gotta love ‘the onion.’

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

genius.
oh, kafka. everyone in the world truly is against you, even when you’re dead.

completion, transition, repeat.

i am so happy that my work with lingua is complete. i am so happy with the journal, and i think other people are too. and i get to sleep again, which is always a plus.

i got a beautiful piece of art in the mail from my friend tom the other day:

(the lighting in my hallway room is so scant. ugh.)

i hung the banner above my bulletin board so that it would be one of the first things i see in the morning (aside from the alarm function going off on my phone). such a wonderful gift. in sort of the same vein, i am so excited to switch rooms and not live in a hallway anymore. and my new room will have a half-staircase in it, no less. it will be a nice place to rise above (literally) all the bullshit, and probably a nice place to talk on the phone to my mom, too.

my mom asked if i thought i was really going to be married within the next year and half, because if i did, she was going to have to get a job to be able to pay for my wedding. it’s weird that the altar is actually in sight, because i don’t know if i ever thought i’d actually get married. i’d much prefer to be like brangelina and just love and live with someone and not have to bring the government into it to make it valid, especially when so many straight people take the sanctity of marriage for granted and when so many gay people don’t even get the chance to marry once. but the boy wants to be married, so for him, i’ll make the exception. probably.

this post is all over the place.

hellooooooo, lingua.

“it is finished.” — jesus

heaven.

i really enjoyed reading this essay about experiencing the divine through music.

i can certainly relate, as i hardly ever feel a divine presence inside the walls of a church, and almost always experience it in particular and fleeting atmospheres and isolated instances, and through people instead of the bible. i think that is the best part of humanity: the individuality and transience of experience, and the value that attaches itself to these moments.

and i would not mind at all if listening to sigur ros for all of eternity was what heaven was like.

15 books

1. age of iron, j.m. coetzee
2. satan says, sharon olds
3. beloved, toni morrison
4. out stealing horses, per petterson
5. franny and zooey, j.d. salinger
6. of mice and men, john steinbeck
7. middlesex, jeffrey eugenides
8. lord of the flies, william golding
9. jane eyre, charlotte bronte
10. the lovely bones, alice sebold
11. to kill a mockingbird, harper lee
12. on chesil beach, ian mcewan
13. the giving tree, shel silverstein
14. fear and loathing in las vegas, hunter s. thompson
15. the master and margarita, mikhail bulgakov

immortality through a pen.

while we were at the beach this past weekend, we had a moment. we turned off the lights, lit some candles, listened to sigur ros, and acknowledged the flickering flames that are our lives. grant talked about thumbing through the guestbook at their beach house, where so many people who are now gone wrote their names and their essence on lined pages.

since then, i’ve been thinking a lot about the immortality of handwriting. i think grant said it best: our handwriting will outlive us, and it will be the marker of something that used to be. i remember reading some of my grandmother’s letters to my mom or to me, and the way she wrote is permanently embedded in my mind and i can’t think of her without thinking of her very distinct penmanship, all of the slightly slanted whorls of cursive. her handwriting is as clear in my mind as her face is. and it’s strange to me that we have found ways to preserve letters and instances of a person’s handwriting so that they are a living record of the person whose life could not be preserved.

mikhail bakhtin wrote this essay on the nature of language, where he asserts that words always only half belong to the person saying them, because they interact with other people, and then the other people adopt them and make them their own (or at least half their own) by speaking them, and then other people hear it and adopt it, and so on. in this way, the word is more alive than humans are, because it is passed on from person to person, and continues to live even after the person speaking it is dead and gone. human beings are just kind of a vessel for the word, which is the real living thing. it’s bizarre to think about, but i feel like handwriting kind of functions in the same way: it is a live representation of something that will perish (if it hasn’t already) and it is passed on from living person to living person, so that everyone who views it can archive it in their memories. it will always outlive the person that wrote it, but it will also always outlive every person who views it; it is immortal.

it makes me wonder what people will think when they see my handwriting after i’m gone, what my handwriting will say about me. if it will give people a sense of who i am, even if they’ve never met me. i hope it does.

highlights from rockaway:

things are okay.

things that make me happy:
+ sufjan stevens’ creative writing skills.
+ i found a signed copy of amy bloom’s normal at half price books and am so excited to start reading it.
+ being able to drop a class that was way too much work and stress for me without being penalized or having to graduate later than planned.
+ ’siren song’ by margaret atwood. yay feminism.
+ being at rockaway beach. the best.

also! i have a tentative sumer reading list that i am super stoked on:
the history of love by nicole krauss
new and selected poems by mary oliver
moby dick by herman melville
disgrace by j.m. coetzee
the adventures of tom sawyer by mark twain
the subjection of women by john stuart mill
travels with charley by john steinbeck
mrs. dalloway by virginia woolf
crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky
ulysses by james joyce (which will probably take me all summer)