhood Monsterkind The Moon Prince Moth (Some nudity) Mr. Lovenstein Muddlers Beat Natalie Dee Nedroid The Non-Adventures of Wonderella Optipess Out There Owen's Uncles Phuzzy Comics Political Cartoonists Index Poorly Drawn Lines Powernap The Property of Hate Red Meat Rice Boy Robbie and Bobby Rosscott, Inc. Safely Endangered Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Savage Chickens Scary Go Round Scenes from a Multiverse The Secret Knots Serenity Rose Stand Still. Stay Silent Stinking Hellebore Strong Female Protagonist Subnormality Tales of Pylea Three Word Phrase (some nudity) Tiny Kitten Teeth Toothpaste for Dinner Trying Human (Some nudity) Two Guys and Guy Wilde Life Witchy xkcd Yellow Peril (PG-13) Infrequently/No Longer Updating Web Comics The Abominable Charles Christopher The Adventures of Dr. McNinja The Adventures of Ellie Connelly American Hell Bag of Toast Bear in Mind Bobwhite The Book of Biff Brat-halla Brightest Broodhollow Bullfinch Camp Weedonwantcha Chain Bear (Some explicit stuff) Chainsawsuit Conspiracy Friends! Daisy is Dead Distillum Dream Life Dumm Comics Ectopiary (Some nudity) Edemia Edmund Finney's Quest to Find the Meaning of Life A Fine Example Finn and Charlie are HITCHED Floodmud Freaks! Green Wake Gun Show Hark! A Vagrant Head Doctor Productions Hello with Cheese Helpful Figures Hollow Mountain IDK Comics Inscribing Ardi Intragalactic The Intrepid Girlbot JBabb Comics Kyle & Atticus Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space Letters to a Wild Boar Lovecraft is Missing Manta-man Meat and Plastic Minimalism Sucks Mis- Moe Moon Town The Nerds of Paradise Nimona No Reason Comics Odd-Fish One Swoop Fell Patches Pictures for Sad Children Raymondo Person A Redtail's Dream Riotfish Roy's Boys (PG 13?) Run Freak Run Saint's Way Shortpacked! Sin Titulo Snowflakes Split Lip Spooky Doofus SubCulture Super Buzzkill The Super Fogeys The Super Gay Adventures of Ross Boston Thermohalia Troubletown Mirror Ugly Girl YU + ME 2815 Monument Pure Flash Awesomeness Aardvardkbutter.com Angry Alien Die Anstalt : Toy Psychiatry The Frown Hoogerbrugge Other Bogleech Clients from Hell Brian Despain Creatures in My Head Damn You Auto Correct! Jhonen Vasquez's site Overheard in New York Passive Aggressive Notes Submarinechannel.com Superdickery UHpinions Whirled | Friend love Sunday, January 15, 2017 I was reading this Brain Pickings article about the intensely loving friendship between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman. There have been a number of times when I've wondered if I really need or want a romantic relationship, or if I just want a level of closeness and intimacy that is most readily found in the context of romantic relationships, but is not exclusive to them. I feel like healthy platonic love is easier to achieve (assuming you can find a person who reciprocates) because the expectations are different. The things I want from a friend are much less restrictive than what I want from a romantic partner. Being friends is more about who a person is as a person, and our connection on that level. A romantic relationship has more practical necessities for me. Suddenly, the resources the other person brings to the relationship are of dire importance. Education matters. Career matters. Physical appearance matters. Any opinions that affect the course of a shared future matter. I can be friends with someone who doesn't want kids. I don't think I could date someone like that. I could, in theory (although it's not particularly likely) be friends with someone who had dropped out of high school and was working as a janitor at McDonald's. That would be unacceptable in a dating partner. I feel that I am being reasonable with these expectations. I'm not obligated to open up my dating preferences to include anybody, regardless of the level of friendship we may have. I think that a flaw in my dating decisions has been to accommodate for things that I am not really okay with, because of this idea that personality should take priority over all else. That's an ideal I don't want to strive for anymore. It conflicts with the other things in life that are important to me. Trying to force myself to disregard other factors for the sake of putting personality first has only caused me to suffer. I have been fighting for the other by fighting myself, and it's not worth it. It's never worth it. This isn't to say that I don't think compromise and even concession don't have a place in relationships, but there is a limit to what you can compromise, and I need to try harder to enforce my boundaries in that regard. --- The past couple days I have been walking around a lot, to take advantage of the weather. It's nice to explore the city. I finally checked out the library downtown, and it's quite a pretty space, although it was also full of what looked like homeless people, judging by the amount of luggage/trash bags they had with them and the smell. I also saw a guy unwrap a block of cheese and just start eating chunks of it. Yesterday I had my first appointment with a therapist that one of my profs recommended to me. The therapist's office is in this big beautiful historic building