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like a whispering in dark streets
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[15 Jul 2009|09:23pm] |
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I think a kid on a skateboard got hit by a taxi right in front of my house just a little while ago -- I heard a kind of ominous "thwap" noise, thought "that can't be good," and stuck my head out the window to see a kid lying on the sidewalk with a crowd gathering around him and a taxi awkwardly trying to pull over. He seems to be alright, at least in the "well, he's clearly not dead, and all his limbs seem to be pointing in the right direction, and he seems to be talking" sense, and his friends look just sort of worried (as opposed to totally freaked out), and I am relatively impressed that there was a fire truck on the scene in what must have been about two minutes or so, but eek, guys. Those of you who live in or visit NYC -- be really careful when you go out into the street, whether on foot, bike, skateboard, unicycle, whatever, because New York traffic is a force of nature and it's not going to bend just for you.
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(12 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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| and another thing |
[10 Jul 2009|08:06pm] |
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When I was a kid, I was a tomboy and my mom didn't teach me a damn thing about makeup or doing your hair and actually somewhat actively encouraged against it ("growing up too fast" and whatnot), and my friends -- mostly dorky boys, and then pothead boys, and then punk rock boys and a few goth girls, etc -- sure as hell never taught me any of that shit either. I feel like I can finally do makeup sort of okay now, but I only really know how to do a couple of things, and I don't know how to do hair at all. The only reason my hair ever looks halfway presentable is because I was blessed with genes that give me straight shiny hair naturally, and I know how to get a decent haircut once in a while. But when I try to do anything at all to it -- like I did just now, optimistically trying out this rolly brush thing and doing what I've seen hair stylists do to me a zillion times, every time I get a haircut, and give it a little bounce and slight curl at the end -- I end up sitting here on the verge of tears with a hairbrush somehow affixed to my head with a nest of hair around it. I am hoping that once my hair air-dries completely, the natural straight/softness of it will let me extract the brush without causing too much damage, but seriously, this is why "we" (me + myself) can never go to fancy places. Jesus. This is part of a whole array of reasons why at least some small part of me always feels like I'm in drag or something if I actually try to look "pretty," because I never knew anything about this shit anyway and I'm just faking it and hoping no one notices, and I still feel that way even with my curvy hips and fancy shampoo and favorite eyeliner (Urban Decay, "rockstar"). I mean, I don't want a corporate job ever really, but I also don't think I ever could even get one, because I just literally don't know how to look like that, and can't do it even if I try. Motherfucker. There really is a roll-brush stuck to the back of my head right now. And some small part of me seems to actually buy into the notion that girls who get brushes stuck to the backs of their heads aren't "real" girls. Ugh. I need some kind of break from life here.
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(27 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[02 Jul 2009|01:37am] |
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I had a dream the other night that I had a dog, and it was the best dream ever. I think maybe I should blame this, which is, for reasons I can't quite explain, one of the best things I've ever seen. It's not so much the amazing skill as it is the perfect display of that particular kind of affection and fun that only dogs are really capable of. I <3 it.
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(1 guerilla | join the revolution!)
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[26 Jun 2009|11:51pm] |
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In slightly mundane news -- today I bought a bathing suit. Despite being sort of, well, squishy these days, close to the largest I've ever been (more on that later, maybe), it is a bikini. I picked this one up on a whim just to see how it would look, and it turned out that even though it shows a lot more skin than the one-pieces and therefore a lot more in the way of what is generally considered unattractive imperfections, it was actually kind of cute anyway, and all the one-pieces made me look kind of like a "rouched" apple or something. I think the stuff that is supposed to be "flattering" for the "larger" ladies ("ladies") might actually just make things worse -- a lot worse. And, I mean, it's obvious that I'm kind of jiggly, it's not like people aren't going to notice if I just pile more fabric on there. ANYWAY. So I have this very retro and honestly kind of rockabilly bikini now, and it is cute, dammit, and I swear I am actually going to wear it -- if Coney Island isn't an okay place for a fat girl to wear a retro bikini, then where in the world is?
