i love me some lil clutches

"Sometimes I imagine my own autopsy. Disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney. Personal failures: kishkes. ... When the clocks are turned back and the dark falls before I'm ready, this, for reasons I can't explain, I feel in my wrists. And when I wake up and my fingers are stiff , almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. ... Yesterday I saw a man kicking a dog and I felt it behind my eyes. I don't know what to call this, a place before tears. The pain of forgetting: spine. The pain of remembering: spine. All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist: my knees. ... To everything a season, to every time I've woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone was sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all."

JEWS HAVE SIX SENSES

"Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary that the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?"

decor post time

just in case you were wondering - no, those pillows are not tacky. you must have mistaken them for something else

mmm I want my own place so I can decorate it with cute and useless things. I should probably start hoarding things now

everybody I know who has blogspot just whines and whines about their dull lives on it. wah wah i drink away the days wah wah don't feel anything for my friends wah wah other shit that doesn't make a lot of sense wah wah long sentences wah wah long words where short words would have sufficed wah wah descriptive language baaaaaaw

by the time I get to the end of it I don't know what I just read and my head hurts

in other news I am going to live here

http://thingsididlastnight.com/

one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea

old men make me inexpicably sad (the character speaking in that quote is an old man). the second picture is one of the saddest pictures i've ever seen. western culture demands masculinity and strength from men, but i suspect that it's a faux-strength; a front. a man needs and wants to cry as much as a woman does, but socially it's taboo. it's especially confronting to see an older man visibly upset because ideas of male masculinity are particularly traditional; it was far less acceptable for a man to express sadness or despair fifty years ago than it is today. when i see an old man cry, i can't help but think that something truly awful must have happened for him to allow himself to break down like that. after holding back tears your whole adult life, there must come a point where you simply can't do it any longer.

"You don't need a man by your side to validate you as a woman. You already are loved and valued. You're good enough exactly as you are. Do you believe this? Because it's true. You have limitless worth and value. If you embrace this truth, it will affect every area of life, especially your relationship with men.

You are worth dying for.

Your worth does not come from your body, your mind, your work, what you produce, what you put out, how much money you make. Your worth does not come from whether or not you have a man. Your worth does not come from whether or not men notice you. You have inestimable worth that comes from your creator.

You will continue to be tempted in a thousand different ways not to believe this. The temptation will be to go searching for your worth and validity from places other than your creator.

Especially from men.

But you don't have to give yourself away to earn a man's love. You're better than that. You're already loved...

Your strength is a beautiful thing. And when you live in it, when you carry yourself with the honor and dignity that are yours, it forces the men around you to relate to you on more than just a flesh level.

You are worth dying for."

you're not you, you're not you anymore

i've been too lazy to post anything here in a while and i'm still lazy now so i'm just going to do a photo blog. i have a lot of amazing pictures saved and it's kind of a waste not using them for anything or sharing them with anyone. here are some of them. 

i haven't credited them, which i probably should have, but most of them are from either my favourites on flickr, ffffound.com or the le love blogspot. if you want to know where an individual photo is from, ask and i can probably tell you. i have links to all the photos from flickr. enjoy :)

i will do another one of these again as i have many, many more photos. 

for loren to read :)

THE PAST

The past is not something that I think about. The past is something that I feel. It creeps up on me like a great and sudden wave, seizing me before I have time to hold my breath. It forces me under its icy grasp in a single, clean swoop. I don't know when it's coming. A wave of memory is not so courteous that it will wait until you are alone before it pounces; it will strike when and where ever, though usually when it is most inconvenient. 

Yet once I am under, I am not panicked or scared or hurt. I feel peaceful. I am inside a dream. Under the wave, the past plays out like an old home video. I can’t tell if time has sped up or slowed down; it runs at a completely different pace to the present. Soft golds, vibrant blues and shocking reds flood me. The colours are so bright and so real that they make my eyes water, rendering the image to a blur of beautiful colours and distant shapes. Everyone that I see is happy; completely and eternally. Every moment lasts exactly as long as I want it to; nothing ends to soon and nothing takes too long.

I can see my family; my mother, my father, my sisters and my wife. My mother is preparing salad; she slices every vegetable as though it were delivered from the garden of Eden itself. In the backyard, my father holds a pair of silver tongs in one hand and a beer in the other. Shirtless and tanned, he listens to the meat sizzle on the barbeque. He looks at me, as though looking at the camera and his face illuminates. There is so much light. Bright rays seep from the sky, my father’s smile, his eyes, and from the very earth itself. He gestures for me to join him, and together we turn the sausages and steak. It’s so simple; cooking food for our family, and yet nothing could be more important, more fulfilling. I feel like I exist just for this moment.
My two sisters, still young, are a picture of innocence. The backyard is a flurry of creamy skin and white cotton as they dance, run and do cartwheels. Every time they leave the ground, it looks like they stay in the air for just a moment too long. I almost believe that they’re flying, it’s just that nobody stopped to watch them long enough to notice. 
On the veranda sits my wife. She is so, so beautiful. Her cheeks are a rosy pink, as though she was blushing at the confronting beauty of life itself. Who knew that these very same cheeks would later turn deep red, then violent purple, then a cold white? Her stomach is big and round. I put my hand to the bulge as though I could reach right through her skin to the tiny baby inside. I want to touch it and hold it. I want to protect it.

Then, as abruptly as the wave pulled me under, it pulls me back out. I break the water’s surface with great speed, gasping loudly for air. The past has the ability to release you from it’s grasp just as quickly as it forced you into it.