Favorite Quotations

  • "When you make education less free you make people that way too" - Nicole on NYPL closures
  • "But I would argue that everything we eat, everything we drink, all this processed food, all the pesticides that contaminate everything in our highly technological, artificial life---it all adds up. In other words, modern society has invented so many ways to poison us that a few extra gamma rays get lost in the noise of our dying." - Tim Mousseau in "Life in the zone: What we're still learning from Chernobyl" by Steve Featherstone in Harpers June 2011
  • "See what scourge is laid upon your hate, / that heaven finds means to kill your joys with love" - Prince from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"
  • "The problem in this case was you just can't be middle-aged in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker. You're addicted to self-abuse. You're a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them." Tender Branson in Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor

Good Quotations

  • "The universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world--all things and beings--are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as shakti, and the Christians as the power of God. Its manifestation in the psyche is termed, by the psychoanalysts, libido. And its manifestation in the cosmos is the structure and flux of the universe itself." Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", pg 239
  • "The meaning [of myth] is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent." Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", pg 220

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Absurd and Criminal... OUTRAGE!!

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/05/fourth_marijuana_conviction_ge.html#incart_hbx

How can this be?
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Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The Small Government in Our Communities

I just watched a FedEx driver completely disrupt a neighborhood by simply being rude. Good parallel parkers in my neighborhood (Washington Heights, NYC) are rare, to be sure. But this was an old woman in a minivan. I too would have felt some road rage while waiting for this woman to try 4+ times to get into a space without allowing traffic to pass. But repeatedly laying into his horn was overpoweringly annoying, which made me identify less with his anger and more with the woman's feeling of being attacked and embarrassed.

I looked around and found the many people that were going about their day normally started to come out of their trances and notice what was happening. It took a mere 46 seconds (yes, I timed it) for those that snapped into reality to side with the parallel parker. Children, old couples who spend hours on the street everyday, and drug-dealers that spend literally the entire day on the street all rallied behind the parker by shouting at the FedEx driver. The woman then got out of her car and started yelling at the driver. I thought the driver would have been so taken back that he actually provoked this woman to get out of the car that he would have crumbled to guilt. Miraculously, he found the nerve to actually scream back at her.

After some back and forth, she returned to her car and pulled aside. Just as the FedEx man was pulling away, a pedestrian walked up to the side of the van, said something, and made a gesture like we was going to touch the driver. Not hit him though. I couldn't see from my vantage point whether he had made contact, but two of the other delivery men jumped out of the passenger door and ran to the drive side where the pedestrian was. Other pedestrians (drug-dealers included) ran to the lone pedestrian's aide and there was soon a crowd of 20 or so people all yelling at each other.

The FedEx trucked escaped the street unscathed, save for a lifetime of animosity if they deliver this route regularly. When they were pulling away, though, I was struck by the camaraderie in their glances at one another. They seemed to be saying, "We take care of our own".
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