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(1 guerilla | join the revolution!)
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[24 Jun 2009|02:01pm] |
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The NYC summer has so far been worse than Pittsburgh in terms of rainy grey drearyness. What gives, NYC? You were pretty spectacularly beautiful when I showed up last August -- this is just getting ridiculous. Rainy day stir-crazy. Ugh.
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(join the revolution!)
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[23 Jun 2009|12:21pm] |
Apparently the young Iranian woman, whose tragic death was captured on video which is now making the rounds on the internet (I have not watched it, though I am glad it is out there -- if you want to see it, it is not hard to find) -- apparently she was a 27 year old philosophy student, who was there with other students and one of her professors.
Obviously, this is pretty eerie to me; of course, any governments' killing of its own citizens like this is horrific and repugnant, but the "that could have been me" feeling really drives it home. Besides that, though, it seems significant to me that so many of the images coming out of Iran are of young, educated, apparently fairly liberal women. I think some of these are being used to tug on the heartstrings of the west, of course, because who doesn't like a pretty young woman? But I think there's something deeper going on -- I mean, historically, Iran hasn't been very friendly towards its pretty young women. I'm not sure what more to say about this right now, but I do wish there was something I could do to help.
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(4 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[17 Jun 2009|11:57am] |
There are a variety of things I could say about the situation in Iran, but instead, I would like to direct you all to this sobering entry that is making the rounds, by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) one_hoopy_frood. I will say this -- I think this is maybe a bigger deal than our somewhat apathetic American awareness has thought.
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(join the revolution!)
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| get off my lawn |
[06 Jun 2009|03:41pm] |
So there is some kind of festival thing happening over in Tompkins Square Park today, and they've got a megaphone and an amp and people are saying things and occasionally musicians are doing some music and stuff. This is fine, although a little irksome, but that's probably the price I pay for living so close to the park, so whatever. But there have been a couple of guys doing this amateur rap thing that drives me f'ing nuts -- they just get up there and, as far as I can tell, start saying random sentences into the mic, in an either bored or maybe slightly angry voice. Like, random sentences. Sometimes those sentences are generally tied together thematically, and the themes are usually "stuff about how my life was hard when I was a kid," "stuff about how my life is hard now," "stuff about women's body parts," and "stuff about being intoxicated," and there's apparently no necessity to stick on one of these themes from moment to moment, they just sort of appear randomly throughout the "lyrics." This is not surprising to me, I've been hearing bad amateur rap around for years, but now that it's forcing its way into my living room, I gotta say -- when the hell did people start liking this shit, and whose fault is it? Who the hell started this thing where a guy can say something that basically amounts to "When I was a kid we ate government cheese / I have observed that women have boobies"? I mean, I know it's "more" than that, and most song lyrics are pretty ridiculous in a certain light, but I swear, they just sort of vomit some random words out of some set of appropriate themes and they wave their arms around a little and people tell them it was good and maybe even buy their cds or something. What is it like to be the kind of person who places absolutely zero requirements for any kind of coherence on the music that they listen to? Doesn't that seem kind of mildly schizophrenic to anyone else?
Also, why the hell am I supposed to care what this dude's life was like when he was a kid? If he's going to just say stuff about his life and about what kinds of women he prefers and whatnot, why is he saying it over a mic and posturing as a musician when he could just go get a beer with some friends or something -- some people who actually, you know, give a shit?
