So I like, glued my fingers together today in a freak accident where the tube of industrial strength glue I was trying to pierce through exploded. A huge amount of green stuff just spurted out onto my left hand and I started panicking because I distinctly remember that the last time I tried to wipe glue off with tissue, I ended up making feathers out of it. But well, I can safely say that experience taught me nothing, because this time I reached for a tissue anyway. I'll never learn.

Anyway, I know now that next time (HEAVEN FORBID!) the thing to do is to wash my hands with hot soapy water, and to use a rough sponge. Also, non acetone-based nail polish removers will help. Or if all else fails, I could try Robyn's remedy:

Get superglue off your skin by eHow Friend
Shave it off! My friend and I were gluing fluff to rocks and we both got glue stuck to your hands. So we looked up how to remove it, but none of those tips worked. Then we tried to bite it off, but I was biting my skin. So we grabbed a shaving razor and gently shaved our skin, and it worked!

Shaving my fingers! Really!

posted by beautiful at 8:06 am

Did I, as Ivan instructed, exit with a bang? Was it a damn good one? It was. The worst, most tense, most sian, most breathless semester of my undergrad life was ultimately a damn good one.

I have no regrets. I am ecstatic because I worked hard with this day in mind, and this day has arrived. I am thankful because of friends I've found: and I don't mean this in head-count, let's do a tally and see who's here kind of way, I mean the people who will last beyond my leaving, our leaving. I am amazed that I survived it at all.

I guess part of me is growing a little afraid though. Perhaps I never really considered that the so-called freedom I've been yearning for comes with this thing called responsibility. But if, as Torbs says, the next step is to 'get married, have kids, become an old hag', then really, I'm missing the point.

This is more than just about a leap of faith. More than anything else, this is going to call for some serious optimism. I have responsibility, yes. But I also have choices: to pursue what I think I want, to not sell out, to not settle, to do something different with my life for once. I think I know what I need to survive this transition.

Stop taking life so seriously and over-investing the future with the same make it or break it mentality that has made student life so unbearable. Because I think if I'm going to take the same mindset into the future, then there's just no point. And if anyone's going to ask me what I'm going to do next, I hope I stop seeing it as a loaded question which implies that I should have an executable plan. I don't have one. I'm not sure if I'm racing against time to beat everyone else to a glorious career, or working with time to see what it unfolds. We'll just have to see how it goes.

posted by beautiful at 7:31 am

Tomorrow I sit for my romanticism paper. I hope I enjoy it. This course has resonated for me deeply; some of the books have spoken to me and reminded me of feelings I've had before, things I've done, places I've been. In one of the last lectures, the idea of memorialising struck me: here lies one whose name is writ in water. Someday, I will look back on the days when I did this course, the moment I now sit here writing this and listening to songs which too have always resonated for me, and I hope it will renew things in me: memories, feelings, nostalgia, whatever. Let that moment in the future celebrate that human capacity to feel intensely, to let experience burn like a hard, gem-like flame.

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The Romantics set in their place feeling, imagination, sensation, intution--not what can be apprehended through the mind, but that which can be apprehended through other faculties. O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!

That inward shift, is about the dialogue between the world we inhabit and the world that inhabits us, recognising and validating imagination, self-awareness, sensibility, an interest in psychology and states of consciousness, individualism and the conflicted self.

Nostalgia is about something you have lost, something you cannot return to. It is a yearning that is directed at the past, a past which is in the process of being lost.

I feel, therefore I am. Existence is tied to emotion rather than thought.

And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art... By 'estranging' objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and 'laborious'... After being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of 'recognition'.

Man must live from within outwards. He puts the standard, once and for all, inside every man instead of outside him.

Language is only a secondary system which refers to the real, primary world, but is not necessarily able to represent it adequately. In a sense, language then represents a separation, or alienation from a primary world or reality.

Sublimity is the product of an inspired moment of passion rather than cool and sustained calculation. But the Romantics privilege not just any sensational experience, but sensation taken to the point of intensity where it becomes transcendant and sublime, where we are 'transported' into a different world or experience, and this leads to a new state of knowledge or awareness. Live and experience fully, not half-heartedly.

Suffering validates what the Romantic has to say, because he has suffered for it.

The fragmented, or incomplete, is tensed towards something outside or beyond itself--that which will complete it; because it is not complete it is a thing still in process, in motion; only when it is completed will it become quiescent. Incompletion gestures towards longing which is perpetually renewed.

Fantasy challenges the ethos of the Enlightenment. It has no necessary 'rules', its nature is irrational, it does not deal with empirically testable realities.

Both Romanticism, and Gothicism as a subspecies of the Romantic impulse, are very aware of limits, mainly as things to be challenged and confronted. And even if the Romantic mind fails and the limitation endures, he has at least succeeded in affirming his human agency, his free will.

If the Romantics value impermanence, incompletion and imperfection, they also value fragmentation, conflict and elusiveness.

A dialogue between fantastic and realistic narrative modes often operates within individual texts, as the second attempts to repress and defuse the subversive thrust of the first.

By taking gothic formulae, twisting them and distorting their usage, Bronte effectively destructures, and in so doing, denatures gothic: she has stripped away that which was familiar and reassuring and rendered them strange and the result is a world of the now unpredictable, and thus terrifying. The structural principles of the gothic no longer operates as expected.

'Arrangement' suggests some kind of artificial interference with the natural, again suggesting that we should be a little suspicious of the narrative and its arrangements. That which the text cancels and negates is in effect the imaginative capacity which produced it in the first place: in other words, art. This problematises the idea of art because of the manner in which we are to distrust it. A compromised text, therefore, manufactures its own fragmentations and epistemological problems, in order to assert its own aesthetic freedom, and to elude the controlling gaze of the Establishment.

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those bout us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

The Romantic impulse is about imperfect desire in an imperfect world, imperfectly executed, but this is the best that can be.

posted by beautiful at 4:29 am