February 2012
16 posts
I kind of know I’m being unseemly, by the way. Other people’s depression: not about me. I know. But things are bad around here (CAN YOU TELL?) and talking about books is better than talking about suicide fantasies, right? Anyway, David Foster Wallace is not just a person who killed himself, and that is not all that Infinite Jest means to me, and I would gladly ramble on about the other...
“One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at...”
– I missed DFW’s birthday, I know. I am making up for it today.
When I read Infinite Jest this summer, I was as close to suicide as I have ever been. (I am not that close now, but for awhile I couldn’t remember what it felt like, and now I do, and I do not welcome that knowledge.) I...
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
– Oscar Wilde (via beatboxgoesthump)
truer words, &c.
(though really, i should add that i don’t think one should be embarrassed to love someone who doesn’t appreciate you—if anything, i think it demonstrates an enviable capacity for wonder, which ought to be celebrated. it’s just that it hurts,...
“Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive,...”
– from this article: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest : The New Yorker
David Foster Wallace’s notes on the premise of his last book, The Pale King
(via stef-lee)
Aside from my patent overuse of “w/r/t” I really, really try not to get all “So, I read David Foster Wallace...
“He’s quite as nervously broken down as I am, but it manifests itself in...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald on Ernest Hemingway (via pulsifers)
Watchchampagnecandy:
relevant:
I’ve played dumb when I knew better
Tried too hard just to be clever
I know honest thieves I call family
I’ve seen America with no clothes on but
I don’t wanna be a cheerleader no more
I have a phantom message. If you messaged me, send it again? Also message me if you have advice for how to deal with overwhelming nervous energy that makes you pick at your skin and totally destroys your ability to be a functional student who has an attention span and reads things. I seriously had forgotten how crazy I am when things get bad. It is kind of funny! But terrible.
so tired of
crippling food-related guilt fuckability as a standard of personal value being too nervous and distracted to read insomnia generally caring about things no reasonable person should care about
bad writer/bad person
I really can’t tell the difference, in my own writing, between arresting honesty and sheer self-indulgence.
1 tag
Consciously deciding to post writing that embarrasses me, by the way. Just because.
I sing Video Games for the fourteen-year-old girl... →
Yes, we are all tired of hearing about Lana Del Rey. But there is something happening here, for me: this naked, unembarrassed fantasy of what it’s like to be a Sexy Young Girl, it just gets more compelling as it gets more obviously fake.
The comparison to Angelo Badalamenti’s music in Twin Peaks: I can hear it. I can hear Air, too, which makes me think of the Virgin Suicides, which is...
January 2012
9 posts
My financial aid is late and I don’t know how the fuck I am about to pay my rent and I have no food at all and now I have to go deal with my horrible rich bitch of an ex-roommate who in our most recent conversation told me (I swear) “I think you should remind yourself that I am the daughter of millionaires.” I know my problems are relatively minor but oh god how am I going to...
Put a body part in my ask and I will tell you...
anoldladyonfire:
grrspit:
kiriamaya:
nothingbutsurrender:
This seems like an interesting experiment.
Haha, sure, why not?
Oo. I’ve got stories, people.
SCARED BUT DOING IT ANYWAY.
Ooh, can we do this please?
“I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can...”
– All my life, I’ll never get over Lily Bart. (via michelledean)
-I wish I were musically talented so badly that sometimes watching people play music hurts, physically, in my skin, all over. -I want a piano. Even though I am terrible at the piano and I know it would just frustrate me. I want one. -I am writing a thing that starts as a barely-fictionalized account of a thing that happened to me and (I hope) will turn into something more interesting, but it is...
December 2011
2 posts
“Anna Arkadyevna read and understood; but it was distasteful to her to read, that...”
– Anna Karenina, obvs. 2011 might be remembered as the year when so many books caught me at just the right time. There was Infinite Jest this summer when the world looked like an interlocking system of black miracles, and a whole string of Jennifer Egan novels this past month when I was trying to...
November 2011
5 posts
I am going to purchase myself a trophy and engrave...
I think it takes some skill to be so terrible at life in so many apparently contradictory ways.
Eggcorn!
Thank you jonathanbogart & imaginatificallytrue, you have set my mind at rest.
Is there a word for when homophones seem like logically they should be the same word so everyone mixes them up? Like “to peak one’s interest” or “newspaper lead.” Please tell me. This is important.
Police Solve Mystery of Severed Buffalo Head in... →
I live in the most absurd place in America.
October 2011
10 posts
I am shallow right now.
But here is something I wish: I wish that sometime about four to six years ago I had taken a break from being self-righteous and learned to do Girl Things, like wear makeup and fix my hair and plan a wardrobe and walk in heels, because now I am old and increasingly unhappy with always looking like a feral prepubescent creature in a room full of well-groomed adults, and I’m pretty sure it is...
4 tags
I have watched all the Doctor Who and all the...
tell me, what is next for me and netflix?
Addenda to the last post:
-I don’t go to a particularly fancy school, by the way. It’s public and huge and not particularly expensive by college standards, which is to say, still really fucking expensive.
-Ideally, I don’t think education would be the way to a middle class job. I think it would be considered a human right. I don’t have high hopes of employment after graduation, but I have learned...
1 tag
I'm not sure if there's any point in saying this
but since I really don’t do politics on tumblr anymore, I don’t need to have a point, do I?
I would (obviously) fucking love to have my student loans forgiven. Getting a degree looked a lot more promising in 2007 than it does now, and I’m more financially unstable than I have ever ever been, and I’m scared. On the other hand: it’s not like I didn’t know what...
5 tags
September 2011
1 post
1 tag
so the thing about the antidepressants
is that they tend to short out my panic/hysteria reactions. Which is nice, because the last six months of my life have been non-stop high drama and it’s bad for everyone. But I am learning the value of panic: it keeps you from sober consideration of the long-term effects of your various personal failures. (It is hard to consider anything when your synapses are all devoted to wordlessly...
July 2011
2 posts
“The point about not crunching serious stats is that Schtitt had clued Incandenza...”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
-Oh my god, these sentences. -I was at one point very fixated on numbers as metaphors but never became fixated enough to actually learn any math. I feel chastened about that right now. -DFW tends to linger awkwardly on certain words, like the three...
June 2011
2 posts
This morning I came home from the overnight train from Moscow to my host family in St. Petersburg and host mama’s daughter (age about 25) came out of the kitchen naked and informed me that the dog had broken its leg, so host mama was sleeping in my room. But this evening I sat in their house sobbing, hysterically and very audibly, for about 45 minutes, so I guess we are even? I don’t...
I'm in St. Petersburg and words are the most...
Like, sometimes I have exchanges in Russian where I get the sense of every sentence, and only miss a word or two, and get my point across and decline more than fifty percent of my nouns correctly and I feel JUST GREAT about life. And sometimes someone asks me where I’m from and I just choke. And sometimes I read a few solid pages of fairly complicated text without even consulting a...
May 2011
11 posts
I am moving out of the first place that’s ever been mine, my roommate is gone already and took most of the decorations and it feels empty, I need to clean, I’m feeling sentimental, should I get lonely drunk? I should, right? Okay.
unbornwhiskey asked: It is worth reading, I think! There are so many gorgeous tangles of style--it's just that the voice (18-year-old college student) permits Moore's writing to get irredeemably lazy, especially when she is handling GREAT AMERICAN THEMES like racism and class and stuff. Also grand gestures of love tend to replace things like characterization.