I'm reading the Joy Luck Club for like the ninth time in four years.
I'm listening to Lionel Ritchie.
I'm counting down to when the time is mine again.
I'm fighting desire for sleep.

The world is fighting too. Lethargy, depression, jealousy, loneliness, fear.
The world is counting too. Money, prospects, the days that go by.
The world is listening too. To their own hearts. To the words of others.
The world is reading too. Disaster in the papers, body language, computer screens.

I insist on putting things in perspective. This cannot keep taking me over.

posted by beautiful at 10:08 pm

I'm not the only one who's freaking out.

My MSN list is a tribute to the terror of exams; where many have laid their living wills.

God, please let the days fly.
Please let me treasure the present moment.
Please forge the path that I shall take.
Please give me strength.

posted by beautiful at 12:30 am

Shedding Light on...
...Virginia Woolf....

How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?... You have greatness, she continued, but Mr Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles, he loves dogs and his children. He has eight. You have none.

... the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies.

His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?... The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlat Shakespeare.

There he stood, demanding sympathy... He wanted sympathy. He was a failure, he said... He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world.

James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy.

... why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

But in her opinion one liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached the whole world must come to an end... For who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody.

...she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for (marriage)

It was a question, she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left.

When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless... our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

We are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that.... searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie... How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice...

Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. He was irritable - he was touchy.

posted by beautiful at 1:52 am