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Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned. Each commonplace book is unique to its creator's particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. - Wikipedia

[selkiesparrow]

Look at this ray of sunshine! SHE’S SO HAPPY

Joanna Newsom at the Kilby block party, May 10, 2024

[allsadnshit]

Ending violence cycles in your family? Prepare to feel alone and powerful in the most confusing way imaginable

[allsadnshit]

i hate how embarrassing and shameful desperation feels...like looking back at more recent times in my life where I was begging for love and care and then scorning myself for needing it is so so sad to me - it's so natural and human, even if it's unhealthy at times...people arent meant to be perfect well adjusted beings and it's so stupid to wish I was always in control and respectable

like i think of my most embarrassing moments of weakness in the last 5 years where i really put myself on blast and when i wipe away all the self hate and need for control i just see me there, needing a friend and trying to be genuine with myself and i cant believe i bully that person even in the privacy of my mind

[ephemeradio-here-to-staydio]

What is wrong with me?

Can I rephrase that? 

Muted and lonely and every sound of a car driving me almost out the window. The written really written words didn’t hurt. Soul. PR is useless. (Journalism is printing what someone, anyone doesn’t want printed, the rest is PR.) Dialogue is choked by it. 

What is wrong?

Can I change that?

Blue and pink sky. The anti-echo of room. The sickness of the night that night. Where is the line between who I am and who I am capable of being, of feeling or thinking of loving or hating? I am no better. I am swelling but I’ve been told twice there is no one else here. It ain’t easy It ain’t easy It ain’t easy It ain’t easy to lose safety. What does it feel like to have feet on a floor you haven’t built yourself? I build and then upend, revert. Infinite regress. Tell me why/////

I sleep small beneath a towel and listen to (for) cars. 

[linephemeradio]

I Am From

by Andreanna Short (2013)

I am from secret recipes for spaghetti dinners. I am from venison chili with sauce so spicy to Italian pastries with flavors so sweet.

I am from cousins that fight, and greedy uncles. Money on their minds, not a care anywhere else.

From a mother concerned about everyone else except the one you want her to be. A mother obsessed with where she is from and story after story the story seems to change.

From a father proud of his daughters, but just a little too overprotective. A father that is worried. Worried, worried, worried. thats all he seems to be.

A simple life thats not so simple.

I am from a sister who is there for you no matter what you do.

I am from “ Andreanna calm down!” and “ You’re not good enough.”

Crying and bottling everything else up she doesn’t reveal a thing. That girl you think is brave, is so scared inside of something she doesn’t understand.

I am from arguments and wondering why nobody is happy anymore.

Everything crashes and one day wanting to take it back.

I am from wasted talents and nervousness. The dance we dance becomes harder to get through. You feel like you can’t do it anymore.

From not being confident to branching out and getting over everything

you came from.

[linephemeradio]

by Judy Sweet

[linephemeradio]

The ‘M’ in the Palm of Your Hand

Description: Five foot two, black hair, brown eyes, can usually be lost in the racks of the petite section.   Still, we walked under her, always under her, all of us.   She, the Colossus, the Brooklynite, the bargainer, the beauty, the loved, the storyteller, the critic. The eternal storm.   But me? I am her first born. I am the house she built for herself to live in. I am a stranger to my make.   And wherever I go within myself, each murky basin, every room filled with smoke, I find her there – her reflection in the water, her bones in the ashes.   She is my phoenix and I am her unwilling satellite.   She taught me to do what she couldn’t do for herself. I mapped the patterns of her storms, majored in her turbulence. I can read the shapes in her face like an oracle. I can feel her blood tremble before it reaches A smoking point.   But some tempests can not be predicted, could not be evaded. These left marks with a wire fly swatter, punched me in the mouth, pulled me by my hair when I hid. Mad-eye advised constant vigilance, and the sound of my name still makes me jump.   (But if I have empathy, it is because there is no surer way to train someone than by inflicting pain. and if I am patient or kind, it is because I know how it feels to long for these things.)   She also taught me the alphabet, how to read, write. Trivia in the car, How do we get to Home Depot from here? Quizzes when the power went out, Where is your nose? How about your belly? Nine plus any number is always that number minus one in the one place, so what is 5 plus 9?   (If I am intelligent, it is because she saw to it.) The creator and the disease. The carpenter and the rot.   I do not fear death: I have already met my maker. She is Jupiter, with her giant red birthmark (the thing that will always give her pain), and I am her satellite, her first born.

[linephemeradio]

lifemare

(n.) female horse, a horse you will love for life

[linephemeradio]

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.

Milan Kundera, from “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

[ephemeradio-here-to-staydio]

There have been a few times I was made to feel bad about unintentionally hurting people. The guilt was unbearable for a while. 

