September 2010
16 posts
“In a culture which relentlessly urges women to make up for our lacks by accessorizing, we are told that we cannot manage bodily accessories if we manipulate them for purposes of self-defense, and that we will be best served by consenting to be accessories to our own violation. We are taught the following fallacy – that we can best avoid getting hurt by letting someone hurt us.”
—
Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words”
DAMN.
I’m trying to write 200 words in the next hour for a 1000 word art history paper and all I can do is laugh and laugh because I’m going to die in 60 years and this is what I’m doing. Hilarious. It is the best joke of all. Kudos, society and life. Kudos. You’ve got me in your trap.
9 1/2 weeks is better than 12 steps
“No single instant of it was unendurable… He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news.”
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
okay, mr. psychology textbook. you got me.
“Existential anxiety arises when we face the finality of death, the fact that we may unintentionally hurt someone, or the prospect that our lives have no meaning. We can avoid existential anxiety by accepting our limits and striving to make our lives meaningful, or we can try to silence that anxiety by avoiding responsibility or by conforming to others’ rules. Failing to confront life’s existential issues only leaves the anxiety in place, however, and leads us to ‘inauthentic lives.’”
you mean drinking my weekends away and avoiding any kind of remotely academic task and repressing all my unresolved issues isn’t going to give my life any Meaning? shit, someone lied to me.
it's cold in here.
the harder i try to avoid it, the more cliched my life becomes. oh well. what can you do.
i woke up singing that line about pussy in a sarcophagus
and it’s been looping through my head all day. i’m kinda creeped out. i don’t even really know what it means, but some confused circuit won’t stop repeating the words and my brain keeps trying to process what that might even look like. vagina mummies? i don’t know. for some reason that just makes me think of that movie “teeth.” ugh. i can’t. but i can’t stop. it’s consuming me, like one of those parasites on that show on the animal planet, “monsters inside me.” whoa. monsters. inside me. only ye would have the audacity to attempt such overt subliminal messaging. and succeed, for that matter. touche, mr. west. your words are thoroughly burrowed in my brain.
he's fucking with us.
[email from my prof]
So admission into this class will require that you write out BY HAND the following statement, sign it, and date it, and hand it in to me on Wednesday. That’s it.
I, <your name here>, want to take AMTH 110 this semester (Fall 2010). I understand that any previous advertisements for the class (including the syllabus and previous evaluations) were made with respect to a much smaller class size and therefore may not represent the actual outcome of the class. I understand that the content, material, grading scheme, and expectations of the class can change at any point during the semester with or without my knowledge. Because of this, I may or may not understand why I got a certain grade or where it came from, and I am OK with that. I understand that I am essentially a guinea pig in an unplanned experiment conducted by the professor (who has never done such an experiment before), and this may lead to even more difficulty and frustration than was intended (despite the fact that the intended difficulty and frustration is already extremely high). Despite all of this understanding, I STILL want to take this class.
Sincerely,
<signed and dated>
“School also taught her the power of language. She recalls a particularly revelatory assignment reading Othello. “The line was, ‘Tis monstrous’—period. And the second line was, ‘Iago, who done it’ — question mark. Then we read it without punctuation. ‘Tis monstrous Iago who done it,” which basically gives the story away. The fact that punctuation can change what you’re saying, I guess that’s why I love hip-hop — being able to say the same thing but it meaning a different thing,” she says.”
—PAPERMAG, “Nicki Minaj is the New Leading Lady of Hip-Hop”
