The Impish Grin

'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.' 'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'

[theimpishgrin]

Think excitement, talk excitement, act out excitement, and you are bound to become an excited person. Life will take on a new zest, deeper interest and greater meaning. You can think, talk and act yourself into dullness or into monotony and unhappiness. By the same process you can build up inspiration, excitement and surging depth of joy.

Norman Vincent Peale

[theimpishgrin]

The Hollow Men - T.S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz-he dead             A penny for the Old Guy                        I     We are the hollow men     We are the stuffed men     Leaning together     Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!     Our dried voices, when     We whisper together     Are quiet and meaningless     As wind in dry grass     Or rats' feet over broken glass     In our dry cellar          Shape without form, shade without colour,     Paralysed force, gesture without motion;          Those who have crossed     With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom     Remember us-if at all-not as lost     Violent souls, but only     As the hollow men     The stuffed men.                                    II     Eyes I dare not meet in dreams     In death's dream kingdom     These do not appear:     There, the eyes are     Sunlight on a broken column     There, is a tree swinging     And voices are     In the wind's singing     More distant and more solemn     Than a fading star.          Let me be no nearer     In death's dream kingdom     Let me also wear     Such deliberate disguises     Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves     In a field     Behaving as the wind behaves     No nearer-          Not that final meeting     In the twilight kingdom                         III     This is the dead land     This is cactus land     Here the stone images     Are raised, here they receive     The supplication of a dead man's hand     Under the twinkle of a fading star.          Is it like this     In death's other kingdom     Waking alone     At the hour when we are     Trembling with tenderness     Lips that would kiss     Form prayers to broken stone.                           IV     The eyes are not here     There are no eyes here     In this valley of dying stars     In this hollow valley     This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms          In this last of meeting places     We grope together     And avoid speech     Gathered on this beach of the tumid river          Sightless, unless     The eyes reappear     As the perpetual star     Multifoliate rose     Of death's twilight kingdom     The hope only     Of empty men.                                 V     Here we go round the prickly pear     Prickly pear prickly pear     Here we go round the prickly pear     At five o'clock in the morning.          Between the idea     And the reality     Between the motion     And the act     Falls the Shadow                                    For Thine is the Kingdom          Between the conception     And the creation     Between the emotion     And the response     Falls the Shadow                                    Life is very long          Between the desire     And the spasm     Between the potency     And the existence     Between the essence     And the descent     Falls the Shadow                                    For Thine is the Kingdom          For Thine is     Life is     For Thine is the          This is the way the world ends     This is the way the world ends     This is the way the world ends     Not with a bang but a whimper.

[theimpishgrin]

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise you will threaten the man.’ Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors – not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, TEDxEuston. Sampled in Beyoncé's "Flawless"

[generic-art]

[applesandibexes]

pearl with a girl earring

[oldpainting]

Barbarossa, The Pearl With A Girl Earring, 2009

[cavetocanvas]

I have a side blog called “Stuff That Makes Me Uncomfortable" and this fits the bill.

[theimpishgrin]

considering a re-vamp.

maybe creating something new. something more in line with who I am now.. not the accumulation of all that I've been over the past few years.

maybe just housekeeping.

[theimpishgrin]

"In 1990, I had three appearances with the legendary Johnny Carson, and a total of 14 applause breaks. And I would have given it all if I could have just had one more day sharing a bag of french fries with my daughter."

[theimpishgrin]

Sweet fuck I love the Greeks.

[theimpishgrin]

Nike of Samothrace; attributed to Pythokritos of Rhodes. Something about the lines in this sculpture. Just. Holy shit.

[eternalseptember]

[jan3d0e]

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate beings condemning them to spend their lives in search for their other halves.”

~Plato’s The Symposium.

 This is one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing. 

[natgeofound]

Irish Guards remain at attention after one guardsman faints in London, England, June 1966.Photograph by James P. Blair, National Geographic

[theimpishgrin]

Love is the great intangible. In our nightmares, we can create beasts out of pure emotion. Hate stalks the streets with dripping fangs, fear flies down narrow alleyways on leather wings, and jealousy spins sticky webs across the sky. In daydreams, we can maneuver with poise, foiling an opponent, scoring high on fields of glory while crowds cheer, cutting fast to the heart of an adventure. But what dream state is love? Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate –love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.

Diane Ackerman (courtesy of Brainpickings.org)

[brightandalarming-deactivated20]

This is not a screwdriver.

[dogshaming]

Song of My people

Aelita the husky finds its lovely to show my whole family and I the song of her people at 2am

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shared via WordPress.com

[residencelifecrafts]

[theimpishgrin]

A reminder that I'm sure we all need at some point.

[theimpishgrin]

The Way I See It

There's something about giving blood that makes me happy. 

I'm not saying I particularly enjoy the pinch of the needle going in, the finger-pricking to check my iron levels, the tourniquet, or the never-swift (and often painful) removal of my arm hair the surgical tape when they're unhooking me.

But there's something about it. Last Spring I donated double RBCs for the first time; the procedure differs from donating whole blood in that you're hooked up to a apheresis machine which draws your blood, filters it, and lets you have your plasma back (how kind!). With no warning given regarding how I would feel after, I happily checked my little card that said I'd donate double and got myself checked out.

Little did I know that for the next week or so, I'd be slogging through my basketball workouts, feeling like I'd been hit by an 18-wheeler. I'd be lying on my floor, simply because I was too fatigued to actually get myself into a desk chair and do homework. I'd literally feel so wiped of my own personality and energy that I had a mini-spell of depression until my RBC count started to bounce back after the donation.

Sweet Jesus. So why the hell would I do it again?

Well, as far as good answers go, I don't have one - I donated again, but without any particular reason.

I gave blood again yesterday (who knows if I technically donated before I was supposed to. Oops!). Whole blood, rather than apheresis. Slogged through just under three miles tonight - but y'know what? I won't bitch. There are harder things I could've done. I was dehydrated and my legs felt like I ran six miles yesterday - but it's okay.

They say that when you give blood, you're giving the gift of life to someone else. The more I thought about it, I'm full of life to give on so many levels: my body is completely composed of cells that are engaged in a cyclical engagement of life, death, and replacement. I've got a beating heart and functioning organs. I have friends, social events, and an existence on this planet that I know affects others in so many ways. I've got heart, personality, and a spirit - which I'd really hope is as contagious as I think it is.

Give what you can.

[theimpishgrin]

When we consider the founders of our nation: Jefferson, Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others; we have before us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political leaders. They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. They were fluent in the English language. They wrote their own speeches. They were realistic and practical, and at the same time motivated by high principles. They were not checking the pollsters on what to think this week. They knew what to think. They were comfortable with long-term thinking, planning even further ahead than the next election. They were self-sufficient, not requiring careers as politicians or lobbyists to make a living. They were able to bring out the best in us. They were interested in and, at least two of them, fluent in science. They attempted to set a course for the United States into the far future — not so much by establishing laws as by setting limits on what kinds of laws could be passed. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights have done remarkably well, constituting, despite human weaknesses, a machine able, more often than not, to correct its own trajectory. At that time, there were only about two and a half million citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred times more. So if there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jefferson's today. Where are they?

Carl Sagan

[fakenewsjunkie]