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(20 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[01 Jun 2009|10:45am] |
Although there is a lot that could be said, I do not want to get into too deep of a discussion of the recent murder of Dr. Tiller. I would just like to say this:
There seems to be an active debate in this country as to whether or not abortion can in some way be thought of as a kind of "murder." I of course fall on one particular side of this debate, I think the people who disagree with me are actually wrong, and I don't think I should have to capitulate to them in debate under the guise of diplomacy or some such. But I do admit that there exists a debate; whether or not abortion is murder is, apparently, not obvious. However, there can be no debate over whether murder is murder. Murder is murder is murder is murder, and those who advocate murder, murder murder, murder that everyone in their right mind would agree is murder, and ruthless premeditated killing at that, should be held responsible for their part in this. The murderer should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, perhaps even as a terrorist (since that's what he is), and it should be made abundantly clear that there is no place in our society for this kind of ideologically motivated violence. This is not "another point of view" which deserves to be protected under some vague and perverted notion of "free speech," this is the murder of a man, and the brute intimidation of millions under threat of violent force. Anyone who advocates for such actions, anyone who would exhort others to carry out such killing as "justified," puts himself outside of the law and is, in essence, encouraging sectarian violence.
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(17 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[24 May 2009|11:42am] |
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I have discovered an unusual and perhaps somewhat secret cool thing about NYC. If you wake up early on a Sunday and get a zipcar, there's pretty much no one out there on the streets. You can cruise around and watch the neighborhoods shift into each other with the breeze in your face, completely at your leisure, without having to worry much about traffic. And by "early" I mean like maybe 8 or 9 AM, not crazy early, although I imagine it must be virtually deserted at dawn. It was such a lovely accidental adventure that I'd recommend actually going out of your way to do this if you visit NYC on a nice day and have a car (or a zipcar membership). I feel like the fact that it is Sunday must be key. It took me maybe ten minutes to get from Tompkins Square Park to 102nd & 3rd, and since there's no traffic, you can cruise down the avenues like there's no stoplights if you don't speed (the lights are timed for this). I can't imagine that this would be much of a "secret," but it seems like it must be, since there was pretty much no one out there. Huh.
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(8 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[22 May 2009|09:52am] |
I've had some really general philosophical questions floating through my mind in a sort of inexplicably urgent manner this morning -- maybe I had some kind of philosophy dream last night? Anyway, there's a certain problem that pretty much everything I've gotten excited about in the past year or so has had at least something to do with, and it goes something like this:
-We do in fact perceive the real world.
-We nonetheless are capable of being wrong about the real world.
There are various historical attempts to get around around these two propositions -- Kant, for instance, denies proposition #1, in asserting that "the real world" is comprised of things-in-themselves to which we have no access. An amazingly wide variety of philosophers after Kant found this notion unacceptable, but I'm having a hard time teasing out exactly why, any further than an appeal to its unintuitiveness. Also, I think representational accounts of perception might fall under this heading as well, insofar as what we perceive is taken to be the perceived effect of an unperceived (and therefore inaccessible) thing. Others, at least as far back as Descartes, seem to think that there's not really anything wrong with #1, and that the fault lies in thinking that #2 conflicts with it, insofar as judging and perceiving are taken to be entirely different things. But obviously judgment can't exist in an entirely separate realm from perception, so I'm inclined to want an account of the intimate relationship between the two (under the presumption that they are two different kinds of activity) that provides room for both mistaken and correct judgments. And are we including hallucinations under "mistaken judgments," or wouldn't that sort of thing fall under perception itself, for those who would want to consider the two so distinct? I think there are probably several different problems rolled up into one big mess here that ought to be picked apart, but I'm not quite sure about what distinctions to make in order to start doing that picking apart.
I'm certainly not expecting to figure much of this out on livejournal, of course, but I'd be interested to hear any of your thoughts/suggestions.
Crossposted to my philosophy/academic lj -- if you want to be added there, just let me know.
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(21 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[19 May 2009|06:24pm] |
I can't believe how much I've written in the past week, holy crap. I really do always choose the most intense, serious topic possible, even when we are assigned topics and it's clear that one of them is really easy and one of them is impossibly difficult. This leads to things like writing 10+ pages worth of an entirely new reading of Lordship & Bondage that disagrees in one way or another with all the commentaries I might've referenced. And this other insane essay where I call Quine a Hegelian. Sort of. But I'm done, and I kind of can't believe I'm not dead yet.
