“Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.”

—	Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

“You’ll likely notice that the real world does have this interesting mix of, like, crushing monotony and paralyzing terror. There’s the crushing monotony of waking up at the same time, sitting in the same traffic, going to the same job, and then coming home to pay the same bills with your only distractions being, like, television and video games and YouTube. But there’s also the constant paralyzing terror of knowing that if you somehow screw up sitting in traffic or working at your job or paying your rent, you will be homeless and hungry and alone.”

—	John Green

My thoughts about my upcoming History and Structure final:

Beyond that...it's now well over a week past my birthday. My father has officially forgot. Again. I know this isn't a surprise to me anymore, but it's still a little disappointing. I had a professor ask me today if I would've preferred to have brothers/sisters and I almost selfishly said yes. Then I sort of thought about it and decided I would never want anyone else to have had to go through the shit I did. And of course, then I said that. Meh.

Come home soon, Tessa? Now?

Language describes, but description tends to emerge precisely when nomenclature falters or when the names assigned to objects fail to render them adequately. The world almost never resembles its linguistic mugshot. Exposing the inadequacy of the world to compass the thing, description is allotted the thankless task of representing the misfit things that cannot be immediately assimilated to the world as we already know it. It thus serves as a heuristic device, as a virtual perspective that reveals something about out relationship to objects, or about the relationship between words and objects, that we cannot perceive in our everyday experience of them.

Monkey: me.

Finals Week: Elephant.

 

Why is it that if some dude walked up to me on the subway platform
and said these things, I’d think he was a mentally ill asshole,
but if the vampire inside my head says it,
It’s the voice of reason.