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Memores acti prudentes futuri


You're unsure if I am a loose end or a strand
that waits for you to mend or understand
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
TICoSME
Musicalities!
Online Radio
Soma.fm

More Fun Shtuff
Newgrounds Audio Portal
Pandora
SoundClick
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
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
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