Julia Margaret Lu

[juliamargaretlu]

What love worthy of the name does not want to be unique and total, an impossible love? If someone has not wanted this, if he has not refused to compromise from the moment he fell in love, if he has not dreamed of the absolute, if he does not aspire to fulfil this dream (to be the firs man to do so) and to achieve this fulfilment (to be the first man, the only one to do so) then he is not worthy to be called a lover.

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life

[juliamargaretlu]

Pleasantly full as she was, Rika felt like crying. She might dine with someone, but at the end of the meal they would go their separate ways. She couldn't stay with that person forever. Even with her stomach full of warmth and the taste of delicious food lingering on her tongue, she remained alone. It didn't matter who she had for company. She was beginning to understand that the more delicious the time she spent with others, the more alone she felt.

Asako Yuzuki. Butter.

Translated by Polly Barton

[juliamargaretlu]

...the kind of quick dialogue that lets you know everyone is ultimately in love but not in love until the last minute. The heart is a fast, thumping creature, like a metronome for repartee. In the movie, everyone talks without breathing, just in case they die before they get a chance to articulate their feelings. The final frame is always a tight embrace, a resuscitation.

Hilary Leichter. Temporary. 39

[juliamargaretlu]

in December I find enough inspiration to write something. This year, for over 450 consecutive days, I wrote a piece of poetry every day. Perhaps to give myself the opportunity to write more than twice a year, and certainly a simple daily creative exercise. I realized that while every day felt so different, I was using the same themes and writing to the same people that I was catching myself in an eddy. So many poems were addressed to a person who barely perceived them, nor me. And so many poems construed a life of dreams in a time that I appreciated direct (over)sharing.

Now alas, I've come here to share and here I am sharing that I found that I had little to say. What an extraordinarily boring anecdote!

[juliamargaretlu]

chunky potato allium soup recipe

12/22/2024

half a stick of Vermont creamery butter half a bulb of sprouting garlic that you forgot in your pantry, smashed  A whole medium yellow onion sliced 2 leeks, possibly grown hydroponically there was no dirt in it, sliced

All these browned 70% in a cast iron pot

1 can Goya coco milk 1 Goya can size of water

4 small-medium gold potatoes cubed small 2 bay leaves  Small bundle of fresh thyme 

Boil until potato is mushy

Hand mash potato with a silicon spatula

S&P generous Lemon squeeze Hand torn cilantro Slice or two of the last seeded rye bread from Balthazar that day

[juliamargaretlu]

I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the convenience of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation—fill you with wonder and gratitude. It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. 

Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods

[juliamargaretlu]

Perhaps you want to lie down and be as the lichen: not dead exactly but just very still for a long, long time. 

Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods

[juliamargaretlu]

D H Lawrence. Lady Chatterly's Lover

[juliamargaretlu]

Maybe his friend Dave had been telling the truth and there was a country down there that you could visit, just like Canada. Maybe when the zombies got all the way to the bottom, they got into zippy zombie cars and drove off to their zombie jobs, or back home again, to their sexy zombie wives, or maybe they went off to the zombie bank to make their deposits of stones, leaves, linty, birdsnesty tangles, all the other debris real people didn’t know the value of.

[juliamargaretlu]

Not even Batu knew what the zombies were up to. Sometimes he said that they were just another thing you had to deal with in retail. They were the kind of customer that you couldn’t ever satisfy, the kind of customer who wanted something you couldn’t give them, who had no other currency, except currency that was sinister, unwholesome, confusing, and probably dangerous. - Kelly Link. The Hortlak

[juliamargaretlu]

Good architecture makes you want to touch it. —Minoru Yamasaki

[juliamargaretlu]

the smile from a memory revisted

[juliamargaretlu]

The oral tradition is inestimably older than writing, but fragile--I thought I'd better write down whatever stories I could find or they'd be lost.

N. Scott Momaday. Paris Review, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 112′

[juliamargaretlu]

Everybody likes something-a song, a movie, a TV show-so you choose not to; this is how you carve out space for yourself. But the right person persuades you to try it, and you feel as though you've made two discoveries. One is that this thing isn't so bad. The other is a new confidant.

Hua Hsu. Stay True.

[juliamargaretlu]

Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another's lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity.

Hua Hsu. Stay True

[juliamargaretlu]

The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories.

Hua Hsu. Stay True.

[juliamargaretlu]

When you're young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed. The way you dress or stand, the music played loud enough to catch the attention of another person who might know a song, too. And then there are things you do as you step out into the world, the real world full of strange adults, testing out what it means to be generous or thoughtful. In that instant, before every memory was placed along some narrative arc, before the act of remembering took on a desperate air, I simply felt lucky to witness something so effortlessly kind--to see my friend do something that was good.

Hua Hsu. Stay True.