The Fault In Our Stars

There will come a time when all of us are dead, all of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything there will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you, everything that we did, built, wrote, or thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon or maybe its millions of years away…but even if we survive the collapse of our sun we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness and there will be time after and if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, you should ignore it. Because god knows that’s what everyone else does.

Pottermore & California.....

...What more could one want?

“Mari,” said Jonna, “sometimes you’re really a little too obvious.”

“Do you think? But once in a while a person just needs to say what doesn’t need to be said. Don’t you think?”

And they went back to their reading.

CALIFORNIA! I will see you tomorrow!!

I want to be possessed and know blinding joys.

Most human lives are usually lived in a state of functional nihilism. Very few of us believe that human life is devoid of all meaning and that all we should do is answer to our base urges and fulfill our basic desires and try to distract ourselves from pain or fear or unpleasantness. But almost all of us act as if we believe that. So what are we going to do about consciousness and how are we going to balance our urge to be more than nihilists with our need to blunt the sharp edges of consciousness? 

There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. I was reading one of the blogs I followed fairly regularly and she summed up two of the impressions I get most often during/after reading a John Green book:

1. "Reading John Green has the uncanny ability to make me feel really, really young and just a little bit dorky. It also makes me go all giggly and squeal-y, and occasionally groan-y because of the mathematics. I love you, John Green, in a non-creep way."

2. :Ya know, reading John Green, you wish you were one of the people he wrote about. That you're life's all good, if a little better, when you find yourself a character in a John Green novel."

I've recently decided to compile a book list of what I would consider *must reads*. This will be completed prior to my departure for California. Speaking of, the west coast and I need to be reunited asap. I'm incredibly sick of the east coast, particularly. Until the next time!

Ilunga

A Balrog of Moria! What did he say?

I'd just like to vehemently express my love for the Vlogbrothers, John and Hank Green. At this moment, particularly for John. In his most recent vlog, John was expressing his distaste for the unedited rap songs playing in stores where he was shopping. Rather than barrage our young, innocent ears with monstrous curses, he substituted each expletive with the names of British romanic poets:

"I'm a William Blake gangster so of course you want my Samuel Taylor Coleridge you're gonna want to be all up in this William Wordsworth like OH Percy Shelley, OH OH Percy Shelly. I'm the Lord Byron in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, WILLIAM BLAKE!"  

It is love. I'm fairly sure I've watched every vlog ever made by the two of them...and all of Hank's gaming videos. The Portal ones are especially entertaining, though I would never look down on the equally awesome Lego Harry Potter ones :D

Anyway, I've been incredibly tired this week. Here's to hoping I sleep straight through the night. Maybe overflowing my nerd quota for the day will help :D

Also! These are my new bed sheets! I am EXCITED! http://www.thinkgeek.com/geek-kids/3-7-years/e566/

Books, books, and more books.

Over the last week I've finished three books. Three! And all I want to do is keep reading! I love when I get into weeks like this, it makes me feel so productive. I do have to credit one book's completion on the brief bout of flu I had. Which sucked. I also lost five pounds...which isn't so bad now that I'm back to eating again. I've successfully completed 2.5 weeks of the P90X/Insanity Hybrid workout and am probably the most toned I've been in my life. Passing over the fact my body hurts daily, it's pretty intriguing to watch muscles and tone form. Most exciting...I have abs? Like, soon-to-be-clearly-defined-[legitimate]-six-pack abs. It is an incredible feeling. I am looking forward to the next time I need to wear a bikini :D

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed sieri sentio, et excrucior.

Admiror, O paries, te non cecidisse ruinis qui tot scriptorum taedia sestineas.

Pompeii & Catullus respectively.

Because enough is never quite enough.

Why does the world seem to function on something so mundane as labels. I mean, I understand what it's like to want need to be in control of one's own life...but not everything needs to be labelled immediately. If one's goal is to take risks, why end a good thing? If every time is a failure except the last time, why be so afraid of it that you end it prematurely? I guess my perspective on 'risk taking' is diverse from the rest of the worlds'. Don't be too confident when someone tells you they like you; the real question is...until when? Because frankly, just like seasons, people change and so do feelings.

Best thing for anyone to do at this point is to launch oneself unabashedly into a book. Any book at all. The History Boys had it right when they said, "The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours". As of late, the author that seems to accomplish this most effectively for me is John Green. Ironically, he also had something equally as applicable to The History Boys' quote, "Maybe our favourite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting". I've found [while composing this blog] that more than half of what I write is quote-based. Sometimes this concerns me...am I simply unable to formulate my own thoughts and ideas? I consider this and decide against it. The quotes I read and reapply are just far more articulate than I could ever come up with. More often than not, the things I read appear to me as something that I could just as easily have said myself [or at least thought]. Again, John Green covers this, "It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things".

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If yo do this, you work [and theft] will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take things to".

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person. Back to being an eccedentesiast for a while.

Ich errate, dass ich dieses Bit nicht gemacht habe, reinigt vor ein paar Monaten:

Wenn Sie sich in mich verlieben werden, ist es nur gerecht, dass Sie wissen, was Sie sich in verlieben. Sie verlieben sich in meine Unsicherheiten, und meine Besessenheit mit Versuch, zu lösen, was jeder an mich denkt. Sie verlieben sich in meine Unreife, mein beständiges Bedürfnis, geliebt und geschätzten, meine hyperaktiven Rissleitungen, meine Internetbesessenheit, meine Tendenz zu fühlen, zu anhänglich zu sein. ..You Sturz verliebt in meinem gestörten vorbei, meine Hoffnungen und Träume, und wie ich ein hoffnungsloses bin, das romantisch ist an Herzen. Wenn Sie sich in mich verlieben, verlieben sich Sie in meinen Selbst-hass und meine ganzen Unvollkommenheiten und meine Empfindung, dass niemand je mich lieben könnte. Aber Sie verlieben sich auch in den Weg meine Augen wird lächeln, wenn ich mit Ihnen bin, der Weg den ich werde simsen Sie, der morgens nur Ihnen erzählt, dass ich hoffe, dass Sie einen großen Tag haben. Sie verlieben sich in die gelegentlich lustigen bzw. nachdenklich stimmenden Dinge, die ich sage, und der Weg, den ich errötet, wenn Leute mich um Sie fragen. Aber zu mir, wird das wichtigste Ding sein, dass Sie sich in mich verlieben, trotz mein Denkens, dass es unmöglich ist.