why?

because i have an affinity for quotations, especially particularly good ones, and this book is so incredibly quotable.

from EL&IC by J.S. Foer.

"we could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened."


"just because you're an athiest, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are."


"in the end, everyone loses everyone. there was no invention to get around that one. and so i felt, that night, like turtle that everything else in the universe is on top of."


"humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with the lips. so in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are."


"the books had been buried, so i hid this time behind a group of trees, i imagined their roots wrapped around the books, pulling nourishment from the pages, i imagined rings of letters in their trunks..."

here's to a grain of sand.

"What would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a grain of sand and moved it on milimeter?"

I said "I'd probably die of dehydration."

He said "I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?"

I said, "I dunno, what?"

He said, "Think about it."

I thought about it. "I guess I would have moved a grain of sand."

"Which would mean?"

"Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?"

"Which would mean you changed the Sahara."

"So?"

"So? So the Sahara is a vast desert that's existed for millions of years and you changed it."

"That's true!" I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!"

"Which means?"

...

"I changed the course of human history."

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
page 86, J.S. Foer

i'm making lilith 2010 a priority.

you strut your rasta wear
and your suicide poem,
and a cross from a faith that died
before jesus came.

you're building a mystery.

i don't understand why

no one seems to want to ask
"how the fuck did we let this happen?"

we should be asking this of ourselves every day.

as we focus all of our attention for a few minutes on Haiti, before the next disaster strikes, we are apparently blind to the fact that we've been wholly ignorant to the state of a nation so close to our shores. ignorant to the fact that it represents a tiny per cent of the rest of the developing world that we've steeped in poverty as a result of our seemingly infinite greed.

climate change is undoubtedly the cause for the number of natural disasters that have hit world-wide over the last decade, disasters that are off the charts in comparison to those prior in our recorded meterological history which, even before the new millenium, were seen to be of increasing intensity.


and apparently no one saw this coming.
and apparently no one will ask "why?"

still, i don't quite understand
what's so threatening.
what it is that's so easily identified,
some
red flag i'm ignorant to.
because all i know is what i know
and
that's not much of anything at all.


we are buried

in a time when at once
our television sets blare bad news
and terror is a word in the vocabularies of our children
with eyes wide open to a world that is trapped in a
haze of chaos.

and i've got a room full of memories
i'd pay to forget.
walls built of regret. and guilt.
doors with hinges that refuse to give
with handles that stick
rooms filled with misunderstandings.

so it pays to have a perspective you haven't bought.
and i'm short on insight
but i'm pushing for change
while i push through walls of
quiet.

because they've got nothing to say to me.

earthquake in Haiti

an earthquake moved through Haiti tonight, just before 5 PM eastern standard time, about 10 miles west of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, one of the poorest cities in the world.

the people who are without power, hospitals, ambulences, rescue teams, food, water, shelter, and even communication need help ASAP.


TEXT "Haiti" to (90999) for an automatic $10 donation. Keep Port-au-Prince and the Haitian people in thoughts and hearts tonight...



how to help:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34834553/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show

no on H8

the trial began today.