Well, except for that 20 page Heidegger term paper due on Friday.
That I haven't started yet.
...
But then, I will be done.
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(2 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[17 May 2009|08:49am] |
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A sincere congrats to all the Johnnies who are graduating today. You made it.
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(join the revolution!)
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[15 May 2009|10:16pm] |
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This is about how I feel about my outstanding papers right now. Gaaaaaah indeed. I think I will manage, but damn. Ow brain ow. I should probably start writing my finals sometime before a few days before they're due next time, huh?
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(join the revolution!)
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| early to bed, early to rise |
[10 May 2009|09:15am] |
So for most of my life I've been both a night owl and a bit of an insomniac, and it's been a huge problem for classes and jobs even way back when I was in high school. However, somehow, since I moved into the new apartment, more often than not I've been naturally going to sleep at about 1 AM and waking up at 8. I understand this is a pretty normal schedule for most people (or even a little late), but for me it's pretty much unheard of that I could do such a thing without having to brace myself with multiple alarms and coffee and also lying awake in bed for hours praying I'll magically fall asleep soon. I'm not sure what it is? I do usually have a little bit of an easier time having a normal schedule in the summer, when it's sunny and warm, but not like this. I mean, I went to sleep at 1 in the morning last night without even thinking about it, just because I was tired and decided it was time to call it quits on the paper I was working on, and I woke up at 8 this morning without an alarm, and sort of puttered out of the bedroom and made coffee, and here I am perfectly alert and happy at 9 AM on a Sunday.
It might have something to do with the orientation of my apartment -- I have these two huge windows that are pointed southeast, and so the sunrise fills the livingroom with light -- but the bedroom (as you can see) is sort of a dark little sleeping cave. It does have a sort of porthole-like window in the upper corner (you can see it in the mirror in the pictures) which lets a little light trickle in rather pleasantly in the morning, but I can't even see it directly from the bed. Besides, my windows in high school barely had any kind of covering on them and I could still sleep like a rock all day and stay up until 6 in the morning if I weren't sleep deprived from a week of getting up at 6 (maybe) for school.
There aren't any really loud noises that happen at this time in the morning -- in fact, it's sort of stunningly quiet here at 8 in the morning, a little like the way it's stunningly quiet at 8 in the morning on Frenchman St. in New Orleans.* I don't have a cat (yet) that is waking me up. Other people in this building aren't up at 8 in the morning on Sundays. The church next door will wake you up at 10 with its bells (lovely) if you're not up already, but I'm up already. What gives? Was there some magical switch that was thrown when I moved here that said "Oh, I see you think you're an adult now, so here, have a normal adult schedule"? In my previous place, I was doing good if I could get to sleep before 4. Is the sense of privacy, safety, and sort of quiet pleasantness that comes from having a comfortable place of my own really making some kind of huge psychological difference?
*If you are traveling there any time soon, get up early one morning and walk over to the cafe du monde or something while it's still cool and misty, it's really eerie in a kind of wonderful way how much of a ghost town it is any time before 9ish.
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(2 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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[09 May 2009|02:52pm] |
Some people (my little brother, for instance) seem to think that not having exams proper means that this time of year is easier for me. Not so. However, I must admit that the kind of ridiculous "study nest" I have set up sort of takes the edge off:
( squish )
Also, despite the fact that I do have almost one whole week more to spend with Hegel, it has already gotten to the arrows-and-squiggly-line phase (oh squiggly line...)
( Oh Hegel. )
And, on one final note, because I am on the 4th floor I am right at treetop level, which apparently means that several different kinds of animals (most notably, pigeons and squirrels) will periodically stop on my windowsill and appear to be seriously considering just coming right on into my apartment (regrettably, I do not have accompanying pictures for this part, you'll have to use your imagination). It's nice outside and the street noise sort of helps me concentrate, so I don't want to close the window, but the thought of having a confused squirrel in my apartment is a little disconcerting...
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(5 guerillas | join the revolution!)
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