In fact, I named this blog “learning to be good” because I was guilty, and felt I had a lot to learn about gentleness and honesty and finding the balance between both. Even when I had the best intentions, I ended up damaging people that I truly cared for. I hurt some people because I was too honest, and I hurt others because I was not honest enough in the name of being gentle with them. 

I am learning to be good, but I am also learning that I was never too bad to start with. People are varied and cruel and hurt the most innocent and trusting, just because they have the power to. People will intentionally hurt others, fully aware of the pain they are inflicting. Boldly salting wounds, or tearing new ones.

I am learning that there is a difference between honesty and cruelty. Between making yourself understood, and discounting other ways of understanding. 

I am learning how to make myself understood without trying to change the way others think. I am learning how to be honest without being cruel. I am learning how to be gentle without lying.

[linephemeradio]

Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'

Kurt Vonnegut, from Timequake

[ephemeradio-here-to-staydio]

Be yourself: a loaded request.

I usually think I’m being myself when I can make people around me laugh, or if I can make an intelligent point. But isn’t that just a performance? Cleverness is something I cling to when I think about what I can claim in terms of identity, but as much as it contributes to who I think I am, it also feels very peripheral. It feels like a performance.

Is performance separate from our selfhood, or are we our performances?

Just be myself. 

Does that mean to strip myself down to the bare minimum of what it means to be a “self”? Or to integrate the external, and claim outside tasks as part of my identity? 

(Hint: It’s somewhere in the middle.)

I wish I could notice less. Noticing means that I see tiny ugly flecks of myself that others probably don’t see. Noticing means that I see tiny flecks of others that I interpret as judgement– that they didn’t want me to see, or maybe don’t even exist. Noticing too much detail means losing sight of the big picture, and seeing whole relationships flounder in the kaleidoscopic shards of individual moments.

If one thing goes wrong in a conversation with someone, I am dazzled by the disappointment of the singular moment, and watch it as it grows to represent the outcome of our entire relationship. (This is a fallacy).

If I notice everything about myself, digging into those times where I disappoint myself or don’t have courage or don’t know what to say or can’t feel what I want to feel or can’t think of something or feel stupid, I lose sight of myself, the broader idea of I-am-a-person-who-is-existing-and-therefore-I-am-myself.

I like the one I’m in love with because he doesn’t think in particulars. 

A friend asked me if he appreciates all of my details. Does he know who you are?

But does knowing my particulars mean knowing who I am?

He says he loves me because I make him happy. 

What about me makes you happy?

I don’t know, you just do.

He says he didn’t like this one bowl of soup because it tasted bad.

What about it tasted bad?

The soup.

But which part of the soup?

The whole soup.

He thinks of it as a whole soup, and me as a whole person. 

It’s hard for me to do that.

If I could, I would be quiet around most people. I like that I get to be quiet around the people that love me. If I could, I would speak to very few people, but be gentle to all people, and if I could, I wouldn’t care what people thought of me. I wouldn’t think about pleasing them or performing for them. I would just listen to them and be gentle with them and not think about their thoughts about me. 

I don’t want to perform for anyone. I don’t want to perform for myself. 

[linephemeradio]

idea:

The struggle, Kurt, is to realize when you are happy--without the feeling of acceleration.

[linephemeradio]

ideas:

Someone told me that there is no such thing as better; there is only different.

Love is not about winning. It is not about being better than anyone your lover has met before or after you. Life is not about winning. It is not about being better than anyone before or after you. 

Love is about loving and life is about living. 

We are taught, shown over and over again in repeated storylines, that the goal of life is love, and the goal of love is happiness, blissful and complete.

But I don’t believe in complete happiness. There is no better; there is only different. I try to find the comfort in suffering, and I see the suffering within comfort.

To be truly alive is to feel all of the things available to us, and most of these things are shitty or disgusting or dishonorable or ugly. A small amount of these things are brilliant and shining and they balance out all of the ugliness that makes up everything else.

We are not meant to avoid suffering. Most of life is meant to be shitty and full of suffering, and the further we move away from that, the more we reject enduring suffering in the name of seeking comfort, the more confused and deviously subtle our suffering becomes.

[linephemeradio]

How selfish it is of the trees to bloom all at once.

Portia

[linephemeradio]

Tamp the soft earth.

[linephemeradio]

day:

Indoor rock climbing with Connor, Cameron, Anthony and Miriam (who I just met today). 

Laughing and bullshitting and fucking with everyone in the car, and telling them they can be as ignorant as they want at my wedding, please.

The one orange set of rocks that I couldn’t get, couldn’t get, couldn’t get. Joking with Cameron about it, watching him get it and trying again and again to figure out the body puzzle of the course. I got it, laughing when I reached the untouchable one.

Connor saying I did a good job, asking if I need chalk, belaying me, asking me to go in the first place.

Anthony not being so bad, after all. 

Cameron is funny.

Miriam is sweet and smart and tells me it was great to meet me.