downtown, although her actual office is quite small. I'm going to start seeing her weekly. Hopefully it helps with things. I'm never sure how much of my stuff is resolved and how much I still need to actually work on. Then again, that sort of thing is never static. Things get better and things get worse. Most issues are not items on a checklist that you can be done with and never have to revisit. At best, I think you can get to a level where things are generally manageable, but that's on average. Nobody is ever "cured", which is an uncomfortable thing to hear, but it's true. I've met too many people who insisted they were completely over their problems, but invariably that turned out not to be true. What matters more than being "done" with things is having an open/receptive mindset about your potential problem areas and understanding that you don't know everything and never will, although nobody else does either. We all just have pieces of the world, and I think the most we can do is share those pieces with each other to try to form a more complete (though never fully complete) picture. I guess my program has been influencing me, though I'm also not sure how different these ideas are from how I already felt. That whole idea that we are always moving towards being more than we are but will never be complete resonates with me, though. It's kind of like how people say it's about the journey, not the destination, except that there isn't ever a destination, only a general direction. Unrelated music: "Knights" by Crystal Castles. Comment! (0) | Recommend! Painted self and interpretation [2P] Tuesday, January 10, 2017 Comment! (1) | Recommend! Mute stones Saturday, January 7, 2017 "Balance" by The Mountain Goats. Wet your finger, place it toward the wind Feel disaster in the air We are far too slow to outrun it now But not too far gone to care I got lunch with a new friend today, and had a good time. Hopefully we can hang out again soon. It was nice to do some socializing. This tiredness thing is not getting better. I'm taking my supplements, sleeping enough (I think? I wake up before my alarm and can't go back to sleep and don't feel tired immediately after waking up), eating, drinking water... I've been walking, though not doing vigorous exercise much. Walked five miles the other day to get to a counseling center downtown and back. Felt sleepy anyway. It makes it hard to do anything. Too sleepy to focus... Comment! (2) | Recommend! Some excerpts from my reading Thursday, January 5, 2017 From "The Contributions of Dialogical Psychology to Phenomenological Research".
"Brainwash" by Suuns. Do you know what you're doing? Do you see? Oh, see it (?) What you see is not the same as what I'm seeing Even in the dark, even in your dream Comment! (1) | Recommend! Crack your soul Tuesday, January 3, 2017 I had Hermeneutics for the first time today. The prof is very clear and passionate about the subject, and I have a good feeling about the class. He covered a lot in the first session, but wasn't all scatterbrained about it, so it was easy to follow. Some of the things he mentioned overlapped with past material, but he actually knew how to phrase them in sensible ways. Plain English! I've sorely missed it. A few of the basic ideas he mentioned in class were that we are never static beings, and we are always moving towards or directed towards the future/our potential in some way. We are never fully who we are, never nouns, so to speak. Because there's no fixed state to our being, we can never completely know ourselves. In addition, he talked about how Dasein (the decentered self that's engaged in living) discloses itself, which is to say, how it manifests and becomes visible to itself and others. One of the most important themes in E-P psych is that being (or Being, since they just love capitalizing that word...) is not the Cartesian concept of self, the mind housed in a physical shell (essentially isolated consciousness). Context is very important in this philosophical tradition. Being is in relation to others and the world; you are not who you are outside of the context in which you exist. Your existence as yourself depends on how you relate to your world. That seems pretty obvious when I say it, but the point is that it's different from Descartes's idea that mind and body are these separate entities, and the "real" self is just this internal thing that isn't in direct contact with the outside world. Moving along in that vein, we can't rely on self-reflection to illuminate existence. The prof kept describing that as "Narcissus looking in a mirror." Without drawing on other people/perspectives, we end up distorting existence by filtering it through our biases. Something that they like to say a lot in my program is "let the things show themselves"-- which is to say, don't orchestrate their showing, but move aside (as best you can) your own biases and preconceptions about things so that the true nature of the things can be seen. I suppose that a very simplistic/reductive way to say it would be "stay open minded and be aware of the automatic judgements you make so that you don't let them overshadow the thing." Hopefully