rabidlycurious

seeking inspiration in the mundane & unfamiliar

[karenmaywrites]

Chew-Bose: I was watching an interview with you from around the time White Girls came out, in which you talked about being a hopeful person. How do you remain hopeful despite– Als: –despite the world… I think it’s in my DNA. I used to call my mother The Happiness Nazi. Through all of her hardships she never made us feel like life was closed off to us. She never made us feel that because we were poor we lacked an imagination about becoming something. I love your question because it makes me want to thank her for giving me the quality of pushing beyond haters and negativity in order to see and feel, you know? Don’t let the small people—even if they’re in your own family—rob you of the experience of being open and free. There’s always going to be siblings or relations who don’t love you because bigness as a person makes them feel small. I think there is something really beautiful about trying, and small people don’t want you to keep trying. They want you to settle for life’s limitations. Don’t ever settle because life is hard enough and limiting enough without people telling you to stay in a cul-de-sac or wherever.

Hilton Als

[karenmaywrites]

After school, you get a job. Suddenly your responsibility isn’t only doing work for yourself: it’s also about pleasing your boss. Then you have a responsibility to make a client happy. It’s easy to think that your greatest responsibilities are working for the aesthetic principles of form, working to make your boss happy, working to get approval from the client, and working to get paid. However, it’s important to constantly be aware that ... you have chosen a profession in which you put communication out into the world. In effect, you are taking part in the public space that we all share, and you’re intruding on it. At the highest level of responsibility you do not intrude on the world with things that are untrue, crappy, dumb, or don’t deserve the space you’re devoting to them. And if you’re really doing it right, you avoid all of that and ask, “How can I do this in a way that will make people’s lives better?” That doesn’t mean only doing non-profit work. It means focusing on how you can take every single project—no matter the size, purpose, client, audience, or context—and and use it to make the world a slightly better place. If anyone runs into a trap, it’s when they segregate those ideas in their mind. When people think they’re going to do this shit for the money and this stuff for their souls, it becomes a real disservice. They’re resigning themselves to be professionally schizophrenic: they’ve divided their minds in a way that, at its core, is somewhat dishonest. Those lucky people who are fully integrated at the highest level figure out how to make everything—their lives, their work, what they do for fun, and what they do for money—all the same thing.

Michael Bierut

[karenmaywrites]

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Oliver Sacks

[karenmaywrites]

My path was about leaving home, coming to a new place, and being an outsider. But it was also about having a good sense of self and a good feeling about the world, so New York didn’t seem too scary.

Maira Kalman

[karenmaywrites]

We save ourselves. Every woman knows it. Every man knows it. You look up. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s a universal story. But it’s revolutionary in the way that a woman is allowed to tell it.

Reese Witherspoon on "Wild"

[karenmaywrites]

What we call tolerance in this country, and pat ourselves on the back for, is the lamest kind of tolerance. What we call tolerance in this country is when people who are unlike us want to be like us, and when we decide to accept someone who is not like us and wants to be like us, we pat ourselves on the back… So when gays want to be like us and get married, we finally get around and say, “Oh, isn’t that courageous of me, to accept gay people for finally wanting to be like us.” Sorry — you don’t get points for accepting someone who wants to be just like you. You get points for accepting someone who doesn’t want to be like you — that’s where the difficulty lies.

Malcolm Gladwell

[karenmaywrites]

One of the things about being a girl is that, often, no one encourages you to be ambitious. Sometimes you’re told you’re going to be a failure, but it’s more fun to rebel against that than rebelling against the idea you’re going to be a success—which is what a lot of guys get told. I got to rebel by succeeding, and it surprised everyone, including myself.

Rebecca Solnit

[karenmaywrites]

[karenmaywrites]

The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."

Caring for your introvert

[karenmaywrites]

[karenmaywrites]

It’s not just the journalists but the armed extremists who are freelancers in Syria. It’s another thing that makes the conflict there different, and so complicated to report. It must be galling for Syria’s freelance journalists to think that they’re worth more as cash cows and captives than for any of the reporting they went there to do. These men and women crossed a dangerous border to plug the gaps in our understanding of a many-layered conflict. When the hunting season came, they made easy prey. But here is something else that is true: they have a natural ability to bond with anyone and see the world through any point of view. They are some of the most cunning and resourceful people you’ll ever meet. If anyone can make it back, they can.

"Evaporated," Vanity Fair

[karenmaywrites]

What else could one do with such a tangled formation but transform it into writing? Not in order to untangle it and tie up loose ends. Not to say, neatly, “This is who I am, and that is why.” Not, finally, to reduce experience to a formula, but rather to convert confusion into curiosity, to face questions that don’t have easy answers, and to create spaces in which others, be they students or readers, might do the same.

Miranda Mellis

[karenmaywrites]

[karenmaywrites]

[karenmaywrites]

Those who are putting in those last few hours at the job tell themselves that they don’t have time now, but after they have finally made partner, or finally saved another so many thousand dollars, then at last they will have the time, and they will take it. Unfortunately, this is a very slippery slope to tread. There are some things that can only be done during a certain part of one’s life. You can only be a father or a mother to a young child while the child is young. Children soon enough grow away from their parents, and you can’t really tell an eighteen-year-old that at long last daddy is ready to play with him. Another way to look at life is to look at it as a great shopping mall, not the usual kind, where goods are purchased with money, but one where such things as worldly success, love of music, enjoyment of painting, a six handicap golf game, a close relationship with your daughter, and many other similar things are also for sale. But the commodity with which they are purchased is not money but is time. And quite contrary to the way the capitalist system works with money and goods, every one of us is given exactly the same amount of time in each hour, in each day, and in each year. It is a limited amount, and it is impossible for anyone to be so rich in "time" that he can enjoy every single one of the things which time may buy. So there is a choice to be made, just as in purchasing goods with money, although the choice in the one case is far less obvious than the choice in the other.

Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist

[karenmaywrites]

[karenmaywrites]

2 pieces, same thought. Both interesting.

1.

"Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive."

2.

"The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous."

-- Wiliam Deresiewicz