I've got that right. I think the idea is that you can't really help but judge, because we all have certain ways that we see the world, but what matters is not whether or not you judge, but how seriously you take those judgements. My program emphasizes having a very loose grip on them. One of the things that I've been a little confused about implementing is maintaining vulnerability while also heeding intuition. As therapists, we are not supposed to let ourselves fall into this mindset of "I am the one who knows"; we don't want to assume the position of authority or mastery, because that only engenders rigidity of thought and habit. We have some tools the clients don't, sure, but the idea is that we are there to help the clients see for themselves what's going on. This doesn't happen because we tell them what we think so much as because we act as a source of... hmm... feedback, maybe? I'm afraid I could be phrasing all these things in misleading or inaccurate ways, so to some extent I'm hesitant to write too much about it. Another thing that the prof talked about in class today was how explaining and understanding are not the same thing. He used the example of poetry. You don't read poetry to explain things the way a textbook would, you read poetry to understand things. In this case, I feel like I understand it but am at a bit of a loss as to how to explain it sometimes. But it's also like 1:30 AM and I'm not sure how lucid I am at the moment. Gah. One last thing I want to add: Prof said that the biggest barrier to not understanding others is not understanding ourselves, because we have so many things that get in the way of our understanding others (e.g. biases, preconceived notions, structures of thought), and ignorance of these obstacles within ourselves blinds us to the other. Okay I think that one came out alright, at least. Phew. I've been listening to some songs by this band tonight. I like this one a lot, it's... hypnotic. "Up Past The Nursery" by Suuns. You can't get quick You can't commit You can't control her But I remember bodies on a Sunday getting colder Comment! (0) | Recommend! All representatives are still busy Tuesday, January 3, 2017 I've been on hold for over 100 minutes and I don't even remember quite what I'm supposed to say once someone answers I set up an appointment with a therapist and called my health insurance to talk about coverage but they said my account wasn't active and told me to call this number so here we are, I guess I remember now why I had such a hard time getting around to finding a therapist last quarter. Last quarter was terrible in so many ways. I heavily suspect that I was getting migraines and possibly mood problems from the medication that I was taking. I stopped taking it over break, and I feel more normal again. Then again, I also had a few weeks away from a very stressful atmosphere, and that could be why I'm feeling better too. After cutting my hair, I noticed that I had several hairs that were white from the tip to halfway to the root, so I think my hair was going white from stress. Classes start again today. :| --- Someone answered after almost two hours, and then immediately transferred me, so I'm on hold again. :( ---Edit--- Three hours. I gave up. Comment! (0) | Recommend! I don't want to be back here Sunday, January 1, 2017 I don't know what to say. Here are a couple songs I was listening to earlier on Spotify. "Take A Walk" by Passion Pit. But see I am no criminal I'm down on both bad knees I'm just too much a coward To admit when I'm in need "Living Zoo" by Built To Spill. We know where we wanna go But we can't tell On our own how to navigate Our way through hell Sometimes when you wake up (Sometimes wake up lonely) You feel alone Somehow we get over it (Somehow keep it going) And you go on Comment! (0) | Recommend! The dim light that filters through Saturday, December 31, 2016 Last night I hung out with Sean, and we walked around the neighborhood commenting on people's holiday yard decorations. It was a lot of fun, though my foot hurt a bit afterwards, since we walked for like a couple hours (or more?). The air was cold outside, but walking warmed me up to the point where it was comfortable, at least until we stopped outside a house with an obscene number of inflatable decorations and the standing made me cold again. On the way back to my house, we stopped in Safeway so he could use the bathroom, and the empty deli section was playing club music for some reason. I feel like if we'd started dancing to it, we could have been part of a scene from some indie movie. I'm really going to miss seeing my friends. Tonight, I've been doing a jigsaw puzzle with my mom in the living room. My dad was helping at first, but then he decided to put on a kung fu movie instead. It's been... a very low key New Year's Eve. We also got pizza at the place near my house, at my request. Passed it with Sean yesterday night and got a craving, so I asked if we could go there for dinner tonight. I guess that counts as a nice thing for the day. "Chinese House Flowers" by The Mountain Goats. Comment! (0) | Recommend! 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